History
One of the artist's last Madonnas, the painting was commissioned by Pope Julius II in 1512 in honor of his late uncle, Pope Sixtus IV, as an altarpiece for the Benedictine basilica of the Monastery of San Sisto in Piacenza, a church with which the Rovere family had a long-standing relationship. It was their requirement that the image contain both Saint Sixtus and Saint Barbara. Legend has it that when Antonio da Correggio first laid eyes on the piece, he was inspired to cry, "And I also, I am a painter!"
Read more about this topic: Sistine Madonna
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour.”
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“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
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