The "Sistine Madonna": Dostoevsky and the Exercise of Looking

Abstract

Raphael's ‘Sistine Madonna’, dated around 1513-1514 and housed in the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden, is one of the paintings that most impressed Dostoevsky, to the point that he wrote about it in several of his novels, from Crime and Punishment (Преступление и наказание, 1866) to The Demons (Бесы, 1873) and The Adolescent (Подросток, 1875). Dostoyevsky certainly knew other paintings by Raphael. But then why this insistence on Raphael's canvas? Our hypothesis is that Dostoyevsky perceived, in a totally modern way and outside the historicist schemes of art, the conceptual and symbolic complexity hidden behind the apparent simplicity of the image and the harmonious union between the ideal of Greco-Roman beauty and Christian religious sentiment. Furthermore, with the ‘Sistine Madonna,’ Dostoevsky inaugurates (or perhaps it would be better to say, brings to light) an ecphrastic myth in literature. With his exercise of the gaze, it is not only Raphael's painting that surprises with its ability to attract the gaze of different generations, but it is Dostoevsky himself who creates new interpretative palimpsests of the work, which will flow many years later into the dramatic and bitter reflections of Vasily Grossman, who, as we know, revisits the ‘Sistine Madonna’ to propose a historical reinterpretation that continues to question the observer's gaze to this day.