Богородица и Младенец со св. Анной со змеёй, или Мадонна деи Палафрениери {2507} Virgin and Child with St Anna with the Serpent, or Madonna dei Palafrenieri
происхождение названия:
palafrenieri - слуги
palafrenieri, or grooms
автор:
Караваджо
Caravaggio
история:
It was in late 1605 that Caravaggio finally obtained a commission for St Peter's.
The papal grooms or palafrenieri invited him to paint an altarpiece for them, and in April 1606 it was exhibited in the basilica for a few days before being moved to the grooms' church of Sant'Anna nearby.
If the sympathy of Paul V had facilitated the commission, his nephew soon profited by it, for later in the year, just after the painter had left Rome for good, it was added to the Borghese collection.
Under the watchful gaze of St Anne, Jesus's apocryphal grandmother, Virgin helps a naked Child to tread on a snake.
The snake may be interpreted as Satan and indirectly as heresy, for Virgin and Child are free of sin and its consequences,
Maria as a virgin mother and by reason of Her Immaculate Conception, Jesus as God made man - and They combine to crush the serpent under Their feet.
This large iconographic canvas has a certain humanity thanks to Virgin's naturalness and the lack of inhibition with which Caravaggio depicts Child naked (a fact that gave offence to some connoisseurs at the time, according to Bellori).
Though their haloes are aligned, a dark gulf separates the pretty Virgin from Her ugly mother; and if the palafrenieri were willing to let Cardinal Scipione Borghese buy the picture so soon after they had received it and paid for it,
it may have been because they disliked the unflattering depiction of their patroness.
