Favorite Women of Art #2: La Donna Velata-Raphael (1516)

This painting I have actually seen in person and I was struck by it at the time as, unlike most of the other paintings in the gallery, depicting a human figure that might, however remotely, be knowable to the likes of me. This is no doubt an incorrect and wholly inadvertent conjecture; Raphael's figures having the air, especially to those of us in latter ages, of being flesh and blood human beings in the same way as ourselves, more than those of his contemporaries, and indeed more than perhaps any other painter in history. This is the most immediately distinctive characteristic of his pictures, and is quite wonderful for people who desperately want to feel some connection with the European tradition and the higher points of its history but are usually too completely intellectually overmastered by such specimens as they encounter to consider they have achieved this. I have always thought him one of those figures whose talent/genius is such that his work, once executed, appears to be so obviously what was called for, so obviously true, as to puzzle one that it is so rare, and so unique even among the rarities. He shows men things that they know and have always known, how they would see and think about them if their minds were not so encumbered by crudity and stupidity and conceit. Is it not wonderful how little art manages to attain this clarity, or even strives to?

I suppose one cannot quite imagine taking this particular Donna Velata to McDonalds (on the first date anyway) but certainly I can see her in a kind of scoop-necked black blouse at some cafe connected to an art museum (say the one at the Isabella Stuart Gardner) surrounded by a lot of potted palm plants and Germans declaiming in irritatingly flawless English about the inferiority of the coffee and the comparative weaknesses of the economics faculties at the Universities of Michigan and Cal-Berkeley. So she is not really knowable to me, though I come within a table or two of her on this singular occasion before I have to descend once again from the empyrean of the beautiful, educated, globalized set to my more humble regular life.