Music around Raphael's Sistine Madonna

After the annexation of the city of Piacenza to Papal States in 1512, Pope Julius II commissioned Raphael to paint an altarpiece for the main altar of the Benedictine monastery of San Sisto. The painting, known as Sistine Madonna, today at Dresden, Gamäldegalerie Alter Meister, is a sacra conversazione between the Virgin and the titular saints, St. Barbara and St. Sixtus. The Sistine Madonna appears on clouds, revealed by the opening of heavy curtains in a sort of theological epiphany. Before the reorganization of the church following the regulations of the Council of Trent, the altar was placed in the center of the transept, and surrounded by a wooden choir completed around 1528 by a team of artists including Gian Pietro Pambianco da Colorno and Gian Maria Boselli da Parma. This original position of the painting should be considered in its interpretation and in the explanation of the expression of the Christ-Child, who does not rest peacefully in the arms of his mother, but looks horrified straight forward. In such monastic churches, the choir enclosure usually included a crucifix opposite the main altar; thus, Christ looked directly at his own death, in a long tradition of representing the child with symbols prefiguring his Passion. Differently than most Marian representations, which followed since the Middle Ages the tradition of representing angels singing and playing instruments, Raphael’s painting does not appear particularly musical. However, the painting stands in a dialogue with the surrounding stalls, decorated by intarsio panels, which could for Renaissance viewers evoke aural stimulation. The included images show a large positive organ, a six-string lira da bracio, and a rebec. The most striking feature of the choir are four carved mensural compositions. Two are shown in open books: ”Sancta Maria ora pro nobis”, for three voices, in a homorhythmic simple style; and a proportional canon on the text “Artibus haec cunctis ortus dedit inclita virtus / totus et aeterno concentu jubilat orbis”. Two other, included at the top of the stalls, are four-part contrapuntal settings of the texts “Non canit ascrei chorus hic celebrata poetae carmina, sed vatis carmina sancta dei”; and “Intentas aures, intentaque corda tenete dulci[s] sonis vocibus dulci[s] sonisque lyris”. The appendix includes transcriptions of these pieces in the modern notation.