The two cherubs at the bottom of the Sistine Madonna, the altarpiece by the Italian painter Raphael, became famous because they could be cut out. Raphael painted them beneath the Virgin in a picture ordered in 1512, and by the early 1800s they were turning up alone on almanacs and armbands. A century later they were everywhere without her, on postcards, wrapping paper, stamps and mugs.
The altarpiece itself is a vision. Mary steps out of the clouds toward the viewer with the infant Christ in her arms, a green curtain drawn back on each side, two saints kneeling at her feet. The cherubs lean on a ledge below her with their chins on their folded arms, looking up. They are the only figures in the picture who do nothing.
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The odd part is that Raphael never planned them. He added the two children late in the work, mostly for the sake of the composition, and Maclean's, covering the Dresden gallery's anniversary show in 2012, called them an afterthought.
The Virgin, Pope Sixtus II and Saint Barbara were settled first. The children on the ledge came after them. So the most copied figures in the altarpiece were the last thing it asked for, and the people who own the mug have mostly forgotten the picture around them.
What the empty space needed
Because the picture needed somewhere for the eye to land. Pope Julius II ordered the altarpiece in 1512 for San Sisto, a Benedictine monastery church in Piacenza, and Raphael designed it as a tall rising vision, with the Virgin high between drawn curtains, Sixtus kneeling at the left and Barbara at the right.
I read it this way: a tall picture with an empty base lets the eye slide out of the frame. The two children close that gap. They sit on a balustrade, elbows planted, and look upward, which sends the viewer's eyes the same way, toward the Virgin and the Child.
The choice of saints shows the same calculation. Sixtus was chosen mainly because he was the patron saint of Julius's family, the Della Rovere. The pope who paid for the picture had his own clan in it. The cherubs belonged to nobody, and Raphael had hidden dozens more like them somewhere in the picture.
What You'll Discover
Where the other angels hide.
What the two children are waiting for.
Who posed for them.
How they got out of the frame.