The Alba Madonna-Raphael
This painting was completed in the year 1510 by the Italian Painter best known as Raphael, when he was only 26 years old. Wikipedia states that Raphael, together with Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, were considered the “traditional trinity” of great masters of that period.
When referring to Raphael’s piece titled “The Alba Madonna” in our text book, as well as the two drawings Raphael used to develop this final piece, I can see many differences. First of all, the only color involved in the first two studies are from the red chalk and ink that Raphael used to design his painting. Hollow shells of people with cross-hatching and lines to indicate shading and color are present. Though Raphael used a male model as the Madonna, in at least one of his studies, many parts of the muscular body are covered and draped with clothes and sweeping material in the final piece. No children are present in the first study, while the second and final shows the Christ Child on her lap as well as St. John as a child by her side. One other thing is that the second study hints that Raphael may have considered putting some kind of building with arched doorways and columns in the background instead of the water and small house or barn he shows in the final.
In my opinion, drawing has a heavy impact on painting. It not only gives the artist some kind of form to work with but it also allows the artist to change, restructure, re-align, and basically re-work the design until it is just right. All of these steps make for a beautiful and precise finished work of art for this type of realistic painting.
Depending on what the subject of a painting is, if there is one, I do believe the artist must draw first in order to paint. Using the example of Jackson Pollock’s painting called Lavender Mist, he didn’t need to draw anything prior to painting it. Pollock may have done some painting, but in the case of this painting, I don’t see that he would have needed to. With Raphael’s painting, I don’t think he would have gotten such a defined and perfect image had he not sketched it out, first.
To answer the last question you posed, I would say that yes, this artist definitely relied on drawing first in order to create his paintings. You can see from the two studies published in our text that he was very meticulous about getting the human form just right and I strongly feel that the study on the far left is almost just as beautiful as the painted final version. Though there is no color in either of the studies, they are just as much a work of art as the painted one, in my opinion.