Ceres

Ceres is a small panel from 1516, credited to Raphael, painted entirely in shades of grey to look like a carved statue standing in a niche. It once served as a protective cover for a portable devotional picture. Today it belongs to the Department of Paintings of the Louvre.

Where to see it

Ceres is held by the Department of Paintings of the Louvre in Paris, and the fact sheet lists its location as Room 710. The panel is small, 38.4 cm high and 31.3 cm wide, so it rewards a close look rather than a view from across the room. Works can be moved, rehung or lent, so check the Louvre's official website for current display status before you visit.

What to look for in person

A goddess painted as sculpture

Start with the figure itself. Ceres, goddess of the harvest, is painted in grisaille, a technique that uses only greys to imitate stone. She stands inside a niche crowned by a scallop shell, her head covered with a veil. She leans on her elbow, and in her bent left arm she holds a cornucopia from which six ears of wheat rise. These are her traditional attributes. The work is also known as Abundance, which suits a figure defined by grain and plenty.

The carved base beneath her feet

Look down at what supports the goddess. She does not stand on a plain ledge. Her feet rest on a cup-shaped base, and that base sits on a carved head. The head has a mouth shaped like a scallop shell, with twisted strands of hair and a curling moustache. The shell motif repeats the shell at the top of the niche, framing the figure above and below. Spend a moment on this small, playful detail, which is easy to miss at first glance.

Painted lettering that imitates inscription

At the bottom of the panel, painted lettering is designed to look as if it were cut into stone. The left side reads RAPHAEL and the right reads VRBINAS, a Latin form meaning 'from Urbino', the artist's home town. Like the figure, the letters are a trompe-l'oeil effect, a painted illusion of carved relief. Notice how the inscription, the niche and the base work together to make a flat panel read as a piece of architecture and sculpture.

About the painting

This panel was made as a protective cover. It would have closed over a devotional painting of the same size, made to travel with its owner, so that the image inside stayed shielded on the road. That practical purpose helps explain both the modest scale and the restrained palette: a cover in shades of grey reads as a sculptural object rather than as a second, competing picture.

The pose was not invented from scratch. The composition follows the Este Aphrodite, a sculpture that originally stood in the Loggia dei Marmi of the ducal palace in Mantua and is now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Turning a real statue into a painted statue in a painted niche is part of the work's appeal, and it is worth keeping in mind as you study the figure's weight and stance.

The panel's later history runs through French collections. It came to belong to the Gouffier family, most likely to Claude Gouffier, Grand Equerry of France and a collector. Around 1663 Loménie de Brienne sold it to the royal collections of Louis XIV. An inventory of 1683 still described it as a grisaille cover by the same hand as The Small Holy Family. At some point between 1683 and 1695, however, the cover and the painting it accompanied were separated. Seeing Ceres on its own today, remember that it was once one half of a portable pair, meant to be opened, closed and carried.

Key facts

Artist	Raphael
Date	1516
Size	38.4 × 31.3 cm
Medium	oil paint
Collection	Department of Paintings of the Louvre

How to visit: Louvre Museum

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