WHY THE MADONNA?
Raphael, the great Italian painter, has been dead these four hundred years and more, but even now he towers above his contempoVaries by' virtue of a unique achievement. Like other gifted artists of his time—Titian, Tintoretto, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michaelangelo—he left the world a legacy that it will always treasure. What set Raphael apart from his fellows, however, was that he, better than any of them, portrayed on canvas the loveliness and delicacy—the spiritual beauty—of the Blessed Virgin. It is not for me to say that Mary guided his brush. But it is true that even the boy Raphael had an exceptional devotion to the Mother of God. She was his ideal, and he determined to use the great talent that God had given him to honor her with paint upon canvas.
Such is the effect of the Madonna of the Chair that even those who know little and care less for line and color, and perspective and composition, cannot help seeing in the masterpiece an ethereal sweetness that arises out of the mother's love for a child. Sweetness—a sweetness of soul—is a virtue of life beautifully exemplified in Mary, Our Mother.
In Mary we see the sweetness of surrender of the human will to the divine. From the moment during the Annunciation when she said: "Behold the handmaid of the lord; be it done to me according to thy word" (Luke 1:38), Mary was in the hands of God more completely than any of His creatures has ever been. To be sure, we are all completely in God's hands, but Mary was chosen for a special mission in the redemption of mankind, a mission foretold in the Garden of Eden when the Lord God said to the serpent: "I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel" (Genesis 3:15). With sublime confidence, such as we should appropriately envy as well as emulate, Mary submitted to the divine will. Now let life bring her what it would; she had lost herself in Him. So, when "her days were accomplished, that she should be delivered . . . she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn" (Luke 2:6, 7).
No room in the inn! Yet Mary
