[3][4][5][6] Pigment analysis of Raphael's masterpiece[7][8] reveals the usual pigments of the renaissance period such as malachite mixed with orpiment in the green drapery on top of the painting, natural ultramarine mixed with lead white in the blue robe of Madonna and a mixture of lead-tin-yellow, vermilion and lead white in the yellow sleeve of St Barbara.

[12] The Sistine Madonna was notably celebrated by Johann Joachim Winckelmann in his popular and influential Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764), positioning the painting firmly in the public view and in the center of a debate about the relative prominence of its Classical and Christian elements.

"[17] Arising in the last decades of the 18th century, the legend—which made its way into a number of stories and even a play—presents Raphael as receiving a heavenly vision that enabled him to present his divine Madonna.

[18] It is claimed the painting has stirred many viewers, and that at the sight of the canvas some were transfixed to a state of religious ecstasy akin to Stendhal Syndrome (including one of Freud's patients).

[19] The picture influenced Goethe, Wagner and Nietzsche[20] According to Dostoyevsky, the painting was "the greatest revelation of the human spirit".

[23] Sistine Madonna was rescued from destruction during the bombing of Dresden in World War II,[20] but the conditions in which it was saved and the subsequent history of the piece are themselves the subject of controversy.

"[24][26] There followed some international controversy, with press around the world stating that the Dresden art collection had been damaged in Soviet storage.

The tunnel in which the art was stored in Saxon Switzerland was climate controlled, but according to a Soviet military spokesperson, the power had failed when the collection was discovered and the pieces were exposed to the humid conditions of the underground.

In some gloomy, dark cave, two [actually four] soldiers, knee-deep in water, are carrying the Sistine Madonna upright, slung on cloths, very easily, barely using two fingers.

[41] Another story, recounted in 1912 in St. Nicholas Magazine, says that Raphael was inspired by two children he encountered on the street when he saw them "looking wistfully into the window of a baker's shop.