The Madonna of the Future

The Madonna of the Future is a short story by Henry James, first published in the Atlantic Monthly in March 1873 and collected in A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales two years later. It is one of his earlier strong stories and one that he kept in print throughout his life, partly because it is one of the cleanest statements of a theme he never quite stopped writing about.

The story is set in Florence and is told by a young American narrator who falls in with an older American painter named Theobald. Theobald has spent twenty years preparing to paint a great Madonna in the Raphael tradition, studying every Madonna ever painted and refining his vision. He has a model who has sat for him in informal sketches for years, a once beautiful Italian woman who is now middle aged. The narrator meets her and is shocked to see how time has worked on her. When he reports this back to Theobald the painter realises with a kind of crash that his masterpiece will never be painted. The canvas in his studio is bare.

The story is partly about the cost of perfectionism and partly about American innocence abroad. Theobald is a sweet figure and a tragic one. James does not mock him but he also does not pretend the years were not wasted. There is a minor character, a coarse Italian sculptor who turns out small figures of monkeys for money, who functions almost as a chorus, asking the right cynical questions about why anyone would spend a life preparing for a work that never starts.

At about thirty pages it is one of the most concentrated of the early Italian stories. The atmosphere of expatriate Florence is precise and the central image of the blank canvas has the weight James is reaching for. Readers who like this should follow it with Daisy Miller and The Last of the Valerii, two other early Italian tales where the same questions about America and Europe are handled in different keys.