Paul Guette - Madonna and Child (copy of La Bella Giardiniera)

The work is a perfect copy of Raphael's painting "Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist," also known as "The Beautiful Gardener," housed at the Louvre in Paris and painted in 1507. The term "The Beautiful Gardener" was coined in the 19th century in relation to the scene's setting, which takes place in an idealized garden. The subject is a recurring theme in Raphael's work, including a famous variation such as "The Madonna of the Goldfinch," housed at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. The iconographic theme stems from the fundamental theme of Western sacred art, the Madonna and Child, with the addition of the infant Saint John the Baptist. He is recognizable because he already bears his traditional iconographic attributes, namely the animal-skin robe and the staff with the cross. The presence of Saint John the Baptist alludes to Christ's redemptive sacrifice, prophesied at an early age. It is clear that we are faced with a completely idealized scene, in keeping with Renaissance poetics. Just as idealized is the setting in a perfect natural landscape, typical of Raphael's production and of the entire mature Renaissance.

Artist Paul Guette, the creator of this perfect copy, formally respects all of the painting's Raphaelesque characteristics. First and foremost, the compositional scheme demonstrates the close connection between the young Raphael's work and Leonardo da Vinci, and is a direct reflection of the aspiration to a classical ideal of harmony and unity in artwork typical of the 16th-century Renaissance. The three figures are perfectly enclosed in an ideal pyramid. Furthermore, within this scheme, their positions and gestures are calibrated by precise relationships of correspondence and balance. The figures, displaying a typically 16th-century monumentality, move with great naturalism, perfectly blending into the space surrounding them. And it is precisely here that the extraordinary skill of the artist who created the copy comes to the fore. Indeed, he is capable of perfectly reproducing the sfumato, still Leonardo-esque, effect that allows the three figures to be perfectly integrated into the landscape, which in turn presents a coherent atmospheric unity. And yet the landscape, splendidly naturalistic, is not caged by the rigidity of geometric patterns but opens up to a vast aerial perspective. Thus, space is measured by light, which, from a technical standpoint, means creating subtle tonal transitions to create the fading of distant objects in a coherent and unified atmosphere.

From a stylistic analysis of the work, we have been able to ascertain that the hand of the person who created this master copy is that of a truly excellent painter. An extraordinary technique is essential to perfectly reproduce Raphael's sfumato, aerial perspective, and the graceful facial features and expressions so typical of the painter from Urbino. Paul Guette, an exponent of the 19th-century French school of painting—the artists who filled the Louvre in the 19th century to imitate the masterpieces of the great masters—demonstrates these qualities, and his work is an extraordinary achievement, the product of incredible technical and philological effort.

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