Raphael was one of the most accomplished painters during the European Renaissance Period in Italy. His Madonna portraits were the most commendable and portraits were also out of ordinary, equally received worldwide attentions.
The Veiled Woman
The painting The Veiled Woman which is now collected in the Florence Beatty Art Gallery is the art treasure of Raphael’s portraiture. It’s injected with Raphael’s thoughts and feelings about the praise of youth and the respects of humanism. The unknown woman who is represented in the picture looks beautiful, physically fit, wearing a veil and necklace. Her left index finger covers upon the plump chest slightly, which makes people feel that her inner world is abnormally peaceful and spontaneously generate an aesthetic sense of solemn, elegant, pure and quiet. It’s not hard to see that she is the ideal woman in Raphael’s mind.
You can not see the extremely vulgar heavy makeup and mannerism of the peeress on her. And you can not see the pale, feeble and stereotyped characters emerged in the large numbers of religious paintings in the Middle Ages on her too. On the contrary, the charming and bright eyes of her are full of gentle love, pregnant with vigorous hopes, which revealing the goodness of female innocence and broad boundless motherhood, showing the noble and good qualities contained in the human female’s heart. The veiled girl under Raphael’s brush is no doubt the combination of charming appearance and pure soul. She is yearning and can arouse strong feeling waves in people’s heart which make them work tenaciously in pursuit of a new beauty.
The tone processing of this masterpiece is not like the usual methods Raphael did with the others in which he emphasized on warm red or inter-phase cold and warm colors with harmonious contrast which gives people the sense that the painting is gorgeous and palatial. He gave priority to brown and green, calm and composed. The inner quiet and dignified, elegant temperaments of the character are more prominent in the tranquil and sedate atmosphere. The rounded, beautiful and charming lines reflect the unique artistic style of Raphael which has soft and clever aesthetic feelings.
This painting gained popularity and aroused the concerns of man critics. Especially the beauty of woman showed in the painting is acknowledged as the model of female beauty, receives enormous loves by the world.
This painting is the challenging work Raphael challenged Leonard’s “Mona Lisa” the master at the same time. The young woman in the painting was Raphael’s lover. She wears the bride’s costume, delicate and attractive, reveals a deep sense of love. Unfortunately, she was the daughter of a baker. They had the problem of identity gap, and not got married as they wanted. She chose to spend her entire life in the monastery after Raphael died four months later when he was 37.
