Madonna della Sedia

Mengs's Madonna della Sedia, painted in 1770 and now in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, is one of many works in which he paid direct homage to Raphael by reproducing and interpreting his most celebrated compositions. Raphael's circular Madonna della Sedia in the Pitti Palace was among the most reproduced images in Western art history, and Mengs's engagement with it reflects his theoretical conviction that Raphael had achieved the highest combination of design, expression, and colour available to European painting. A Mengs interpretation rather than a strict copy would have involved translating Raphael's tondo format and compositional innovations into Mengs's own pictorial language, a pedagogical and creative exercise simultaneously. The Stockholm provenance reflects the wide distribution of Mengs's work across Scandinavian and northern European collections.

The tondo format of Raphael's original posed compositional challenges if Mengs adopted it, or offered interpretive freedom if he translated the composition to a rectangular format. His approach to the circular design — how he managed the curvilinear flow of figures within or against a potentially different format — provides technical evidence of his engagement with his model.