Raphael - Madonna del Granduca, Vivaldi- Concerto for Strings and Basso Continuo in C Major, Rainer Maria Rilke - The Panther

Our third Madonna painting by Raphael this week.  How is this painting similar to the last two and how is it different?

Madonna del Granduca - Raphael

More beautiful music by Antonio Vivaldi today - Concerto for Strings and Basso Continuo in C Major.
 If you want a short piece to focus on you could just choose one or two of the 63 pieces in this playlist to listen to this week or use the whole thing as a playlist for background music throughout the week. 

If you've been to the zoo and seen the big cats pacing in their cages, you can imagine this panther as Rainer Maria Rilke describes it in this poem:

           The Panther
 
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly--. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.