Summer, 1830. St Petersburg. Alexander Pushkin—not yet married, but already hopelessly in love with Natalia Goncharova—wanders along Nevsky Prospekt. His money is running out, the wedding looms on the horizon, and yet he lingers for long stretches before a single painting displayed in the window of Ivan Selenin’s bookshop. A fair-haired Madonna gazes down from the canvas—and in her he sees Natalie. “She is like you as one drop of water is like another,” he writes to his fiancée on July 30. “I would have bought her, if she had not cost 40,000 roubles.”
He did not buy the painting. Instead, he wrote the sonnet “Madonna.” It is one of the most revealing works reflecting the influence of Raphael’s imagery on Pushkin’s art. In it, the poet compares his beloved to the Mother of God as he had seen her, above all, in the Italian visions of Raphael. Not by chance, the poem echoes the aesthetic ideal of the High Renaissance—the harmony of earthly and divine beauty.
Below is the canonical English translation of Pushkin’s sonnet “Madonna,” as established in academic editions:
Madonna
(Alexander Pushkin — trans. A. Z. Foreman, academic edition)
Not a great number of old masters’ paintings
Did I desire to ornament my home,
That visitors might marvel at them, prone
To heed the weighty judgment of the learned.
Within my modest corner, mid my labors slow,
One painting I desired to contemplate forever—
One only: that upon me from the canvas, as from clouds,
The Most Pure One and our Divine Redeemer—
She with majesty, He with reason in His eyes—
Might gaze, benign, in glory and in light,
Alone, without the angels, ’neath the palm of Zion.
My wishes have been granted. The Creator
Has sent you down to me—you, my Madonna,
The purest model of pure loveliness.
The sonnet reads as a confession. In place of a painting—there stands a living Madonna. In Pushkin’s poetic universe, Natalia became that sacred image.
But which painting so deeply moved the poet? Here begins a cultural detective story that scholars have been unraveling for nearly a century and a half.
At first, many assumed the obvious answer: Sistine Madonna—Raphael’s most celebrated Madonna, endlessly reproduced in albums and engravings. Yet Pushkin’s sonnet makes no mention of angels, so prominent in the Dresden masterpiece.
Another hypothesis pointed to La Donna Velata (“The Woman with the Veil”). The resemblance to Natalia’s portraits by Vladimir Hau and Ivan Makarov is striking. But this image lacks both the Child and the sacred narrative so central to the poem.
Some scholars looked instead toward Pietro Perugino, Raphael’s teacher. The researcher Viktor Esipov suggested that Pushkin might have seen a painting from Perugino’s school in the collection of Nikolai Smirnov and later described it in the sonnet: a palm in the background, the Child, the compositional structure—all seem to correspond. Yet documents confirm that the poet spent long hours specifically before Selenin’s shop window on Nevsky.
A major breakthrough came in the 1940s thanks to the literary scholar Mstislav Tsyavlovsky. Examining old newspapers, he discovered a notice in the Literaturnaya Gazeta dated April 1, 1830. Valerian Langer described a painting titled “Madonna and Child” exhibited in Selenin’s shop and “attributed to Raphael.” The authorship was uncertain, yet the critic remarked upon its “Raphaelesque coloring” and “divine serenity.” The price was indeed enormous.
In August, another notice reported that a lithograph of the painting was being prepared by the young artist Alexander Bezlyudny.
Tsyavlovsky eventually located the lithograph in the Russian Museum. Its inscription read: “from the original painting of the Italian school.” The fair-haired Madonna’s face, the turn of her head, the compositional details—these correspond strikingly to Pushkin’s description.
Later, the art historian Georgy Koka proposed a compelling hypothesis: the painting in question may have been a copy of Raphael’s Bridgewater Madonna. The original—distinguished by its characteristic landscape and palm—now resides in the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh. The St Petersburg copy exhibited for sale later vanished from scholarly view; it is thought that its trail may have led to Germany, possibly to the collection of the Städel Institute. The painting’s subsequent fate remains uncertain. But the lithograph survives. And so does the sonnet.
The debate, however, continues. Some still favor the Sistine Madonna, others the Perugino connection. Most likely, Pushkin saw precisely the painting displayed in that Nevsky window—the one mentioned in the newspapers of 1830. Yet in the humanities, final conclusions are rare.
What is certain is that Natalia Nikolaevna truly became for him “the purest model of pure loveliness.” In the summer of 1830, during the very days when “Madonna” was composed, the poet dreamed not only of beauty, but of quiet domestic happiness—of harmony in the home, of a light that would greet him each day.
Perhaps we shall never know with absolute certainty which Madonna gazed upon the poet that July day. But we know this: in painting, Pushkin recognized the ideal toward which he strove both in life and in poetry. And, though he did not purchase the canvas, he gained something greater—an image that would remain forever in Russian literature.