A very small panel (under 33 cm wide) in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, catalogued with an attribution to Raphael that few would now defend. It is a votive image of the modest devotional kind produced in quantity by the Umbrian and Marchigian workshops of the 1490s — the circle of Giovanni Santi, Evangelista da Pian di Meleto and their contemporaries — and it is of interest chiefly as a specimen of the artisanal world from which the young painter emerged and which he left behind within five years. It is listed here because Wikidata credits it to him; it should be understood as "Umbrian school, formerly attributed to Raphael."

A fresco on the wall of a first-floor room in the house in Via Raffaello, Urbino, where Raphael was born. The Virgin, seen in profile and seated on a bench, reads from a small book propped on her knee; the naked Child sleeps across her lap, one arm hanging, his head on a cushion. The setting is a shallow niche with a ledge; the palette is the pale Umbrian-Marchigian one of the 1490s — a rose tunic, a blue mantle, greyish architecture — and the handling is soft and a little tentative, as though the painter were working at the limit of his powers rather than inside them.

That uncertainty is the crux of the picture's history. Since at least the eighteenth century local tradition has made it the first work of the boy Raphael, painted as a precocious exercise under his father's eye; a sentimental variant makes it Giovanni Santi's portrait of his wife Magia with the infant Raphael asleep on her knee. Neither can be proved. Most modern scholars give the fresco to Giovanni Santi himself, around 1490, on the grounds of its close kinship with his documented altarpieces (the same long oval faces, the same quiet profile pose he used for his Madonnas at Cagli and Montefiorentino) and its lack of any of the structural intelligence — the way a figure fills and organises its space — that marks even the earliest panels securely by Raphael. A minority keeps it for the son, around 1498–1500, as a work done in the father's manner, and points to the Child: the relaxed, foreshortened abandon of the sleeping body is more than Giovanni usually managed.

The technique is worth a word, because it bears on the question. The painting is in true fresco with finishing in oil — a mixed method common in the Marche in the 1480s and 1490s, when painters trained in tempera and fresco were beginning to use oil for the final modelling of flesh and the richer draperies. The flesh tones of the Virgin's profile have the slightly waxy translucence of oil over a fresco underlayer; the blue of the mantle, which would have been azurite applied a secco, has largely gone, leaving the reddish underpaint exposed; the architecture behind is pure fresco. This is exactly the technical world of Giovanni Santi's altarpieces, and it is the world in which his son first learned to handle a brush.

What is not in doubt is where it stands in the story. This is the painting that stood, quite literally, in the room where Raphael grew up: a domestic image of a reading Virgin and sleeping Child, in the idiom of the Urbino workshop, the kind of thing the boy would have seen his father and his father's assistants produce by the dozen. The motif of the Madonna reading would return in his own early panels — the Solly Madonna, the Conestabile Madonna — and the sleeping Child, stretched across the lap, in the Umbrian Madonna del Velo type and in countless later variants. Whoever painted it, it records the visual ground from which he started, and it is the reason the house in Via Raffaello is a place of pilgrimage rather than merely an address.

The Casa Santi was bought in 1873 by the Accademia Raffaello of Urbino and has been a museum since; the fresco is in its original position, the only work of its kind to remain in the house. A small room downstairs preserves the stone on which, by tradition, the Santi workshop ground its colours.

A head and shoulders of a youth of perhaps fifteen or sixteen, turned slightly to the left and looking out with a grave, slightly wary expression, drawn in black chalk on a sheet now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. The soft cap, the long hair falling to the shoulders and the delicate, somewhat heavy-lidded face have made it, since the nineteenth century, the "earliest self-portrait of Raphael," and it has been reproduced as such countless times. The identification rests on the resemblance to the Uffizi self-portrait of c. 1504–06 and to the figure traditionally identified as Raphael at the right edge of the School of Athens; it cannot be proved, and some scholars prefer to see in the sheet a portrait study of a shop boy or a young nobleman. The drawing itself is of a refinement unusual for the Umbrian workshops of the 1490s: the chalk is used with great economy, the modelling kept to a few soft passages around the eyes and under the chin, the contour of the cheek left open. Whatever it shows, it is a first sight of the draughtsman.

A processional banner painted on both faces for the Confraternity of the Holy Trinity at Città di Castello, almost certainly in connection with the plague that struck the town in 1499: on one face the Trinity — God the Father holding the crucified Son, the dove between them — adored by the two plague saints Sebastian and Roch; on the other the Creation of Eve, with God drawing the woman from the side of the sleeping Adam in a landscape. The two faces were separated in the nineteenth century and are now displayed as two canvases in the Pinacoteca Comunale of Città di Castello, much abraded and retouched, the Trinity face in particular having lost most of its surface.

Despite its condition the banner is one of the most important documents of Raphael's beginnings, because it is probably the earliest surviving work that is his in conception and largely in execution — painted, if the connection with the plague is right, when he was sixteen, a year before the Baronci contract. Banners of this kind were the cheap end of the trade: painted in tempera or thin oil on cloth, meant to be carried in procession and to hang in a chapel, not to last. That the confraternity gave the job to a boy from Urbino says something about the reputation he must already have had, or about the reach of his father's old workshop, which Evangelista da Pian di Meleto was still running in the Tiber valley towns.

The Trinity face is entirely in the manner of Perugino — the hieratic frontality of God the Father holding the cross before him (the Throne of Grace type that Perugino had used for his Città della Pieve banners), the soft, long-limbed Sebastian with his arrows, the bearded Roch pointing to the plague-sore on his thigh, the composition organised as a symmetrical triangle against an empty landscape. The Creation of Eve is more interesting. Its figures are taken from the Umbrian repertory — the sleeping Adam reclines in the pose of a river-god, God the Father bends over him with a gesture of calling-forth — but the landscape, with its feathery trees and its distant blue hills, has an openness and a tenderness that the Peruginesque type rarely allows, and the sleeping Adam is a first study of the relaxed male body that Raphael would draw for the rest of his life. The drawings connected with the banner — a study in Oxford for the Father, and a sheet at Lille — confirm that the design was his.

The survival of the banner at all is a matter of luck. Città di Castello, a small town on the upper Tiber with a strong confraternity culture and a prosperous merchant class, gave the young Raphael his first four commissions (the banner, the Baronci altarpiece, the Gavari Crucifixion, the Albizzini Marriage of the Virgin); it lost three of them to Napoleon, the Pope and the art market, and kept only this, the most perishable. The Pinacoteca Comunale, housed in the Palazzo Vitelli alla Cannoniera, shows the two faces side by side.

The half-length angel now in the Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo at Brescia — a panel of about 31 by 27 cm, transferred to canvas — is the best-preserved and most often reproduced of the fragments of Raphael's first documented work, the Baronci altarpiece of 1500–01 from Sant'Agostino in Città di Castello. It comes from the left side of the lost composition, where two angels flanked the standing Saint Nicholas of Tolentino with inscribed scrolls. The angel is shown in three-quarter view, turned to the right, with long fair hair falling in ringlets over a rose-coloured tunic, holding the end of a scroll (a fragment of which survives at the lower edge); the head inclines with the gentle, slightly melancholy sweetness that the young Raphael took from Perugino and, beyond Perugino, from the Umbrian tradition of Pinturicchio and the young Signorelli.

As a sample of Raphael at seventeen the fragment is instructive. The type is wholly inherited — the oval face, the small mouth, the lowered eyelids, the curled hair are all Perugino's stock — but the execution is of a finer grain than Perugino's own workshop usually managed. The face is modelled with a very soft gradation from light to shadow, the transitions almost invisible; the hair is painted strand by strand with a tiny brush, each ringlet given its highlight; the flesh has a faint pearly translucence that comes from thin layers of oil over a light ground, a quality that Perugino's heavier, more opaque flesh-painting lacks. Already there is the sense, which would never leave his work, that every part of the surface has been attended to with equal care, and that the painter took a craftsman's pleasure in the rendering of a curl or the edge of a scroll.

The fragment entered the Brescia gallery with the collection of Count Paolo Tosio in 1832; it was long catalogued simply as "Umbrian school" or given to Perugino's circle before its connection with the Baronci altarpiece was recognised in the twentieth century, when the Lille composition drawing and the Costantini copy allowed the dismembered work to be reconstructed. Its pendant, the Louvre angel (Q3616854), came to light only in 1981. Seen together — which they have been, in the exhibitions of 1983–84 and 2020 — the two angels give the best available sense of how the flanking figures of the altarpiece must have looked: two graceful adolescents, mirror images of each other, holding the saint's praises on their scrolls, in the pose of the angels who attend Perugino's enthroned Virgins.

The Brescia panel is the one that has suffered least, and it is the touchstone for Raphael's technique at the very beginning — the point of comparison for the attribution of the São Paulo Resurrection, the Bergamo Saint Sebastian and the earliest Berlin Madonnas. Its transfer from panel to canvas, done at some point before it entered the Tosio collection, has flattened the surface a little and made the craquelure more regular than it would otherwise be, but the paint film is intact; a cleaning in the 1980s removed a yellowed varnish and restored the pale rose of the tunic and the pearl tones of the face. Visitors to Brescia find it hung among the gallery's Lombard and Venetian pictures, a small Umbrian visitor, and it is easy to pass; but it is the first brushstroke of the career that the documents allow us to see.

The second surviving angel from the Baronci altarpiece, a fragment of about 58 by 36 cm on poplar, acquired by the Louvre in 1981 after its rediscovery in a private collection; it had been recorded in the eighteenth-century dispersal of the dismembered altarpiece and then lost sight of for nearly two centuries. It comes from the right side of the lost composition, the pendant of the Brescia angel, and is the larger and more complete of the two: the angel is shown at nearly three-quarter length, turned to the left, holding in both hands a long scroll (the phylactery of the title) whose inscription once proclaimed the saint's virtue. The pose — weight on one leg, the body slightly turned, the head inclined in the opposite direction — is the gentle contrapposto of Perugino's standing saints, and the drapery, a pale tunic with a mantle looped over one shoulder, falls in the long soft tubular folds that Raphael would never abandon.

Against the Brescia fragment the Louvre angel has suffered more — it was cut down, cleaned and perhaps partly repainted in the eighteenth century, and the surface has a slightly flattened look — but it preserves a passage that the Brescia panel does not: the hands, which hold the scroll with an articulated delicacy that is the young painter's own, the fingers curling round the paper with a precision of observation that no Umbrian contemporary could match. The two angels together are the nearest we can now come to the flanking figures of the altarpiece as it stood, and comparison with the Lille drawing for the whole composition shows that the design was followed closely, with the angels placed a little below the level of the saint's shoulders, looking inward towards him.

The rediscovery of the fragment and its acquisition by the Louvre were among the events that, in the 1980s, renewed interest in the young Raphael: the 1983–84 exhibitions in Paris, London and Florence for the quincentenary of his birth made a point of reconstructing the Baronci altarpiece from its pieces, and the Louvre angel — freshly restored — was the occasion. The panel hangs today in the Grande Galerie among the early Raphaels — the small Saint George and Saint Michael, the Belle Jardinière — where it provides the starting point of the sequence and the measure of how far, in seven years, the painter had travelled. The phylactery, the long ribbon-like scroll held in both hands, is the device by which medieval and Renaissance painters gave angels speech; the inscription on this one is lost, but the Costantini copy records that the two scrolls bore verses in praise of the saint's virtues, and the Lille drawing shows them clearly. The angel is thus not merely an attendant but a herald — the announcer of the saint's glory to the congregation below — and its slightly formal pose, the body turned towards the saint and the face towards us, carries that double role. The type of the face, with its broad cheekbones and lowered eyes, is close to the Virgin of the Capodimonte fragment and to the Madonna of the Berlin Solly panel; it is the face the young Raphael used for everybody in 1500–02, and it is recognisably the ancestor of the Florentine Madonnas.

A second Wikidata record for the Brescia angel from the Baronci altarpiece of 1500–01, created from a photograph taken when the panel was lent to the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow for the 2016 exhibition Raphael: Poetry of the Image. It is the same picture as Q3616853 and the commentary there applies; it is retained here because the catalogue lists every item Wikidata credits to Raphael. The Moscow exhibition, organised with the Uffizi, brought together eleven paintings and drawings including the Self-portrait, the Madonna del Granduca and the Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia, and was the largest Raphael showing in Russia since the Hermitage's acquisitions of the nineteenth century.

The first documented work. On 10 December 1500, in Città di Castello, "Raphael of Giovanni Santi of Urbino, master" (magister Rafael Johannis Santis de Urbino) and Evangelista da Pian di Meleto, his father's former assistant, contracted with Andrea Baronci to paint an altarpiece for his chapel in the church of Sant'Agostino, for thirty-three ducats, to be finished by the following September; the final payment is recorded on 13 September 1501. Raphael was seventeen; he is named first, and the title magister means that in the eyes of the law he was already a master with his own shop. Evangelista, thirty years older, was the junior partner — a circumstance that has puzzled historians ever since, and that probably reflects both the boy's talent and the survival of his father's business under his name.

The subject was the Coronation of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino, the Augustinian hermit-saint canonised in 1446 and much venerated in the Marche and Umbria: Nicholas stood at the centre in his black habit, holding a book and a lily, his foot on the defeated devil, who writhed beneath him; above him God the Father held a crown, and on either side, on clouds, the Virgin and Saint Augustine held out two more, while two angels flanked the saint with scrolls bearing inscriptions in his praise. The whole thing was a symmetrical, three-tiered hierarchy of the kind Perugino had made the standard Umbrian altarpiece, and it was set in a landscape. We know the whole composition from three sources: a drawing in Lille (a compositional study in the young Raphael's pen, with the figures already placed and the architecture indicated); a partial copy made in 1791 by the local painter Ermenegildo Costantini when the altarpiece was about to be removed, which records the lower half; and the fragments themselves.

The altarpiece was damaged in the earthquake that shook Città di Castello in 1789, and was sold by the church to Pope Pius VI, who had it cut into pieces that could be hung as separate pictures; the pieces then went their several ways through the chaos of the Napoleonic years. The surviving fragments are four. The upper part with God the Father and the Virgin holding the crown is in the Museo di Capodimonte at Naples. An Angel with a scroll, half-length, from the left of the saint, is in the Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo at Brescia. A second Angel holding a phylactery, at greater length, from the right, was rediscovered in a private collection and acquired by the Louvre in 1981. And a small head of an angel, accepted by some and doubted by others, has passed through the trade. The figure of the saint himself, the devil, and Saint Augustine are lost, presumably destroyed in the cutting.

What the fragments show is a painter completely fluent in Perugino's idiom and already more than its equal in certain things. The Brescia angel, with its tilted head, pursed lips and elaborately curled hair, is almost a quotation of the angels in Perugino's Vallombrosa altarpiece of 1500; but the modelling of the face is firmer, the fall of light on the cheek more closely observed, the hand holding the scroll drawn with a precision that Perugino's assistants never achieved. The Capodimonte God the Father is a grand, bearded, frontal type, but the Virgin beside him has a Leonardesque softness in the turn of the head that is pure Raphael, and her hands, holding the crown with fingers slightly splayed, are the first of the long series of exquisitely drawn hands that run through his work. The technique is a careful, thinly layered oil over a pale gesso ground, with the flesh built in small hatched strokes from a pinkish mid-tone — the "tempera-like" oil handling of his first decade, in which the medium is used for its smoothness rather than its depth.

The drawings for the altarpiece are the other half of the story. Besides the Lille composition there are studies in Oxford and Lille for individual figures, and a sheet with the head of the devil; together they are the earliest group of Raphael drawings connected with a documented work, and they establish the method he would follow for twenty years: a compositional sketch in pen, individual studies from the model in metalpoint or chalk, and — though none survives for this work — a cartoon. They also establish that the design was his and not Evangelista's: the older man's few independent works are stiff provincial exercises, and nothing in them could have produced the Lille sheet.

Two things about the altarpiece matter beyond its quality. First, it shows the kind of commission that was available to a gifted seventeen-year-old in 1500: a provincial Augustinian chapel, a local saint, a price of thirty-three ducats (a respectable but not a large sum — Perugino was getting several hundred for major altarpieces), a partnership with an older hand who presumably supplied the shop and the panel. Second, it shows how fast he moved. Within eighteen months of this Peruginesque coronation he had painted the Mond Crucifixion; within three years, the Oddi Coronation, a work of real compositional ambition; within four, the Marriage of the Virgin. The Baronci fragments are the floor from which that ascent is measured.

Saint Nicholas of Tolentino himself deserves a word, because the choice of subject tells us about the patron. An Augustinian friar who died at Tolentino in the Marche in 1305 and was canonised in 1446, Nicholas was the great popular saint of the Marche and Umbria in the fifteenth century — a healer, a protector of souls in Purgatory, invoked against plague; his cult was promoted by the Augustinian order, whose church this was, and his image, a black-habited friar with a star on his breast and a lily in his hand, was in every Augustinian church of the region. Andrea Baronci, a local citizen, was buying for his family chapel the most reliable intercessor available, and the Coronation — the saint crowned in heaven by the Trinity and the Virgin — was the Augustinians' preferred way of showing him. Raphael's task was to give the established image dignity and grace; the drawings show him doing so by studying the figure of the saint from a draped model and placing the devil under his feet with a writhing energy borrowed from Signorelli.

The fragments are listed separately in this catalogue (Q3616853, Q3616854, Q3733689, Q125936872); this entry stands for the altarpiece as a whole. Its dispersal is also a reminder of how much of the early Raphael is known to us only in pieces: of his first four commissions, one survives whole (the Marriage), one was transferred to canvas and damaged (the Oddi), one is in fragments (this), and one — the banner — is a ruin.

The upper part of the Baronci altarpiece, now in the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples, where it arrived with the Farnese-Bourbon collections: a panel of roughly 112 by 115 cm in tempera and oil showing, against a gold-flecked sky, the half-length figure of God the Father, grey-bearded and frontal, holding the crown that he lowers onto the head of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino (lost, below), and to the left the Virgin, in profile on a cloud, holding a second crown. A third figure, Saint Augustine, balanced her on the right and is lost; so is the saint himself and the devil beneath his feet. The fragment was cut from the damaged altarpiece after the earthquake of 1789, when it passed to Pius VI; it was recognised as Raphael's and reunited in scholarship with the Brescia and Louvre angels in the twentieth century.

Of all the fragments this is the one that shows most clearly how the composition worked: a hierarchical, symmetrical arrangement in three registers — God, the intercessors, the saint — of the kind Perugino had made standard for Umbrian altarpieces, with the figures isolated against space and the heavenly figures borne on clouds. The God the Father is a conventional type, solemn and a little stiff, his robe a heavy blue, his gesture of crowning made with both hands; the Virgin is another matter. Her profile, with its high forehead, lowered eyes and the faint smile at the corner of the mouth, and the way her hands hold the crown — the fingers slightly splayed, the gesture both ceremonial and tender — show the painter of seventeen already finding the note that would become his signature: a grace that is at once formal and intimate. The cloud on which she kneels is painted with soft, feathery edges, and the light on her mantle is observed rather than formulaic.

The panel is in poor condition, with much abrasion of the sky and repainting in the draperies, and the cutting has left the two figures oddly placed in the field; but the heads are largely intact. The fragment is displayed at Capodimonte among the Farnese pictures, a little out of its context; its true companions are in Brescia and Paris, and the whole can be imagined only with the help of the Lille drawing. It remains the grandest surviving piece of Raphael's first altarpiece and the only one that preserves the upper register, the part of the composition on which the Umbrian altarpiece depended for its solemnity. How the fragment reached Naples is not entirely clear; it appears in the Bourbon collections in the nineteenth century and was for a time attributed to Perugino's school. Its reattribution to Raphael, and its connection with the Baronci altarpiece, were made by Cavalcaselle and confirmed by the later reconstructions. The gold-flecked sky against which the figures float — a survival of the gold-ground tradition in a painter who would soon abandon it altogether — is a detail worth noticing: in the Umbria of 1500 the altarpiece still belonged, in part, to the world of the icon.

A small panel (about 52 by 44 cm) in the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, bought by the museum's founder Assis Chateaubriand in 1954 and the only painting by Raphael in the southern hemisphere. Christ rises from a marble sarcophagus that stands at an angle in a rocky landscape, holding the banner of the Resurrection and blessing; two angels on clouds flank him, one at each side, their draperies caught by the wind; below, four soldiers react in four different ways — one sleeps, slumped against the tomb, one starts awake and shields his eyes, one twists away in terror, one, at the left, springs up with his shield raised. Behind, a dawn landscape of blue hills and a pale sky with the first light at the horizon.

The picture's early history is blank; it was attributed in the nineteenth century to Perugino, then to Mariotto Albertinelli, and was only generally accepted as Raphael's after Roberto Longhi and others connected it with a group of drawings in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford — studies in metalpoint and pen of the soldiers, of an angel, and of the whole composition — that are unquestionably by the young Raphael. Those drawings date from his first years, c. 1500–02, and the painting belongs with them: the date of 1499–1502 that the museum gives brackets his earliest activity, and the picture has sometimes been placed as early as 1499, before the Baronci contract, and sometimes connected with the Baronci predella, though nothing confirms the latter. Its small scale and upright format would suit a predella or a private devotional panel equally well.

What makes the Resurrection remarkable is that it is the first picture in which Raphael attempts drama — bodies in violent motion, reacting to an event — and that he does so at a scale and with a delicacy that are almost those of manuscript illumination. The models were Perugino's Resurrection (now in the Vatican Pinacoteca, with its sleeping and waking guards) and, more distantly, the animated soldiers of Signorelli's Orvieto and Loreto frescoes, but the four guards are more varied, more individually conceived, than anything in Perugino; the sleeping one in particular, with his head fallen forward and his limbs loose, is observed from life in a way that anticipates the sleeping apostles of the Agony in the Garden in the Colonna predella, and the one who springs up with his shield, seen from behind in a twisting movement, is the first of Raphael's figures in real torsion. The figure of Christ is the conventional Umbrian type, frontal and weightless, with the banner held like a sceptre; the angels, poised on their clouds with their scarves flying, are of the Perugino-Pinturicchio family. The landscape is tender and atmospheric, with the sky graded from rose at the horizon to blue at the top, a small walled town on a hill and a winding road.

The handling is of extreme fineness — the surface almost enamelled, the contours crisp, the highlights on the armour laid in with a brush of two or three hairs, the gold of the halos applied in fine rays — in the tempera-like oil technique of his first decade. The panel is in good condition, though the sky has been somewhat abraded and the blues have darkened.

The Resurrection is also a small lesson in how the attribution of early Raphaels was settled in the twentieth century: not by style alone, which in these years is hard to separate from the best of Perugino's workshop, but by the drawings, which survive in quantity precisely because Raphael, unlike Perugino, drew everything afresh from the model and kept the sheets. The Oxford studies for the guards — one of them a nude study for the soldier at the left, then draped in a second drawing — show the method at its origin, and they show, too, that the energy of the figures was sought deliberately: the drawings are more violent than the painting, and the painting more violent than anything in Umbria before it.

The picture's arrival in Brazil is a story of its own.The iconography repays attention. The Resurrection as a narrative event — Christ stepping or floating from the tomb before guards — was a Northern and Italian commonplace, but the Umbrian version had particular features: the sarcophagus set obliquely in a landscape rather than in a cave, the angels as attendants at either side, the four guards as a display of contrasted reactions. Perugino's Vatican Resurrection, painted for San Francesco al Prato in Perugia around 1499, is the immediate source, and one of its sleeping soldiers is traditionally said to be a portrait of the young Raphael. Raphael's version takes the scheme and sharpens every element: the tomb is more firmly placed, its perspective worked out; the guards are more violently contrasted; Christ, though still weightless, is more precisely lit. The little picture is, in effect, a young man's correction of his master's design.

The critical history is characteristic of the early works. Its earliest certain provenance is the Kinnaird collection in Scotland in the nineteenth century, when it passed as Perugino; it was sold to Chateaubriand as "attributed to Raphael" and the attribution was consolidated only after 1954, when Longhi, Fischel's successors and finally the systematic catalogues of the 1970s and 1980s accepted it on the strength of the Oxford drawings. The São Paulo Resurrection is now regarded as securely his and is regularly lent to the major exhibitions; it was in Rome in 2020.

Chateaubriand, the newspaper magnate who founded MASP in 1947, bought in the post-war years, with the advice of Pietro Maria Bardi, a collection of European painting that no South American institution had attempted before; the Resurrection was one of his prizes, and it hangs in Lina Bo Bardi's glass-easel installation among Bosch, Bellini and Mantegna. In that setting — the pictures standing free on glass sheets in a single great hall, with their labels on the back — the little panel can be approached from a foot away, which is how it was meant to be seen; at that distance the hatched strokes of the flesh and the tiny touches of white on the armour become visible, and the painter of nineteen becomes a presence.

A half-length Saint Sebastian, about 43 by 34 cm, in the Accademia Carrara at Bergamo, from the collection of Count Guglielmo Lochis, which entered the gallery in 1866. The saint is shown not as the naked martyr tied to a tree but as a young Umbrian nobleman: dressed in a dark tunic with a rich patterned collar and a red mantle, his long hair falling to the shoulders, his head tilted in the familiar Peruginesque inclination, holding delicately between finger and thumb a single arrow — the attribute of his martyrdom, displayed rather than suffered — against a landscape of blue hills under a pale sky. The light falls softly from the left; the flesh is pale, the expression one of gentle abstraction.

This is the type of devotional half-length, a saint presented as a portrait, that Perugino and Pinturicchio had made fashionable in Umbria in the 1490s, and the Bergamo panel was long given to one or the other before the attribution to the young Raphael, proposed in the later nineteenth century by Morelli and Cavalcaselle, became general. It belongs to his earliest years, around 1501–02, and its kinship with the angels of the Baronci altarpiece and with the Solly Madonna is close: the same oval face, the same soft modelling by almost imperceptible gradations, the same fine, strand-by-strand painting of the hair, the same thin oil handling in which the brush is never seen. Some scholars have placed it slightly later, around 1502–03, on the strength of the greater breadth of the drapery; the difference is small.

Yet the picture has a quality that is not quite Perugino's — a stillness that is psychological rather than merely compositional. Sebastian does not look at us or at heaven; he looks slightly downward and away, absorbed, and the arrow he holds is not brandished but contemplated, as though the painting were a meditation on martyrdom rather than its representation. This inwardness, the sense of a figure with a mental life, is what distinguishes Raphael's early saints from the pretty vacancies of his master's; it is present already in the Brescia angel and it would become, in the portraits, the thing he did better than anyone alive.

The beautiful passage of the collar, with its gold embroidery rendered in small raised touches of paint, and the hand with the arrow, drawn with great delicacy and set off against the dark tunic, are the work of a painter who already took more pleasure than his master in the exactness of things. The red mantle, painted in vermilion glazed with lake, has darkened somewhat; the panel has suffered some abrasion in the background, but the head and hands are well preserved. A pen study in Oxford for a half-length figure holding an arrow has been connected with the picture, though the connection is not certain.

The Saint Sebastian is the only early devotional half-length of a male saint by Raphael to survive, and it is an unusually clear instance of the genre's meaning: the saint as a courtly ideal, the martyr as a beautiful youth whose suffering is sublimated into an attribute held like a jewel. It was a type the Venetian painters would take up; in Umbria it was Raphael who brought it to this pitch of refinement.

The cult context is worth recalling. Sebastian was, with Roch, the plague saint par excellence, and the years around 1500 were plague years in the Tiber valley — the Città di Castello banner of 1499 shows the two saints together. A half-length Sebastian for private devotion was a protective image as much as a beautiful one: the arrow he holds is the plague-arrow of Apollo, which the saint's intercession turned aside. That the young Raphael could make of this apotropaic object a thing of such elegance — the slender shaft held between two fingers like a pen or a flower — is a measure of his instinct for transforming function into grace.

The costume also tells a story. The dark tunic with its broad embroidered collar is the dress of a young man of rank in the Marche or Umbria around 1500; the long hair parted in the middle and falling in waves to the shoulders is the fashion that the young Raphael himself wears in the Uffizi self-portrait. Sebastian is, in effect, dressed as a contemporary — a courtier of Urbino or Perugia who happens to hold an arrow — and the type looks forward to the small portraits of the Umbrian years (the Borghese Portrait of a Man, the Budapest Bembo), where the same face, the same hair and the same soft lighting appear without the halo.

Count Guglielmo Lochis (1789–1859), a Bergamasque collector and politician, assembled a cabinet of Italian pictures in his villa at Crocetta di Mozzo, which he bequeathed to the city on condition that it be joined to the Carrara collection; the bequest took effect in 1866. Lochis catalogued the panel himself as Perugino's; Giovanni Morelli, the Bergamasque connoisseur whose method of attribution by the forms of ears and hands was developed in part on the Carrara's holdings, was among the first to claim it for Raphael, and the attribution has stood. The panel is displayed in the Carrara's room of Umbrian and central Italian painting, near Perugino and Pinturicchio, which makes the comparison easy. Among the Carrara's other treasures from the Lochis bequest are Pisanello's Lionello d'Este and Mantegna's Madonna; the young Raphael holds his own in that company, which is itself a judgement. The panel has been lent sparingly — to the Raphael exhibitions of 1984 and 2020 — and is otherwise always in Bergamo, where it is one of the most loved pictures in a gallery full of them. Its modest size — it would fit in a coat pocket — is part of its character: this was a picture to be held, kept in a bedchamber or carried on a journey, and its refinement is the refinement of a jewel rather than of a public image. Raphael's later saints would be monumental; this one is intimate, and the intimacy is not the least of its charms.

A pen-and-brown-ink drawing, 272 by 175 mm, in the print room of the Royal Castle in Warsaw, showing a soldier in full plate armour and a plumed helmet, standing in profile to the left, his sword raised in his extended right hand and a round shield on his left arm. The figure is drawn with the brisk, hooked pen-line of the young Raphael's Umbrian years and belongs to the repertory of soldiers and guards he was studying around 1500–05 for compositions such as the São Paulo Resurrection, the Saint George panels and the lost Saint Michael designs; it has also been connected with studies for the Piccolomini Library in Siena. The attribution has been accepted by most students of the drawings, though some have given the sheet to Raphael's Umbrian circle. It is listed by Wikidata without a type; it is a drawing.

An altarpiece on poplar, 283 by 167 cm, in the National Gallery, London, bequeathed in 1924 by the industrialist and collector Ludwig Mond, whose name it bears. It was commissioned by the wool-merchant Domenico Gavari for his chapel dedicated to Saint Jerome in the church of San Domenico at Città di Castello, where an inscription dated 1503 recorded the dedication, and it is signed at the foot of the cross RAPHAEL / VRBIN / AS / P[INXIT] — the earliest signature on a surviving painting. The two surviving predella panels, with miracles of Saint Jerome, are in Raleigh and Lisbon.

Christ hangs on a tall cross against a luminous sky in which the sun and moon — small dark discs with faces, the ancient emblems of cosmic mourning — appear on either side of the crossbar. Two angels on ribbons of cloud catch his blood in chalices, their scarves fluttering in a wind that touches nothing else. Below, on a level foreground before a wide Umbrian landscape of river, bridge and hills, stand the Virgin at the left and Saint John at the right, and kneel Saint Jerome — the chapel's dedicatee, in his cardinal's red, holding a stone — at the left and the Magdalen, with her ointment jar, at the right. All four heads incline at the same gentle angle; all four faces have the same expression of sweet, composed sorrow.

Vasari said that if Raphael's name were not written on it everybody would believe the picture to be by Perugino, and for once Vasari's remark has been repeated without irony ever since, because it is true. The whole structure — the high cross isolated against the sky, the symmetrical standing and kneeling figures, the ribboned angels, the landscape with its high horizon — is that of Perugino's Crucifixions of the 1480s and 1490s (the Galitzin triptych now in Washington, the Chigi altarpiece in Siena), and the figure types, the drapery and the colour are his. The picture is the proof that at nineteen Raphael could produce a Perugino more perfect than Perugino: and that is its interest, for it obliges one to look for the difference.

The difference is in three places. It is in the space: Perugino's foregrounds are ledges on which figures stand in a row, while here the four figures are disposed at slightly different depths, the kneeling saints a little forward of the standing ones, so that the group has a faint but real three-dimensional order, and the landscape behind them is constructed, not merely painted — the river winds back, the bridge sits in a plausible middle distance, the hills recede by degrees towards a horizon that is lower and more atmospheric than Perugino's. It is in the drapery: the Magdalen's mantle and Jerome's cope fall in folds that are crisper, more structural and more exactly observed than Perugino's, with a play of light on the edges that comes from looking rather than from formula; the Magdalen's yellow mantle in particular, with its deep, sharply lit folds, is a passage that Perugino's shop could not have painted. And it is in the sky, which is the most beautiful passage of the picture — graded from a pale green-gold at the horizon through blue to a deeper blue at the top, with the two angels' scarves the only movement in it, and the whole suffused with a light that is not Perugino's flat brightness but something more atmospheric and more tender. The sun and moon, with their small human faces, are archaic — a medieval survival — and Raphael would never use them again; they are a sign of the provincial context, and also of the painter's tact in giving the Dominican friars and the wool-merchant what they expected.

Technically the altarpiece is a perfect specimen of the first-period method. The panel is poplar, the ground white gesso, and infrared reflectography (published in the National Gallery's technical studies) has shown beneath the paint the dotted lines of spolvero — charcoal pounced through a pricked cartoon — under every contour, exactly the method of Perugino's shop, with very few changes between underdrawing and paint. The oil is applied thinly in layers, the flesh built up from a pale mid-tone in small parallel strokes, the blues of the Virgin's mantle and the sky in natural ultramarine over an azurite underlayer, the reds in vermilion glazed with lake, the yellow of the Magdalen's mantle in lead-tin yellow. The surface, cleaned in the twentieth century, is in excellent state apart from some wear in the sky and the loss of the azurite details applied over the ultramarine.

The drawings for the altarpiece are few — a study at Oxford for the angel at the left, and a sheet at Lille related to the kneeling Magdalen — but they show the same closed, cartoon-directed process as the underdrawing. What the picture has in abundance, and what the drawings do not show, is the painter's pleasure in the execution: the small jewelled touches on Jerome's cope, the transparency of the Magdalen's veil, the reflection of the sky in the river.

The Gavari chapel's altarpiece was taken from San Domenico in 1808 by Cardinal Fesch, Napoleon's uncle, and passed through the Fesch sale (1845), the Dudley collection and Mond's hands to London. It hangs in the National Gallery's early-Raphael room beside the Ansidei Madonna of two years later, and the comparison is a short course in what Florence did to him. It is also the picture that, more than any other, fixed the nineteenth-century image of the "Peruginesque" Raphael, the painter before the fall, whom the Nazarenes and the Pre-Raphaelites held up against the Roman master; Ruskin, who loved it, thought it showed what Raphael might have remained. Domenico Gavari's chapel was the third on the left in San Domenico; the altarpiece stood there for three centuries, and the church still shows the empty frame. The inscription, recording that Domenico had the chapel made in 1503, gives the terminus for the picture's completion, and the signature — cut into the painted wood of the cross, like a carpenter's mark — gives the painter's first public claim to authorship. He was nineteen or twenty.

A small upright panel, about 39 by 15 cm, in tempera and oil, in the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche at Urbino, showing Saint Catherine of Alexandria standing full-length, holding the palm of martyrdom and resting a hand on the wheel of her torture, against a plain ground. The format — tall, narrow, a single standing saint — is that of the small panels set into the pilasters of Umbrian altarpieces, and the Urbino Catherine is thought to be such a fragment, from a dismembered altarpiece of the years around 1502–03, when the young Raphael was working in Città di Castello and Perugia. The attribution to Raphael was proposed on its acquisition by the Urbino gallery and has been accepted by some scholars and doubted by others, who see in it the hand of an Umbrian contemporary; the head, with its inclined pose and lowered eyes, and the fall of the drapery are certainly of his type. It is listed here as Wikidata records it; the visitor to Urbino should judge for themselves in the room where it hangs near Piero's Flagellation.

A half-length Virgin and Child, about 52 by 38 cm, in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, named after the English merchant Edward Solly, whose enormous collection of Italian pictures was bought by the Prussian state in 1821 and formed the nucleus of the Berlin gallery. The Virgin, seated before a low parapet with a landscape of blue hills and a lake behind, holds an open book in her left hand and steadies with her right the naked Child, who sits on her lap, turns his head to look at the book, and holds on a string a small bird — the goldfinch, whose red face was said to come from the blood of the Crown of Thorns and which, in Italian devotional painting, stands for the Passion to come. The Virgin's gaze is lowered to the page; the Child's, to the same page; the bird looks out at us.

The picture is among the earliest of the Madonnas and one of the most Peruginesque: the type of the Virgin's head, with its high forehead and lowered lids, the transparent veil, the way the mantle is drawn over the hair, and the parapet-and-landscape setting all come directly from Perugino's half-length Madonnas of the 1490s, and the Berlin catalogue has sometimes placed it as early as 1500. But the child is Raphael's. Perugino's infants are doll-like and inert; this one has weight, sits with a real shift of balance, and turns his head with an attention — to the book, not to the viewer — that gives the panel a quiet inner narrative. The motif of mother and child reading together, absorbed in the same object, would recur through the Florentine Madonnas and become, in the Madonna della Seggiola and its descendants, one of the most influential images of maternal intimacy in European art. Here it is stated for the first time, with an almost naïve directness.

Technically the Solly Madonna is characteristic of the first period: poplar panel, a smooth white ground, thin oil paint built up in layers of small strokes, the flesh pale and pearly, the contours sharp, the landscape painted with a miniaturist's attention to the reflections on the water and the little trees on the far shore. Infrared examination has shown an underdrawing of the careful, closed kind associated with cartoon transfer, with almost no changes — a sign of how completely the design was settled on paper before the panel was touched. The panel is in good condition and is a touchstone for the attribution of other early Madonnas — the Diotalevi, the Norton Simon, the Conestabile — which are measured against it.

The book the Virgin holds is a book of hours, and the page is legible enough to show that it is open at a text; the goldfinch, tethered by a thread to the Child's finger, is the detail that later generations found most charming and that Raphael would elaborate in the Florentine Madonna of the Goldfinch. The three elements — book, bird, child — are a compact theological programme: the Word, the Passion, the Incarnation, held together in a mother's lap. That Raphael at nineteen could make such a programme look like a domestic moment is the whole of his early gift.

Solly, a timber merchant who had made his fortune in the Baltic trade, bought largely in Italy during the Napoleonic dispersals; his three thousand pictures included the Berlin Raphaels that now form the most important group of the early Madonnas outside Italy — the Solly, the Diotalevi, the Terranuova, the Colonna and the Madonna with Saints Jerome and Francis. Their presence in Berlin made the city, in the nineteenth century, a centre of Raphael scholarship, and the Berlin catalogues from Waagen to Bode laid much of the groundwork for the modern chronology of the early work.

The comparison with Perugino is instructive in detail. Perugino's half-length Madonnas of the 1490s — the Louvre Madonna with Two Saints, the Washington Madonna and Child — set the Virgin frontally before a parapet with the Child seated or standing on it, and treat the pair as a devotional icon with a landscape backdrop. The Solly Madonna keeps the format but changes the relation: by turning both heads down to the book, Raphael makes the two figures share an action and so gives the picture an interior life that Perugino's never have. The Virgin's right hand, resting lightly on the Child's body, and the Child's left hand holding the thread, are the two points of contact that bind the group, and both are drawn with the close attention to hands that would become a hallmark. The parapet, which in Perugino is an abstract ledge, is here a real surface on which the book could rest.

The picture is usually dated around 1500–02, which would make it contemporary with the Baronci altarpiece and the earliest works; some have put it a little later, around 1503–04, because of its greater assurance. It is at any rate earlier than the Florentine journey, and it shows what the young Raphael could do with a private commission for a small devotional panel before Leonardo had taught him to build his Madonnas as sculptural groups. The Berlin gallery, which has the finest group of early Raphael Madonnas anywhere, hangs the Solly first in the sequence, and it earns its place. One further detail: the Virgin's halo is a thin gold ring seen in perspective, not a flat disc — a small sign that the painter was already thinking of his figures as bodies in space rather than images on a surface. Perugino's halos are usually flat. The distinction sounds pedantic; it is the difference between an icon and a picture, and it is the direction in which everything in Raphael's art was already moving. The Solly Madonna was cleaned in the 1970s, when an old varnish and some eighteenth-century retouching in the sky were removed; the picture as now seen is close to its original state, and the landscape in particular — the lake with its reflections, the two small trees on the near shore — has recovered a freshness that the nineteenth-century reproductions do not show.

The second surviving predella panel of the Gavari (Mond) Crucifixion, about 26 by 44 cm, in the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon. It shows, in an open landscape continuous with that of the Raleigh panel, the miracle by which Eusebius of Cremona, the disciple of Saint Jerome, laid the dead saint's cloak over three corpses and restored them to life, while a crowd of witnesses reacts. The little figures are animated with the same brisk economy as those of the Resurrection in São Paulo, and the painting of the distance — blue hills dissolving into a pale sky — is among the most delicate in the early work. The two predella panels were separated from the altarpiece when it left Città di Castello in the eighteenth century and reached their present homes by different routes; together with the main panel in London they allow the Gavari altarpiece to be reconstructed almost complete.

A small oblong panel, about 26 by 42 cm, in the North Carolina Museum of Art at Raleigh, from the Cook collection at Doughty House, Richmond: one of the two surviving predella panels of the Mond Crucifixion (the Gavari altarpiece) painted for San Domenico at Città di Castello in 1502–03. The altarpiece was dedicated to Saint Jerome, and the predella told two of his posthumous miracles as recounted in the Golden Legend and in the letters attributed to Cyril of Jerusalem: here, in a single continuous landscape, the saint appears in the sky to save the bishop Silvanus, falsely accused of heresy, from execution — the headsman's sword stopped in mid-stroke — and the true heretic, Sabinian, who had made the accusation, is struck down in his place. The figures are small and brisk, disposed across the long format in two groups; the landscape, with its pale distance, is painted with the same tenderness as the Crucifixion above. The companion panel, Saint Jerome (or Eusebius of Cremona) raising three men from the dead, is in Lisbon (Q63110871). The Raleigh panel was acquired by the museum in 1960 from the Kress Foundation's dispersals.

A small panel (about 34 by 29 cm) in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, showing the Virgin in half-length with the Child standing on a parapet before her, flanked by two saints in half-length: at the left Jerome, as a cardinal in red with a book, and at the right Francis, in his habit with the stigmata, both gazing at the Child, who raises his hand in blessing. A landscape of hills and trees fills the distance. The panel takes its name from the Baltic-German family von der Ropp, from whose collection it entered the Berlin gallery in the early twentieth century; it is also known simply as the Madonna with Saints Jerome and Francis.

The picture belongs to the first years of the century, about 1502, and to the small group of half-length Madonnas with attendant saints — a format Perugino and his circle used for private devotion — that Raphael painted before Florence. It has sometimes been doubted, and sometimes given to the workshop or to a Peruginesque contemporary, because the two saints are conventional and rather stiff, and the Virgin's type is close to Perugino's; but the Child, standing with a real sense of balance and turning to bless with an unselfconscious seriousness, and the quality of the landscape, with its feathery trees and pale distance, argue for Raphael's own hand at the stage of the Solly and Diotalevi Madonnas. The modelling of the Virgin's face, with its soft transitions and the characteristic slight swelling of the lower lip, is of a quality that the workshop did not reach.

The composition — a central group framed by two half-length saints who look inward — is a compressed version of the sacra conversazione, and the young painter's problem, which he does not yet solve, is how to make the four figures a group rather than a row: the saints remain attendants, not participants, their gazes converging on the Child but their bodies isolated in their own narrow bands of space. Compare the Met's Colonna altarpiece of two years later, where the same problem is met with a real architecture of bodies, and the Florentine Canigiani Holy Family, where it is solved. Jerome and Francis, the learned hermit and the poor man of Assisi, were a common pairing in Umbrian devotion; their presence here suggests a patron with Franciscan connections, perhaps in Perugia, where both saints had strong cults.

The panel is in fair condition, with some abrasion in the Virgin's mantle and in the sky; the reds of Jerome's robe have held well. It hangs in Berlin beside the other early Madonnas, where its slightly lesser quality is instructive: it shows the Raphael of 1502 on an ordinary day. The von der Ropp family, Courland barons with Baltic estates and Berlin connections, acquired the panel in the nineteenth century; it was given to the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum, as the Gemäldegalerie then was, in the first years of the twentieth century, when Wilhelm von Bode was assembling the collection that would make Berlin one of the great centres of Italian painting outside Italy.

Two fragments of a cartoon in black chalk and charcoal, mounted together, in the Musée Condé at Chantilly (where the duc d'Aumale's collection includes also the Three Graces and the Madonna of Loreto): a group of naked children — putti — of whom two ride on the backs of boars and charge at each other with lances, in the manner of a tournament, while six others stand and gesture around them; one at the right holds a shield, one at the left raises an arm, one at the centre looks out. The drawing is at a fairly large scale, the figures rubbed and the paper torn and pieced, as cartoons that have been used for transfer generally are; the lines of the original pricking can be seen in places.

The sheet has been attributed to Raphael since it entered the Condé collection, and it is usually placed around 1502–05, in the late Umbrian or first Florentine years; its purpose is uncertain. Cartoons of putti at play were made for decorative friezes — in painted borders, in the dadoes of chapels, in the ornament of ceilings — and the mock-tournament of children on boars is a humanist conceit, an antique motif (the Bacchic putti of Roman sarcophagi ride on goats and panthers) adapted to the taste of the courts. The most frequent suggestion connects the drawing with the decorative scheme of the Piccolomini Library in Siena, for which Raphael made designs in 1502–03 while assisting Pinturicchio, and whose painted pilasters and borders are full of grotesque and playful ornament; another connects it with the decoration of a Perugian or Urbino room. Nothing is proved.

Whatever its destination, the drawing is a fine instance of the young Raphael's handling of the infant body — the plump limbs, the round bellies, the soft transitions of the chalk — and of his early interest in the antique: the boars are drawn with real animal energy, and the motif of children parodying adult combat is taken directly from Roman relief. The putti of the Madonna della Seggiola and the Farnesina loggia, and the playing children of the Madonna of the Pinks, are the descendants of these; and the cartoon's use — pricked, rubbed, cut — shows that it was a working object, made to be transferred to a wall and then discarded. That it survived at all is luck. The Condé, by the terms of the duc d'Aumale's bequest, cannot lend, so the sheet is seen only at Chantilly. Photographs, fortunately, are good, and the drawing is regularly reproduced in the literature on the Piccolomini Library, where the question of Raphael's share in Pinturicchio's scheme — Vasari says he made the cartoons for the main scenes, modern opinion gives him the composition drawings and perhaps some decorative designs — remains one of the unresolved problems of his early career. The Chantilly putti are the best evidence that he was also designing ornament. They are, incidentally, the earliest securely attributed cartoon fragments by Raphael apart from the Louvre Annunciation. Their condition — torn, rubbed, mounted — is the normal fate of working cartoons, and a reminder of how much of the graphic preparation for Raphael's decorative projects has simply perished.

A cartoon in black chalk and ink on paper, about 28.5 by 42 cm, in the Département des Arts graphiques of the Louvre: the full-scale working drawing for the Annunciation predella panel of the Oddi altarpiece (Q116286717), pricked along the outlines for transfer by pouncing. The sheet shows the angel and the Virgin in the same loggia as the painting, with the perspective lines of the pavement ruled in, and differs from the finished panel only in small particulars. It is one of the earliest surviving cartoons by Raphael — the Umbrian workshops used cartoons for everything, and the young master learned the practice from them — and its survival, together with the painting, allows the method of the first period to be followed step by step: design in pen, cartoon at full size, transfer by spolvero, paint with few changes. The sheet has been in the French royal collection since the seventeenth century.

A Virgin and Child with the infant Saint John the Baptist, about 69 by 50 cm, in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, named after the Diotalevi (or Diotallevi) family of Rimini in whose house it hung until the nineteenth century; Berlin acquired it in 1842. The Virgin is shown in half-length, frontal, her head inclined slightly to the right, before a landscape; on her lap the Child, naked, turns to his left to bless the little Baptist, who kneels at the lower right in his camel-skin, hands joined in prayer, gazing up at Christ. A curtain or cloth of honour is suggested behind. The Virgin's mantle is blue over a red dress; her veil falls over her hair and shoulders in fine transparent folds.

The picture was long attributed to Perugino, and the reasons are plain: the Virgin's face, with its lowered lids and small mouth, is of Perugino's type; the symmetry and frontality are his; the flat, rather abstract treatment of the cloth of honour is the sort of thing his shop did by rote. The reattribution to the young Raphael, argued in the later nineteenth century and now unchallenged, rests on the children and on the landscape. The two infants, one blessing and one adoring, are related to each other with a psychological precision — the Baptist's upturned face, the Child's grave attention — that Perugino never attempted; the gesture of blessing is drawn with real anatomical knowledge; and the landscape, with its lake, its tiny figures and its atmospheric blues, is of the delicate kind that runs through all the early panels from the Mond Crucifixion to the Conestabile Madonna.

The Diotalevi is interesting above all as a first statement of the three-figure group — Virgin, Christ, Baptist — that Raphael would take to Florence and remake there under Leonardo's influence into the pyramidal compositions of the Madonna of the Meadow, the Goldfinch and the Belle Jardinière. Here the three are still arranged additively, side by side in a shallow space, with the Baptist as a small supplementary figure at the edge; in Florence they would be bound into a single mass, the Baptist brought in under the Virgin's arm, the Child's body turned against hers. The comparison makes vivid how much the Florentine years changed, and how much — the tenderness of the relation between the children, the stillness of the Virgin — was already there.

Technically the panel is in the thin, smooth manner of the early period, with the flesh built in small hatched strokes and the blues laid in ultramarine over azurite; the Virgin's veil is painted with a translucency that is already a speciality. The panel has been cleaned and is in good condition apart from some wear in the curtain, whose pattern has become indistinct. The Rimini provenance is interesting in itself: the Diotalevi were a patrician family with ties to the Malatesta court, and the picture's presence there suggests that Raphael's small Madonnas were already travelling beyond Umbria and the Marche in his earliest years — a first sign of the reputation that would bring him, within two years, to Florence.

The infant Baptist is the figure to watch. Umbrian painting had made much of the little Saint John — Perugino's shop produced Madonnas with the two children by the dozen — but the Baptist was usually a small, doll-like supplement. Raphael's Baptist, kneeling with joined hands and upturned face, is a real child, with a real child's eagerness; his camel-skin is painted with attention to texture, and his halo is a thin gold ring set at an angle that follows the tilt of his head. The relation between the two children — the Baptist adoring, Christ blessing — is the seed of the Florentine groups, and in particular of the Madonna of the Meadow, where the same two figures are turned towards each other across the Virgin's lap and the Baptist offers the cross.

The Virgin's frontality, which in the Florentine Madonnas Raphael would abandon for a turn of the body, is here still iconic, and it is the picture's most Peruginesque feature. But look at her hands: the right rests on the Baptist's shoulder with a gesture of introduction, the left supports the Child's back, and the two hands together form with the Child's blessing arm a small circuit of touch and gesture that binds the three figures more closely than their bodies do. It is in such things — the work of hands — that the young Raphael was already most himself.

The name Diotalevi (Diotallevi, Diotalevi) is that of a Rimini family documented from the fifteenth century; the picture was in the family palace until sold to the Berlin museum in 1842 through the agency of the dealer and connoisseur Johann David Passavant, whose three-volume Rafael von Urbino (1839–58) was the first modern catalogue of the painter's work and the book that established most of the early attributions. Passavant's acquisition of the Diotalevi Madonna for Berlin was among the earliest instances of a museum buying an early Raphael on scholarly rather than decorative grounds; and the picture's subsequent place in the Berlin sequence — between the Solly and the Terranuova — has made it a standard reference point for the transition from Umbria to Florence. Berlin's hang allows the visitor to follow that transition in five panels in a single room, which is a privilege no other gallery offers. The Diotalevi is the hinge: Peruginesque in its symmetry and its Virgin, Raphaelesque in its children, it is the picture in which the two tendencies of the early work — the inherited formula and the personal observation — are most evenly balanced, and it is the one in which the coming change can most clearly be felt as a pressure not yet released. A copy of the composition, of lesser quality, exists in a private collection, and the type was repeated in the Umbrian workshops for a generation — a small index of the picture's early reputation. The Diotalevi was cleaned in the twentieth century and has been lent rarely; it is among the quietest and most reliable of the early panels, and its quality is easy to underrate precisely because nothing in it strains.

A half-length Virgin and Child, about 55 by 40 cm, oil on panel, in the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, acquired by Norton Simon in 1972 from the collection of the Earls of Northbrook (hence its older name, the Northbrook Madonna). The Virgin sits before a parapet with a landscape behind, her head inclined to the left; she holds open on her knee a small book of hours, and the Child, seated on a cushion on the parapet, turns his head to look at it, one hand resting on the page, the other on the Virgin's arm. The book is open at the office of None, the ninth hour, the hour of Christ's death on the cross — a detail legible enough to be read, and one that turns the domestic moment of mother and child reading together into a meditation on the Passion.

The picture belongs with the Berlin Solly Madonna, which it closely resembles in format and motif, and with the Hermitage Conestabile Madonna, which also shows the Virgin with a book; it is usually dated around 1502–04, in the last Umbrian years before Florence, and it is among the most securely attributed of the early Madonnas. The Virgin's type — the oval face, the high forehead, the transparent veil drawn over the hair, the lowered lids — is Perugino's, but the Child is wholly Raphael's: a real infant, with a plump foreshortened body, turning to the book with a child's curiosity, his hand on the page like a reader's. The relation between the two figures, bound by the book and by their gazes, is of the kind that Raphael alone among the Umbrians understood: a shared action, not a pose.

The landscape, seen through the window-like gap between the Virgin and the parapet, is a delicate panorama of hills and a distant town under a pale sky; the Virgin's red dress and blue mantle are painted in thin layers with the blue built up in ultramarine; the flesh is the pearly, hatched flesh of the early period. The panel is in good condition, with some abrasion in the mantle and retouching in the sky. Infrared examination has shown a careful underdrawing, transferred by cartoon and little altered.

The Northbrook Madonna was for most of the nineteenth century in England, where it passed through the collections of Thomas Baring and the Earls of Northbrook, and where Passavant and Crowe and Cavalcaselle recorded it as an early Raphael; it was among the pictures that gave the Victorians their idea of the "Umbrian" Raphael, the painter of sweet Madonnas before the fall. Its acquisition by Norton Simon in 1972 — one of the industrialist's great coups, at a time when early Raphaels were almost never on the market — brought to California a picture of a type that had seemed the exclusive property of the European galleries.

The theological point of the open book deserves a moment. The Virgin's book of hours, open at None, is a device Raphael used more than once — the Solly and Conestabile Madonnas also show a book — and it rests on a long tradition of images of the Virgin as a reader, absorbed in the prophecies of her Son's fate. What is particular to this panel is that the Child reads too: he looks at the page that foretells his death, and his hand rests on it, while his mother's face is lowered in a stillness that is close to grief. The little picture is thus a Pietà in the guise of a nursery scene — and it is characteristic of Raphael at twenty that he could make such a subject look like nothing more than tenderness.

The Northbrook provenance is itself a chapter of taste. Sir Thomas Baring, a banker, bought the panel in the early nineteenth century as the market in early Italian pictures was beginning; his collection passed to his son and then to the Earls of Northbrook, and was kept at Stratton Park in Hampshire, where the Madonna hung with Flemish and Dutch pictures and a Raphael drawing. Waagen saw it there in the 1850s and described it as "a lovely work of Raphael's Peruginesque period"; it was lent to the great Manchester exhibition of 1857 and to the Royal Academy winter exhibitions, and became, through engravings, one of the best-known of the small early Madonnas in England. When the Northbrook pictures were dispersed in the twentieth century it went to a London dealer and thence to Pasadena.

As a painting it is a textbook of the early technique. The panel is a single piece of poplar; the ground is white gesso; the paint is thin, the flesh built from a pale pink mid-tone with hatched strokes of a warmer colour in the shadows and fine white highlights on the forehead, the bridge of the nose and the Child's knee; the Virgin's blue mantle is natural ultramarine over a dark underlayer, its folds modelled in a slightly lighter blue and glazed in the shadows; the red dress is vermilion with lake glazes. The veil is painted in a thin white over the flesh so that the skin shows through — a trick Raphael learned from Perugino and refined. The landscape is laid in with a very small brush, and the sky graded from a pale warm tone at the horizon to a cooler blue above. It is a perfect small object, and the Norton Simon Museum, which shows it in a room with its Sienese and Florentine primitives, is right to treat it as a jewel. It has been lent to the great Raphael exhibitions — Washington 1983, London 2004, Rome 2020 — and each time it has held its own among larger and more famous pictures, which is the best test of a small one. Its companion in spirit is the Solly Madonna in Berlin, and the two should be thought of together: a pair of reading Madonnas made within a year or two of each other for private patrons, identical in conception and almost identical in format, in which the Umbrian Raphael stated, twice, the theme he would spend the Florentine years developing.

The largest and most ambitious work of the Umbrian years, painted for the chapel of the Oddi family in the Franciscan church of San Francesco al Prato in Perugia, at the order of Maddalena degli Oddi (or, by another reading of the documents, of Leandra Baglioni, who had married into the family and whose son Simone was the chapel's patron); it is usually dated around 1502–04, and it stood on the Oddi altar until 1797, when it was requisitioned for Paris under the Treaty of Tolentino. In the Louvre it was transferred from panel to canvas, with some damage; it was returned in 1815 and has been in the Vatican Pinacoteca ever since, with its three predella panels (Annunciation, Adoration of the Magi, Presentation in the Temple), which were also sent to Paris and also returned. The main panel is 272 by 165 cm.

The subject

The subject is a composite: the Assumption of the Virgin, seen from the ground, and her Coronation in heaven. Below, the twelve apostles stand and kneel around an open marble sarcophagus from which the Virgin has risen and which is now filled, instead of a body, with roses and lilies — the standard iconography of the Assumption in Umbrian painting, derived from the Golden Legend, in which the apostles, arriving too late, find the tomb empty and flowering. Thomas, at the centre, kneels holding the girdle she let fall to him as proof of her bodily assumption — the relic venerated at Prato, and a Tuscan-Umbrian specialty of the subject. The others look up, point, fold their hands, turn to one another. Above, on a bank of cloud that cuts the panel into two zones, Christ sets a crown on the head of the Virgin, who sits beside him with lowered eyes and crossed hands; four music-making angels — two with tambourine and viol, two with lute and fiddle — flank them, and the heads of cherubim fill the sky. A landscape of hills and a small town closes the distance between the two zones.

The model and the departure

The picture is built on Perugino, and in particular on Perugino's great Assumption for Vallombrosa (1500, now in the Accademia, Florence) and his Sistine Assumption, painted for Sixtus IV on the altar wall of the chapel and destroyed when Michelangelo painted the Last Judgement: the same two-storey arrangement of earthly witnesses and heavenly event, the same symmetry, the same ribboned, dancing angels, the same landscape. The Franciscans of Perugia, who had commissioned from Perugino some of his finest work, would have expected exactly this, and Raphael gave it to them. What is new is the lower half. Perugino's apostles stand in a row and look up; Raphael's are a crowd of individuals, each with his own response, disposed around the tomb in a loose oval that gives the group depth and movement. The one at the left edge who leans forward with hands clasped, the one at the right who raises his arm and turns away, the kneeling Thomas seen from behind with the girdle, the grey-bearded figure at the back who looks not up but across at his neighbour — these are studies from life, posed in the shop, and the drawings for them survive.

The drawings

The Oddi altarpiece is the first work of Raphael's for which a substantial body of preparatory drawings exists, and they are the key to it. There are metalpoint and pen studies in Oxford, Lille, London and Stockholm for individual apostles and for groups, including sheets in which the same garzone — the shop boy who served as model — is drawn first nude and then draped, so that the fall of the cloth can be understood over the body beneath; there are studies for the angels, for the Virgin, for hands; there is a sheet in Lille with the whole composition in pen. Together they show a method that is already the mature method: composition first, then figures from the model, then the cartoon. They show also a young painter who drew far more than the picture needed, who tried poses and rejected them, and who kept the sheets. This is the method Raphael would use for the rest of his life, and the Oddi altarpiece is the first work in which its results are visible at scale. (The metalpoint studies, in silver on a pinkish prepared paper, are among the most beautiful drawings of the Umbrian years; they show a hand that was, at twenty, already as certain as Perugino's and far more curious.)

The upper zone

The upper zone is more conventional and, in its way, more beautiful. The Virgin and Christ are of Perugino's type — the Virgin's lowered, slightly swollen eyelids and small mouth, Christ's soft beard and the slow ceremonial gesture of crowning; the angels are among the most graceful he ever painted — the one with the tambourine in particular, her head turned and her drapery flying, is an Umbrian dancer made celestial — and the music they make is exactly observed: the viol is bowed correctly, the lute fingered, the tambourine struck. The cherubim's heads, floating in the blue, are a first essay in the motif that would become the cloud of faces behind the Sistine Madonna. And the junction between the two zones — the band of cloud on which the heavenly figures sit, lit from below — is handled with an atmospheric softness that is not Perugino's.

Technique and condition

The colour is Umbrian and the light is soft; the handling is the fine, thin, enamelled oil of the early period, somewhat flattened by the transfer to canvas, which has given the whole a slightly dry surface and made the joins of the original panel visible in raking light. The transfer, carried out in Paris by the restorer Hacquin around 1800 — the French were proud of the technique, which involved gluing the paint film to canvas and planing away the wood behind it — saved the picture from the worm and the warp that threatened it but cost it some of its surface; the sky has been retouched, and the cherubim have lost their crispness. The draperies are largely intact. The drawing of the figures is much crisper than anything Perugino's shop produced, and the faces of the apostles, though still idealised, begin to be faces.

Its place

Two things make the Oddi Coronation pivotal. The first is that it shows Raphael meeting for the first time the problem of the large-scale narrative altarpiece — how to make a crowd act in concert — and solving it, at twenty, by the method he would refine in Rome: individuals studied separately, then composed. The second is that it is the first work in which the two halves of his art, the devotional and the dramatic, are present together and not yet reconciled: the hieratic heaven above, the human earth below, joined by the flowers in the tomb. The Disputa, six years later, would make the same division the structure of a masterpiece; the Oddi altarpiece is where he learned that the division could be made to mean something.

The predella panels — which tell, in three small oblong scenes, the Annunciation, the Adoration of the Magi and the Presentation — are separate entries in this catalogue (Q116286717, Q140247103); each is a miniature of extraordinary delicacy, the Adoration in particular a little anthology of figure types, including a pair of horses and a group of attendants that look forward to the Marriage of the Virgin. The altarpiece and its predella are displayed together in the Vatican Pinacoteca, in the room that holds also the Madonna di Foligno and the Transfiguration — the beginning, the middle and the end of the career on three walls.

The Oddi family, for whom it was painted, were Perugian nobles in perpetual feud with the Baglioni; their chapel in San Francesco al Prato stood a few yards from the Baglioni chapel for which, in 1507, Raphael would paint the Deposition now in the Borghese. That the same painter served both families, within five years, with the two most important altarpieces of his Umbrian-Florentine period, is a small fact with a large meaning: Raphael's reputation was, from the start, above faction.

Vasari and the later history

Vasari, who saw the altarpiece in San Francesco al Prato, described it with unusual precision: the Virgin crowned by Christ "among a choir of angels," the apostles below "contemplating the celestial glory" with "expressions of wonder," and the predella with its three small stories "executed with infinite diligence." He noted, too, that the work was done "in the manner of Pietro" — Perugino — and that it showed "how much Raphael had profited" from his master, a judgement that the picture still supports. The Perugian Franciscans prized it; it was one of the first works seized by the French commissioners under the Treaty of Tolentino in 1797, and it travelled to Paris with the Perugino altarpieces from the same city. There, in the Musée Napoléon, it was transferred to canvas and displayed in the Grande Galerie; after Waterloo it was among the works recovered by Canova for the Papal States, and it was placed not back in Perugia but in the new Vatican Pinacoteca that Pius VII created to house the returned pictures — a transfer that the Perugians have never quite forgiven.

What to look at

Seen in the Vatican today, the Oddi Coronation is often passed by visitors hurrying to the Transfiguration at the far end of the room. It rewards a pause. Look first at the apostle at the far left, who leans in over the tomb with his hands joined: he is the first of Raphael's figures to be seen in a real turning movement, the body and head rotated against each other, and the drawing for him at Oxford shows how carefully the pose was constructed. Look then at Thomas, seen almost from behind, holding up the girdle — a study in drapery over a crouching body that the Baglioni Deposition would develop. Look at the flowers in the tomb, each lily and rose painted as though for a botanist. And look, finally, at the four musician angels, who are the purest Perugino in the picture and also the most enchanting: the tambourine player at the left, with her turned head and flying veil, is the image on which the nineteenth century's love of the "early" Raphael was largely founded, and she is the ancestor of every dancing angel in the Nazarene repertoire.

The Franciscan context

San Francesco al Prato, the great Franciscan church of Perugia, was the city's pantheon: its chapels belonged to the leading families — the Oddi, the Baglioni, the Ranieri — and its altars carried the most important pictures in the city, among them Perugino's Deposition and his Resurrection and, from 1507, Raphael's Baglioni Deposition. The Franciscans had a particular devotion to the Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin, and the Oddi altarpiece's iconography, with the girdle given to Thomas, belongs to a tradition the order had fostered since Giotto. The church itself, built on unstable ground, suffered repeated collapses; it was secularised in the nineteenth century and is now, after a long restoration, a concert hall and the Museo dell'Accademia, its chapels empty of the altarpieces that made it famous. The Oddi chapel, on the left of the nave, can still be identified; the picture that stood there is in the Vatican, its predella beside it, and the visitor to Perugia must imagine the whole. The Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria, across the piazza, keeps the Perugino altarpieces that were returned to the city and that supply the immediate context for Raphael's; seen after them, the Oddi photographs and the Vatican original make the young painter's debt and his difference equally plain. It is, in the end, the picture with which Raphael announced to Perugia — Perugino's own city — that there was a new painter in Umbria, and the city seems to have understood: within two years he had the Ansidei and Colonna commissions and, in 1507, the Baglioni altarpiece for the chapel next door.

A small panel, about 47 by 37 cm, in the Princely Collections of Liechtenstein, Vienna: a young man in a black cap and long reddish hair, wearing a green doublet buttoned to the neck under a black gown with broad red revers, shown in half-length against a landscape — a river winding between wooded banks at the left, a turreted castle at the right, ducks on the water, a clear sky. The face is long, clean-shaven, rather severe, with a strong nose and a tight mouth; the eyes look directly at the viewer. The dark mass of the dress, with its flashes of red and green, fills the lower half of the panel; the landscape, seen over the shoulders, the upper.

The picture entered the Liechtenstein collection in the nineteenth century and has been attributed to the young Raphael since, with the usual dissents in favour of Perugino or an Umbrian contemporary. The arguments for Raphael are the quality of the landscape — a real Umbrian river valley, with a feathery treatment of the foliage and an atmospheric distance that Perugino's workshop did not manage — and the modelling of the face, which has the soft, almost boneless transitions of the early Raphael flesh and the same close attention to the hair. The arguments against are the stiffness of the pose and the hardness of the costume, which some have found unlike him. On balance the panel is usually placed among his portraits of c. 1502–04, with the Borghese Man and the Budapest Bembo, as one of the small group in which he was learning the genre.

The sitter is unidentified; the castle in the landscape, with its round towers, has been thought a clue, and various Umbrian and Marchigian fortresses have been proposed without conviction. The costume — the green doublet, the black gown faced with red — is that of a prosperous townsman or a minor courtier; the sober cap and the direct gaze suggest a man of affairs rather than a poet. He looks, in fact, rather like the kind of Perugian or Urbino patron who commissioned small Madonnas, and it is possible that he was one.

As a portrait the Liechtenstein panel is more ambitious than the Borghese one: the landscape is more developed and the sitter is more firmly placed in it, with the river running behind his head and the castle closing the view at the right. The influence of Perugino's Francesco delle Opere — a man in a black cap against a landscape — is again evident, and beyond Perugino the Flemish portraits that both painters knew. The handling is the thin, fine oil of the early period, the flesh hatched, the landscape painted with a tiny brush; the panel is in good condition, with some abrasion in the black of the gown. It hangs in the Liechtenstein Garden Palace in Vienna among the collection's Italian pictures. It has rarely been lent, and it remains one of the least studied of the early portraits; a technical examination would settle much.

A small panel, about 46 by 31 cm, in the Galleria Borghese, Rome: a young man of perhaps twenty-five, seen in half-length and almost full-face, wearing a broad black cap over long auburn hair that falls in loose waves to the shoulders, and a plain black garment buttoned to the throat; behind him, a low horizon of pale blue hills and a vast, clear sky. The face is broad, fleshy, clean-shaven, with a heavy jaw, a small mouth and small watchful eyes that look slightly to the viewer's left; the expression is composed and unrevealing. There is no parapet, no hands, no attribute — only the head and the black mass of the dress against the blue.

The picture has been in the Borghese collection since the seventeenth century, when it was listed among the Raphaels of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, and it is one of the small group of portraits that can be assigned to the years around 1502–04, before or just at the start of the Florentine period. The attribution has not gone unchallenged: the slightly stiff frontality and the broad, rather coarse face have led some to give the panel to Perugino, whose portrait of Francesco delle Opere (Uffizi, 1494) it resembles in format, and others to suggest it is a portrait of Perugino by a pupil. But the handling — the extreme fineness of the hair, painted strand by strand against the sky, the soft modelling of the flesh with its faint pink in the cheeks, the clear atmospheric treatment of the distance — is the young Raphael's, and the majority of scholars now accept it as his, among the earliest of his portraits.

The sitter is unknown. The old identification as Pietro Bembo is based on nothing; the suggestion that he is a member of the Perugian nobility, or an Urbino courtier, or a fellow painter, is equally unsupported. What can be said is that he is a man of some standing (the black dress and cap are sober but not humble) and that the painter has treated him with a directness that owes more to Flemish portraiture — to the Memling and van der Goes portraits that had reached Urbino and Florence — than to the Italian profile tradition. The full-face pose, rare in Italian portraiture before 1500, is itself a Northern trait; so is the landscape background with its low horizon and enormous sky, which makes the head loom against the light.

The portrait is instructive as a baseline. Set beside the Doni portraits of two years later, it shows how much Raphael learned from Leonardo in Florence: there is no turn of the body here, no hands, no psychological interplay between sitter and viewer — only a likeness, very exactly taken, set against the world. But the likeness is exact, and the picture has a stillness — the sitter's mind elsewhere — that is already a Raphael quality. The condition is good; the panel has been cleaned, and the sky retains its clear blue. It is shown at the Borghese in the room with the Deposition and the Lady with a Unicorn — three Raphaels that together span the distance from Umbria to Rome.

The central predella panel of the Oddi Coronation, about 27 by 50 cm, oil on panel, in the Vatican Pinacoteca. Before a rustic shed with a wattled roof, the Virgin presents the Child to the kneeling eldest king while Joseph stands behind; the other two Magi and their train fill the right half of the long panel with a crowd of attendants, horses and pages in a variety of poses and costumes — turbaned, hatted, in armour — that is the young painter's most extended exercise in the picturesque before the Marriage of the Virgin. The two horses seen from the side and from behind, and the youth in the foreground who turns to look out of the picture, are studied from the same repertory of drawings as the Marriage's bystanders. The landscape of blue hills and the clear, light-filled sky are of the quality of the main panel; the figures, at this scale, are painted with a miniaturist's precision. Like its companions the panel went to Paris in 1797 and came back in 1815. The Wikidata item is unlabelled; it is identified here from its image.

A drawing in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (NMH 296-1863): an Adoration of the Magi composition, catalogued under Raphael. The subject connects with the Oddi predella's Adoration (Q140247103) and the young painter's Umbrian narrative repertory; whether the sheet is a preparatory study, a school derivation or a later pastiche in the manner is unestablished in the published literature. Recorded here on the Stockholm group's footing (see Q110799440): a traditional attribution, transmitted by the database, awaiting its modern examination.

The first of the three predella panels of the Oddi Coronation, about 27 by 50 cm, oil on panel, in the Vatican Pinacoteca with the main altarpiece. The scene is set in a Peruginesque loggia of slender columns, with a view of landscape through the arches: at the left the angel Gabriel enters, kneeling, lily in hand; at the right the Virgin, at a prie-dieu, turns from her book with her hand on her breast; God the Father appears in a glory at the top centre and the dove descends on a ray of light. The perspective of the pavement and the coffered ceiling is exactly worked out, the vanishing point placed on the central axis between the two figures, so that the architecture becomes the instrument of the encounter — the device of the Brera Marriage of the Virgin in miniature. A cartoon for the panel, in black chalk and ink and pricked for transfer, survives in the Louvre (Q122712441), one of the earliest full-scale cartoons by Raphael to come down to us; comparison shows how closely he followed it. The panel was taken to Paris with the altarpiece in 1797 and returned in 1815.

A drawing in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (NMH 291-1863): an Annunciation, catalogued under Raphael — the angel and Virgin composition that the Oddi predella (Q116286717) and its Louvre cartoon (Q122712441) fixed in the painter's early repertory. The Stockholm sheet's relation to those works, if any, is unstudied; the entry records the traditional attribution. The three Stockholm narrative sheets (Annunciation, Adoration, Noah) read together as a set of sacred-history compositions in the Umbrian-Roman manner, which is how Tessin's era collected: by subject and name, the connoisseurship of the label — a practice this catalogue inherits, and flags.

The Wikidata item for the Colonna Altarpiece as a whole — an altarpiece painted for the convent of the Franciscan nuns of Sant'Antonio da Padova in Perugia around 1504–05 and now dispersed among six collections. This entry describes the ensemble; its parts have their own entries. The main panel, with its lunette, is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Q27033728); the predella consisted of a long central Procession to Calvary (National Gallery, London, Q26705837) flanked by the Agony in the Garden (Metropolitan Museum, Q19911609) and the Pietà or Lamentation (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, Q27034683); and two small standing saints, Francis and Anthony of Padua (Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, Q23929176 and Q23929146), come from the pilasters or the outer ends of the predella.

The altarpiece is the largest and most important of Raphael's early sacre conversazioni and the only one for which the whole apparatus of main panel, lunette and predella can still be put together. Vasari describes it in detail and records the nuns' one stipulation — that the Christ Child and the infant Baptist be shown clothed, "as befitted those simple and venerable sisters" — which the painter obeyed, dressing the two children in little shifts. The convent kept the altarpiece until 1678, when, in financial straits, the nuns sold it to Queen Christina of Sweden's circle in Rome; it passed to the Colonna family (hence the name), then to the kings of Naples, and in the nineteenth century, in pieces, through the hands of Spanish and English collectors to J. Pierpont Morgan, who gave the main panel to the Metropolitan in 1916. The Met's panel is the most expensive old master picture of its day: Morgan paid the equivalent of two million dollars for it in 1901.

As an ensemble the Colonna altarpiece is the point where Raphael's Umbrian manner reaches its full maturity just as it is about to be transformed by Florence. The main panel has the frontal, symmetrical structure of the Perugian altarpiece — the Virgin enthroned under a canopy, saints in pairs at either side, God the Father in the lunette — but the saints are more individualised, the space deeper and the architecture more precisely constructed than anything in Perugino; and the predella panels, small narratives in landscape, show the dramatic gifts of the São Paulo Resurrection refined into real story-telling. The Procession to Calvary and the Agony are among the most moving things of the early years. The whole was probably painted across the journey to Florence, the main panel in Perugia in 1504 and the predella a little later, with the first signs of Florentine influence in the Pietà.

The dismemberment is a lesson in how the altarpiece, a liturgical machine designed to be seen as a whole above an altar, became in the modern period a set of collectable "pictures," each valued and sold on its own. The Colonna altarpiece was taken apart around 1663, when the nuns sold the predella separately from the main panel; the pieces were not reunited until the exhibition of 2006 at the Metropolitan Museum, which brought the Met, London, Boston and Dulwich panels together for the first time in three and a half centuries and allowed the ensemble to be seen and photographed as Raphael and the nuns had seen it. The reconstruction showed a tall, narrow altarpiece with a semicircular lunette, a high predella and flanking pilasters — a Perugian type — of a coherence and grandeur that none of its pieces alone conveys.

A tiny tondo, about 17.5 by 18 cm, in the Hermitage, St Petersburg: the Virgin in half-length, head inclined, holding a small book from which she reads, the naked Child on her arm turning his head to look at the page, against a winter landscape — bare trees, a frozen lake, snow on the distant mountains — under a cold pale sky. It is the last of the Umbrian Madonnas and perhaps the most perfect, and it is one of the very few Raphaels for which the original frame survives: a carved and gilded frame with grotesque ornament that was almost certainly designed by the painter, and that makes the tondo's circle the centre of a square panel of decoration.

The picture takes its name from the Conestabile della Staffa family of Perugia, in whose collection it was from at least the eighteenth century; it was sold in 1871, with its frame, to Tsar Alexander II for 310,000 francs — a sum that caused a scandal in Italy, where the export was denounced — and presented by him to the Empress Maria Alexandrovna; it passed to the Hermitage in 1881. In that year it was transferred from panel to canvas, and the transfer revealed something: the underdrawing beneath the Virgin's hand showed that she had originally held not a book but a pomegranate — the fruit of the Passion and the Resurrection, with its blood-red seeds — which the painter replaced during execution. A black chalk study in the Albertina (Q18688638) shows the first version, and is known for that reason as the Madonna of the Pomegranate.

The change is characteristic. The pomegranate is a symbol; the book is an action. By giving the Virgin and Child something to do together — to read — Raphael turned an emblem into a relationship, and the tondo gained the quiet inner life that the pomegranate version would have lacked. It is the same move as in the Solly and Norton Simon Madonnas, and it shows how consistently, in these years, he was pushing the Umbrian devotional image towards narrative and psychology.

The winter landscape is almost unique in his work. Umbrian Madonnas sit in perpetual spring; this one sits in a cold, clear, northern light, with leafless trees and snow on the hills, and the effect — the warmth of the figures against the chill of the world — is extraordinarily tender. It has been suggested that the landscape reflects the winter in which the picture was painted, or that it is a meditation on the Nativity's season; whatever its cause, it is painted with a delicacy of observation — the reflections in the ice, the thin branches against the sky — that has no equal in his early work.

The tondo form, which Raphael would use again for the Alba Madonna and the Madonna della Seggiola, was a Florentine speciality, and its appearance here, in Perugia around 1504, is a sign of things to come; but the handling — the thin, enamelled oil, the hatched flesh, the ultramarine mantle over a rose dress — is still entirely Umbrian. The picture is in good condition despite the transfer; the frame, which is of the first importance as a document of Raphael's ideas about ornament (its grotesques anticipate the Vatican Loggia), was restored in the twentieth century.

The Conestabile was among the treasures evacuated from the Hermitage in 1941 and returned after the siege; it is displayed in the Italian rooms with the museum's other Raphael, the Madonna with Beardless Joseph, and it is one of the most beloved small pictures in Russia — a picture about which Russian writers from Benois onward have written as though it were a national possession.

The frame deserves its own paragraph. Carved in wood and gilded, it sets the circular picture in a square field filled with grotesque ornament — candelabra, masks, acanthus, small winged figures — in the manner of the Umbrian and Marchigian frames of the turn of the century, but with a refinement of design that has persuaded most scholars that Raphael drew the pattern himself. If so, it is his earliest surviving essay in the ornamental vocabulary that would reach its climax in the Vatican Loggia, and it shows that the interest in the antique grotesque, which the Domus Aurea would feed in Rome, was already alive in Perugia. Frame and picture were sold together in 1871, and the Hermitage, unusually, has kept them together; the effect — the tiny tondo of Virgin and Child set in its golden square — is exactly what the Conestabile family saw on their wall.

The tondo's small scale has always been part of its charm and part of its reputation. At barely eighteen centimetres it is a picture for the hand, not the wall; it was painted to be held close, and at that distance the precision of its execution — the individual branches of the winter trees, the thin gold line of the Virgin's halo, the highlights on the Child's curls — becomes astonishing. Russian writers have made it a symbol of intimacy, and the Hermitage's guides tell visitors that the sale of 1871 was the last time an Italian collection parted with a Raphael by choice; the price, and the public outcry in Perugia, were among the episodes that led Italy to tighten its export laws. The picture was cleaned in the 1980s; the transfer canvas is stable, and the paint surface, though slightly flattened, retains its enamel-like finish. It is shown in the Hermitage's Raphael Loggia wing — the gallery Catherine the Great had built as a full-scale copy of the Vatican Loggia — which makes it, in a sense, the only early Raphael displayed inside a Raphael. The Conestabile della Staffa were one of Perugia's oldest families, with a palace on the Corso Vannucci; how the tondo came to them is not recorded, but it may well have been painted in the city for a member of the family — in which case it is the last picture Raphael made for a Perugian patron before Florence, and the end of the Umbrian chapter.

The main panel of the Colonna altarpiece, with its lunette, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: the most important early Raphael in America and the only complete sacra conversazione of the Umbrian years outside Europe. The main panel is about 172 by 172 cm; the lunette, 74 by 180 cm; both are oil and gold on wood, and they have been shown together, in a modern frame approximating the original, since the Museum's 2006 reconstruction.

The Virgin sits on a high marble throne under a canopy of green cloth, the Child on her knee, the little Baptist standing at her feet and looking up at him; both children are clothed — the Christ Child in a white shift, the Baptist in his camel-skin over a tunic — in compliance with the wishes of the nuns of Sant'Antonio, as Vasari records. Four saints stand at either side: at the left Peter, with his keys, and Catherine of Alexandria with her wheel; at the right Paul, with his sword, and a female saint with a book, variously identified as Cecilia, Margaret or Dorothy (Cecilia seems most likely, from the connections of the convent). The pavement is tiled in perspective; behind the throne a parapet and a landscape of blue hills; above, in the lunette, God the Father, half-length and blessing, between two angels, against a sky with cherubim.

The composition is the Umbrian altarpiece in its most ceremonial form — frontal, symmetrical, hieratic, the figures ranged in a shallow space before a low horizon — and in that respect it is the most conservative of Raphael's large works. But the conservatism is the nuns', not the painter's, and within it he does things that no Umbrian contemporary could. The throne is a real piece of Renaissance architecture, its canopy and dais drawn in correct perspective; the four saints are four distinct presences — Peter heavy and thoughtful, Paul alert with his sword, Catherine turning gracefully to look at the Child, the saint at the right absorbed in her book — whose glances and postures make a conversation around the central group; and the two children, constrained by their shifts, are nevertheless related with the same tenderness as the naked infants of the Florentine Madonnas. The Baptist, in particular, standing with his little cross and looking up, is a figure of great sweetness.

The lunette, with God the Father between angels, is in the grand, rather archaic type that the Oddi altarpiece and the Baronci fragments also show; the cherubim heads floating in the sky are among the finest of the early period, and the angels, with their turned heads and long hands, are close relations of the Oddi musicians.

Technically the altarpiece is the summit of the early method. The panel is a heavy poplar plank; the ground white; the underdrawing, where it has been seen, of the careful, transferred kind; the paint thin and smooth, with the gold of the halos and the Virgin's hem applied as real gold leaf and tooled. The flesh is built in fine hatched strokes; the draperies — Peter's gold-brown mantle, Paul's green, Catherine's crimson — are painted in layers of local colour with glazes in the shadows. The picture is in remarkably good state, its surface less flattened than the transferred Oddi altarpiece; a cleaning in the 1970s removed an old discoloured varnish.

The history of the panel is the history of the altarpiece's dispersal. Sold by the nuns in 1678 (the predella had already gone in 1663), it passed to the Colonna family in Rome, whose name it bears; from them, in 1802, to Ferdinand IV of Naples; then, after 1860, through the hands of Spanish royalty — Francis II of the Two Sicilies took it into exile — and a Paris dealer to the London dealer Sedelmeyer and, in 1901, to J. Pierpont Morgan, who paid a price that made headlines. Morgan lent it to the National Gallery in London and then brought it to New York, where it hung in his library until he gave it to the Metropolitan in 1916. For a century it was the Met's great Raphael, and it still is — the Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints being the only altarpiece by the painter in the United States.

The Met's 2006 exhibition Raphael at the Metropolitan: The Colonna Altarpiece reunited the main panel and lunette with the three predella panels from London and Boston and the Dulwich saints, and made the case, on the basis of the predella's style, that the altarpiece was painted over two or three years, the predella being the last part finished — possibly after Raphael had already seen Florence. The Pietà in Boston, with its monumental grouping, and the Procession in London, with its frieze of figures, support the argument. What the reunion made plain above all was the quality of the ensemble: a work that had been thought of, through the nineteenth century, as a slightly stiff transitional piece turned out to be a grand and coherent whole, a last statement of the Umbrian altarpiece by the painter who would, within three years, make the type obsolete.

One further point about the main panel concerns its architecture. The canopy above the throne is supported on slender columns and hung with green cloth, and the throne itself rises on steps whose perspective converges, with the tiled pavement, on a vanishing point at the level of the Virgin's lap — so that the whole space is constructed around her, as the temple of the Brera Marriage is constructed around the priest. This is the Urbino education at work: Raphael thought of an altarpiece as a building with people in it, and the nuns' conservative programme did not stop him from making that building precise. The landscape glimpsed beyond the parapet, with its soft hills and pale sky, is the same country as the Oddi altarpiece's; the light falls from the upper left with a consistency that the Umbrian workshops rarely troubled to observe. These are small things; they are the things by which, in 1504, one recognises the painter who would design the Stanze.

A black chalk drawing in the Albertina, Vienna, showing the Virgin in half-length holding the Child, who reaches towards a pomegranate in her hand, within a circle: the first idea for the Hermitage Conestabile Madonna (Q919294), drawn at the same small scale. When the tondo was transferred to canvas in 1881 its underdrawing revealed that the Virgin had originally held the pomegranate, as in this sheet, and that the book was a change made during painting; the drawing is thus a rare case in which the first version of a Raphael composition survives both on paper and beneath the paint. The pomegranate — whose seeds signified the Passion and whose cracked rind the Resurrection — was a common Umbrian attribute; its replacement by the book changed the picture from an emblem into an action. The sheet is among the earliest of Raphael's chalk drawings, soft and summary, and belongs to the group of Madonna studies that show the painter rotating and reconsidering the same pair of figures in search of the pose that would bind them most closely.

A panel of about 52 by 37 cm in the Uffizi, Florence: a woman of about thirty, seen in half-length and nearly full-face, in a dark dress with a square neckline and sleeves patterned in gold, her dark hair parted in the centre and bound at the back, her forehead crossed by a thin cord from which hangs, at the centre, a jewel in the form of a scorpion; behind her, a landscape of hills and water under a clear sky. The face is pale, oval, with a long nose and a small mouth; the expression is reserved, almost melancholy. The picture came to Florence in 1631 with the inheritance of Vittoria della Rovere, the last of the Urbino line, who married Ferdinando II de' Medici and brought with her the contents of the ducal palace, including Titian's Venus of Urbino and the Raphael portraits of the Urbino court.

The sitter is Elisabetta Gonzaga (1471–1526), sister of Francesco Gonzaga of Mantua, wife from 1489 of Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, and the presiding spirit of the court that Castiglione immortalised in The Book of the Courtier, where the evening conversations take place in her apartments and under her rule. Her marriage to the impotent Guidobaldo was childless; her life was spent in the exercise of the courtly virtues — patience, wit, cultivation, the government of conversation — and she was admired throughout Italy as the model of the noble lady. Bembo wrote verses to her; Castiglione adored her; and Raphael, the son of her husband's court painter, portrayed her.

The attribution is not unanimous. The picture has been given to Raphael since the eighteenth century, and most scholars accept it as his, around 1504–05, at the end of the Umbrian years; but the rather stiff frontality and the dry, linear treatment of the costume have led some to propose an Urbino painter — Timoteo Viti, or a follower — and the Uffizi catalogue has at times been cautious. The landscape, which is of the quality of the Conestabile and the Budapest portrait, and the modelling of the face, soft and luminous under its austere expression, are the strongest arguments for Raphael; the costume, with its gold pattern laid on flat, is the weakest.

The scorpion on the forehead is the picture's most remarked detail. The jewel — a ferronnière, a cord with a pendant worn across the brow, a fashion of the 1490s — is in the form of a scorpion, and it has been read as an astrological emblem (the sign of Scorpio, or a talisman against its influence), as an impresa of the duchess (the scorpion as an emblem of prudence or of self-sacrifice, since the scorpion was believed to sting itself to death when surrounded by fire), or simply as a fashionable ornament. No explanation is certain. What is certain is its effect: the small dark creature at the centre of the pale forehead gives the portrait a strangeness, a faint note of menace, that the calm face and the placid landscape do not otherwise carry, and that has made the picture memorable out of proportion to its size.

As a portrait it is the most formal of the early group — the sitter frontal, the hands omitted, the dress treated as a flat pattern — and it shows the limits of what Raphael had learned before Florence. The comparison with La Muta of three years later, also from Urbino and also a portrait of a court lady, is revealing: there, the body turns, the hands appear and speak, the face is modelled in a Leonardesque half-light; here, everything is stated, nothing implied. But the face itself — its pallor, its reserve, its intelligence — is a real likeness of a real woman, and it is the only one we have of the duchess of the Cortegiano.

The panel is in fair condition; the dark dress has suffered some abrasion and the gold pattern has been strengthened. It hangs in the Uffizi's Raphael rooms beside the portrait of her husband Guidobaldo (Q3013751) and the Young Man with an Apple (Q2713823), which together form the Urbino court group that Vittoria della Rovere brought to Florence.

The provenance deserves a note. The 1631 inheritance was one of the decisive events in the history of the Florentine collections: Vittoria della Rovere, granddaughter of the last Duke of Urbino, brought to the Medici the ducal guardaroba — Titian's Venus of Urbino and his portraits of Francesco Maria and Eleonora, Piero della Francesca's diptych of Federico and Battista, Raphael's Urbino portraits and his Madonna del Granduca-type panels — and with them the memory of the court Castiglione had described. The Uffizi and Pitti Raphael rooms are, in large part, the Urbino rooms, and the Elisabetta Gonzaga is their presiding lady. The duchess herself is buried in Urbino; her portrait, in Florence, is the only reliable image of the woman to whom Castiglione dedicated the ideal of civil conversation.

A copy of the portrait, of the sixteenth century, exists in a private collection, and the composition was engraved in the nineteenth century as a pendant to the Guidobaldo; the pair were much reproduced in the literature on the Courtier, and it is through them that the faces of the book's hosts are known. The portrait was cleaned in the 1980s for the Uffizi's Raphael rooms; the cleaning confirmed the quality of the face and landscape and the relative weakness of the costume, and left the attribution question where it was. What the visitor sees is a grave, intelligent woman in her thirties, dressed with sober magnificence, set against the soft hills of her adopted duchy — a portrait that tells us less about the painter's gifts than about the sitter's character, which is perhaps as she would have wished. Castiglione's description of her — 'a lady of such worth that, though she had lived with that fragile body in the prison of such long sickness, never did the least complaint escape her' — is the best caption it could have. The panel measures barely half a metre; the presence is larger.

A small panel, about 42 by 29 cm, in the Baltimore Museum of Art, from the collection of the Baltimore merchant Jacob Epstein: the bust of a woman in early middle age, seen nearly full-face, in a black dress with a square neckline, her head covered by a black veil that frames a pale, round, rather heavy face with dark eyes, a firm mouth and a faint colour in the cheeks; the background is a plain dark grey-brown. There is no landscape, no jewel, no hands — only the head and the black mass of the dress, the widow's weeds of a woman who had lost her husband young.

The sitter is identified by an old inscription and by tradition as Emilia Pia (c. 1470–1528), daughter of the lord of Carpi, widow of Antonio da Montefeltro, a natural brother of Duke Guidobaldo, and the closest companion of the Duchess Elisabetta Gonzaga at the court of Urbino. In Castiglione's Book of the Courtier she is the Duchess's lieutenant in the evening conversations — quick, sceptical, teasing, the one who keeps the men in order and who, at the end, "took the Duchess by the hand" as dawn broke. She never remarried; she died, it was said, without the sacraments, talking of the Courtier — a humanist's death that Castiglione's admirers found fitting and the devout found shocking.

The portrait has been attributed to Raphael since it came to notice, on the strength of its connection with the Urbino court group (the Elisabetta Gonzaga, the Guidobaldo, the Young Man with an Apple) and of its date, around 1504–05; the attribution has been doubted by those who find the handling dry and the pose too rigid, and alternative names — Timoteo Viti, an Urbino hand — have been proposed. The Baltimore Museum gives it to Raphael with a query. The face itself is modelled with the soft, luminous transitions of the early Raphael; the dress and veil are flat and summary; the effect is of a likeness taken quickly and honestly, without flattery — the widow as she was.

What the picture lacks in ambition it makes up in documentary value: it is the only known portrait of one of the most vivid characters in Renaissance literature, and it shows a face that matches the character — intelligent, composed, a little formidable. Set beside the Elisabetta, with its scorpion and its landscape, the Emilia Pia is the plainer and the more immediate; the two together give the faces of the two women who governed the conversations of the Courtier. The panel was cleaned in the twentieth century; the background has been retouched, and the black of the dress has lost some of its modelling. The Baltimore Museum shows the panel among its small group of Italian Renaissance pictures, where its austerity — no landscape, no ornament — makes it stand out; it is the plainest Raphael in America, and one of the most human. Its scale — a head and shoulders, not much larger than life on the panel — gives it an immediacy the grander portraits lack.