A panel, about 51 by 37 cm, in the Uffizi: a man of about fifty, seen in half-length and nearly full-face, in a black cap and a black gown over a white shirt, with short grey-brown hair and a heavy, clean-shaven face, against a plain dark ground. The face is fleshy, the eyes small and shrewd, the mouth set; the expression is that of a practical man who has been asked to sit still. The panel came to Florence with the Urbino inheritance of Vittoria della Rovere in 1631, which is a strong argument that it was painted at Urbino or for the Urbino court.

The sitter's identification as Pietro Perugino rests on the resemblance to Perugino's documented self-portraits — in the Collegio del Cambio at Perugia (1500) and in the Sistine Chapel — and is generally accepted. The attribution has had a more adventurous history: the panel was catalogued in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a self-portrait by Perugino, then given by some to Lorenzo Lotto and even to Holbein (the hardness of the modelling suggested a Northern hand), before the attribution to the young Raphael, proposed in the early twentieth century, gained ground. It is now the usual view, though not unanimous: the picture is placed around 1504, at the end of Raphael's Umbrian years, when he was still in contact with his old master and when a portrait of Perugino for the Urbino court — where Perugino had worked and where Giovanni Santi had praised him — would have had a point.

The style is consistent with that date and that hand. The face is modelled with close, unsparing attention — the heavy jowls, the lines from nose to mouth, the pouches under the eyes — in the soft, luminous manner of the early Raphael flesh, with the transitions almost imperceptible; the black of the cap and gown is painted with a sense of the material that the Borghese Man does not have; the plain dark ground, unusual in Raphael's portraits (he preferred landscapes or interiors), isolates the head and gives the picture a Flemish directness. It is a portrait of a painter by a painter, and it has the quality of an appraisal.

If the identification and attribution are right, the picture is a document of a relationship: the pupil who had surpassed his master, painting the master's face with a truthfulness that stops just short of unkindness. Perugino in 1504 was at the height of his fame and the beginning of his decline; Michelangelo would soon call him clumsy, and Vasari would record the repetitions that made his late work a byword. Raphael's portrait, if it is his, shows none of that — only a man of fifty with a hard face and a sober dress, looking out with the expression of someone who knows what things cost. The panel is in fair condition; it hangs in the Uffizi's Raphael rooms with the other Urbino portraits. A drawing in the Uffizi, in metalpoint, of a man in a cap has been connected with it, though the link is loose; and the portrait was much copied in Perugia, where Perugino's face was a local icon.

A small panel, about 54 by 39 cm, in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, from the Esterházy collection: a young man in a red cap and a red gown over a dark doublet, with long brown hair falling to his shoulders, seen in half-length and three-quarter view against a wide landscape of hills, a river and a pale sky, holding in his right hand a folded paper or letter. The face is smooth, clean-shaven, slightly plump, with a long nose and a small composed mouth; the gaze is direct and a little dreamy. The red of the costume, in two tones, is the dominant note; the landscape behind is of the soft, feathery Umbrian kind, with a band of water and blue hills.

The portrait has been identified since the nineteenth century as Pietro Bembo, the Venetian humanist and future cardinal who was in Urbino from 1506 to 1512 and who became Raphael's friend and the author of his epitaph; the identification rests on the age of the sitter (Bembo was born in 1470, so would have been in his thirties — rather older than this young man looks), on the letter in his hand (the poet's attribute) and on the tradition that Raphael painted him. It is not secure, and the Budapest catalogue gives the picture simply as a Portrait of a Young Man. The attribution to Raphael, on the other hand, is generally accepted: the picture belongs with the Borghese and Liechtenstein portraits and the Uffizi Perugino as one of the small group of Umbrian-period portraits, and its date — c. 1504, on the eve of Florence, or a year or two later — is suggested by the greater ease of the pose and the turn of the body, which is already a little Leonardesque.

The landscape is the picture's chief beauty: a panorama of hills and water under a sky graded from warm to cool, painted with the atmospheric delicacy of the Conestabile Madonna and the Louvre Saint George, and opening behind the sitter's head so that he is set in the world rather than before a screen. The letter in the hand is a motif from Flemish and Venetian portraiture — Antonello, Bellini — and its presence here, in an Umbrian portrait of 1504, shows how quickly the young painter was absorbing the vocabulary of the genre. The red gown is painted in vermilion with lake glazes in the shadows, the cap in a deeper red; the flesh is the pale, hatched flesh of the period.

The panel came to Budapest with the collection of the Esterházy princes, bought by the Hungarian state in 1870; it had been in the family's Vienna gallery since the early nineteenth century and was catalogued there as Raphael's portrait of Bembo. Its companions in Budapest are the Esterházy Madonna (Q2283808), the unfinished little Holy Family of c. 1508, and a portrait drawing; together they make Budapest, unexpectedly, one of the places where the transition from Umbria to Rome can be studied. The picture is in good condition and was restored in the 1980s.

Whether or not he is Bembo, the young man with the letter is the most sympathetic of the early portraits — the one in which the sitter seems most alive and the painter most at ease. The slight turn of the head, the soft gaze, the relaxed hand with its paper, the open landscape: these are the elements that, two years later, Raphael would combine with Leonardo's example to produce the Doni portraits, and it is pleasant to think that the first step was taken for a poet.

A panel, about 48 by 36 cm, in the Galleria Palatina of the Palazzo Pitti, Florence: a boy of thirteen or fourteen in a red cap and a red tunic with a collar of dark fur, his long brown hair falling to his shoulders, seen in half-length and three-quarter view against a landscape of hills and trees under a clear sky; he holds in his right hand, raised to the level of his chest, a small golden apple. The face is smooth and rounded, with a straight nose and a full mouth; the gaze is direct and slightly haughty; the whole figure has the self-possession of a young prince. The panel came to Florence in 1631 with Vittoria della Rovere's inheritance from Urbino, and it has always been associated with the ducal family.

The sitter is usually identified as Francesco Maria della Rovere (1490–1538), nephew of Pope Julius II and of Duke Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, who adopted him as heir to Urbino in 1504 — the year the portrait is generally dated — and who succeeded to the duchy in 1508. At fourteen he was already a figure of some importance, the future of a state and the object of papal policy, and a portrait by the court's most promising painter would have been a natural commission. The apple has been read in various ways: as the golden apple of Paris, a humanist compliment to the boy's judgement or beauty; as the orb of sovereignty, in allusion to his adoption; as a reference to the Hesperides and thus to virtue rewarded (the theme of the Three Graces); or simply as an elegant prop for the hand. None of these is proved; the golden apple as a token of the Hesperides, and thus of the prince's destiny, seems the most likely in a court where such conceits were currency. An older identification of the sitter as Guidobaldo himself as a boy is untenable on grounds of age.

The attribution to Raphael is generally accepted, though the picture has had its doubters (Timoteo Viti's name has been raised, as for the other Urbino portraits). The arguments for Raphael are the landscape — of the quality of the Conestabile, with its soft hills and atmospheric sky — and the modelling of the face, which has the pearly, softly shadowed flesh of the early period; the costume, with its fur collar painted in small separate strokes, shows the painter's pleasure in texture. The date of c. 1504–05 places the picture at the hinge between Umbria and Florence, and there is in the slight turn of the body and the raised hand a first hint of the Leonardesque portrait formula that the Doni pictures would state fully a year or two later.

The Young Man with an Apple is the most attractive of the Urbino court portraits and the one that most clearly shows the painter's gift for the genre: the boy is a real boy — the softness of the cheek, the slightly pouting mouth, the unformed jaw — and also a prince, and the picture holds both without strain. It is also a document of the court in which Raphael grew up, and of the family whose head, Julius II, would four years later bring him to Rome; Francesco Maria himself would later be the patron of Titian, and the portrait of him as a boy by Raphael and as a general by Titian make a pair that spans the century.

The panel is in good condition; the reds have held their intensity and the landscape its clarity. It hangs in the Pitti's Sala di Saturno, the Raphael room, with the Doni portraits, La Gravida, La Velata and the Madonna della Seggiola — the greatest concentration of Raphael portraits anywhere.

The boy's later life gives the portrait a certain pathos. Francesco Maria della Rovere became Duke of Urbino in 1508, Captain-General of the Church under his uncle Julius II, and the murderer — in the street, at Ravenna, in 1511 — of Cardinal Alidosi, a crime the Pope forgave; he was driven from Urbino by Leo X in 1516, restored in 1521, and spent his later career as a condottiere in Venetian service, dying in 1538, probably of poison. Titian painted him in armour, grim and grizzled; Raphael painted him at fourteen with an apple. Between the two portraits lies the whole history of the Italian wars, and the boy's untroubled, faintly arrogant face is a reminder that the court of the Cortegiano was also a court of soldiers.

The landscape, which is unusually extensive for a portrait of this size, shows a river valley with wooded slopes and a distant range — an idealised Marchigian country, painted with the softness of the Conestabile tondo and lit by a low, even light. The boy's head is set against the sky, his red cap the highest point of the composition; the fur collar, painted in short separate strokes of grey and brown, is a passage of textural observation that looks forward to the velvet and damask of the Leo X. The hand holding the apple is drawn with the precision that Raphael's hands always have, the fingers closing lightly on the fruit as though it were an egg; and the apple itself, a small gold sphere catching a highlight, is the kind of detail that makes the difference between a good portrait and a memorable one. The picture has been cleaned and is in good condition; it is among the most frequently lent of the Pitti's Raphaels and was in the great exhibitions of 1984 and 2020, where, hung beside the Budapest Bembo, it showed how close in conception the two portraits of young men with attributes — a letter, an apple — are, and how far the Urbino court's taste for the emblem shaped the painter's early portraiture. The apple, the letter, the scorpion: three small objects, three portraits, one court — and in each the object is the key that the sitter holds out to us, and withholds. It is the first appearance of a device Raphael would use all his life: the hand that holds something, and by holding it, tells us who the sitter is.

The pendant of the Dulwich Saint Francis: a small standing figure of Anthony of Padua, the Franciscan preacher and the dedicatee of the Perugian convent for which the altarpiece was painted, in his habit, holding a book and a lily, against a dark ground. The panel is about 25 by 17 cm (the Wikidata dimensions are wrong). Anthony was the nuns' patron; his presence on the altarpiece's frame, with Francis, identified the convent and its order. The little figure is painted with the same care as the main panel — the lily, in particular, is drawn with botanical attention — and the head, slightly inclined, has the Umbrian sweetness of the Oddi angels. The two saints were probably set in the pilasters that framed the predella, one on each side, in the manner of Perugian altarpieces. They are in Dulwich's Bourgeois collection and are the smallest Raphaels in any British public gallery.

A small standing figure of Saint Francis, in his grey habit with the stigmata visible on hands and side, holding a cross and a book, set against a dark ground: one of the two small saints in the Dulwich Picture Gallery that belonged to the Colonna altarpiece, where they occupied the pilasters or the ends of the predella. The dimensions given in Wikidata (256 by 168) are in error; the panel is about 25 by 17 cm. Francis, the founder of the order to which the nuns of Sant'Antonio belonged, stands with the quiet inward pose of Perugino's saints, but the modelling of the head and hands and the fall of the habit are of the quality of the main panel. The two Dulwich saints came to England with the predella in the nineteenth century and entered the Gallery with the Bourgeois bequest; they were reunited with the altarpiece in New York in 2006.

A small panel, about 29 by 25 cm, in the Louvre, the pendant of the Little Saint Michael (Q2415259): Saint George on a rearing white horse drives his lance into the dragon, which writhes beneath the horse's hooves; the broken shaft of an earlier lance lies on the ground; the princess, small in the middle distance, flees to the right; a landscape of hills and trees closes the scene under a blue sky. The saint, in full armour with a red mantle flying, is a slender, graceful figure in the Umbrian manner; the horse, with its arched neck and flying mane, is Raphael's first and one of his finest; the dragon is a bat-winged, scaly beast with a long neck, derived from the Northern prints that also supplied the monsters of the Saint Michael.

The two Louvre panels were almost certainly made as a pair — the Saint Michael's reverse shows that it was part of a draughtsboard, and the two pictures match in size and in the date of their execution — and the connection with the court of Urbino, where Guidobaldo da Montefeltro was a knight of both the English Garter (Saint George's order) and, through his French links, the order of Saint-Michel, is generally accepted, though the exact occasion is uncertain. They were in the collection of Cardinal Mazarin in the seventeenth century and passed to Louis XIV in 1661.

The Saint George is the first of Raphael's equestrian subjects and it shows how completely, by 1504, he had mastered the problem of the rearing horse. The horse is seen in profile, its forelegs raised, its body twisted slightly so that the near hind leg takes the weight; the rider sits straight, his lance held across the horse's neck and driven down into the dragon's mouth; the whole group is compact, energetic and perfectly legible, and it owes something to the equestrian reliefs and bronzes — Donatello's Gattamelata, Verrocchio's Colleoni — that the painter knew from drawings, and something to Pollaiuolo's and Leonardo's studies of horses. The broken lance in the foreground, a detail common in the iconography (the saint had already tried once), adds a note of narrative; the princess, tiny and fleeing with her hands raised, is a Peruginesque afterthought.

The landscape is among the best of the early panels: a rolling country of hills and trees, with a winding path and a distant blue range, painted with a delicacy that gives the little scene an air of fairy-tale. The colour is clear and bright — the white horse against the green and brown of the ground, the red of the mantle, the blue of the sky — and the handling is of the enamelled fineness of the period; the panel is in good condition. A drawing for the composition, in pen, is in the Uffizi, and a study for the horse in the Ashmolean.

The picture's relation to the Washington Saint George (Q2622161), painted a year or two later for Guidobaldo with the Garter visibly on the saint's leg, is close: the Washington version is larger, more assured, and turns the horse the other way; the Louvre version is the first attempt, and it has the freshness of a first attempt. Together the two little Saint Georges, with the Saint Michael and the Dulwich saints, are the nearest thing in Raphael's work to a series of small cabinet pictures for a prince, and they show a side of him — the miniaturist, the painter of knights and monsters — that the Madonnas and the altarpieces tend to hide.

The connection with the Order of the Garter deserves spelling out. Henry VII of England conferred the Garter on Guidobaldo da Montefeltro in 1504, and the Duke sent Castiglione to London in 1506 to receive the insignia and to present the King with a gift — which, it has long been argued, was the Washington Saint George, in which the saint wears the Garter on his leg with its motto HONI. The Louvre panel, which shows no Garter, would then be an earlier treatment of the subject, perhaps a first essay made when the honour was announced, or simply a cabinet piece for the ducal household. The argument is circumstantial but attractive, and it places the two little pictures at the centre of the Urbino court's diplomacy in the years when Raphael, a native son, was its most promising artist.

The horse is the thing. Umbrian painting had no tradition of the equestrian subject, and Perugino's few horses are wooden; Raphael's, here, is a creature of energy — the neck arched, the nostrils flared, the mane and tail flying, the forelegs drawn up with the tension of a spring. The drawings show where it came from: a pen study in the Ashmolean of a rearing horse, clearly after an antique or Florentine model, and the Uffizi composition sketch in which the horse is tried in two positions. Leonardo's horses for the Sforza monument and the Adoration were known through drawings; Pollaiuolo's Hercules prints showed the animal in action; and the ancient reliefs of the Marche and Rome supplied the type. From these the young painter made a horse that would serve him for the Heliodorus and the Attila and that his pupils would repeat for a century. The Louvre's two small panels hang together in the Grande Galerie, near the Baronci angel and the Belle Jardinière, and the visitor who stands before them is looking at the most complete surviving evidence of what Raphael did for the Urbino court in the years when he belonged to it. The little panel has also had a curious afterlife in reproduction: its compact, legible design made it a favourite of nineteenth-century engravers and of the Arundel Society's chromolithographs, and it was through such prints, rather than through the Washington version, that the Victorian public knew Raphael's Saint George. It was also the model — through the Washington version and the prints — for the Saint Georges of the English Pre-Raphaelites, who found in its fairy-tale clarity the very quality they accused the mature Raphael of having lost.

A small panel, about 31 by 27 cm, in the Louvre, known as the Petit Saint Michel to distinguish it from the great altarpiece of 1518 for Francis I (Q594470). The archangel, in armour with a red mantle flying behind him, stands with one foot on the prostrate devil — a bat-winged, horned monster — and raises his sword to strike; around them, in a dark landscape lit by a burning city, a population of monsters crawl and fly, and to the left and right, in the middle distance, two groups of human figures suffer punishments: at the left, figures in heavy cloaks walk in a file — the hypocrites of Dante's Inferno, weighed down by their leaden copes; at the right, naked figures are bitten by serpents — Dante's thieves. Above, a red sky with the smoke of the burning city.

The panel has a peculiarity that links it to its pendant, the Louvre Saint George (Q2529918): its reverse was originally part of a draughtsboard, the squares still visible, and the two little panels are thought to have been made to be mounted together in a small portable object — a diptych or a box — for a patron of the court of Urbino. The subject supports the connection: Michael was the patron saint of the French royal order of Saint-Michel, and George of the English Garter, and Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, had links with both; one suggestion is that the panels were made for him around 1504, when he received the Garter from Henry VII (an event commemorated more directly in the Washington Saint George of 1506).

The Little Saint Michael is the strangest picture of Raphael's early years. The monsters — crouching, winged, fish-headed, with tails and claws — come from the Northern prints that circulated in Italy, from Schongauer and the young Dürer and, perhaps, from Bosch, whose work reached Venice and Urbino through Flemish contacts; the burning city is a Netherlandish motif; and the Dantean punishments, which are unique in Raphael, show that the painter (or his adviser) was reading the Inferno — the hypocrites in their gilded leaden cloaks are Canto XXIII, the thieves and serpents Cantos XXIV–XXV. Nothing else in his work is so full of the grotesque, and the combination of a Peruginesque archangel — slender, graceful, his head inclined — with a Northern nightmare is disconcerting and, in its way, delightful: the picture has the quality of an illuminated margin.

Technically the panel is of the highest finish: the armour is painted with small touches of white and grey on a dark ground, the monsters with a precision of outline that shows the young Raphael's admiration for the Northern engravers, the flames of the city in thin glazes of red and orange. The paint surface is in good condition. The Louvre acquired the panel, with its pendant, from the collection of Cardinal Mazarin, who had bought them in the seventeenth century; they entered the collection of Louis XIV in 1661 and have been in France ever since.

The picture matters, beyond its curiosity, for what it shows of the young Raphael's range and of his sources. The received image of the early painter is of a sweet Umbrian; the Saint Michael shows that at twenty he was also looking hard at Northern prints, reading Dante, and capable of a small apocalypse. The motif of the archangel standing on the devil with raised sword would return, transformed, in the great Louvre altarpiece of 1518, where the Northern monsters are gone and Michael descends in a single Michelangelesque movement; the comparison between the two is one of the most complete measures of the distance he travelled.

The Dantean reading of the two groups of sufferers, first proposed in the nineteenth century, has been generally accepted, and it is of more than antiquarian interest. It tells us that the patron — or the painter — of a small panel at Urbino around 1504 expected the Inferno to be recognised in a picture of Saint Michael, and it places Raphael, at twenty, in the literary culture of the Montefeltro court, where Dante was read and where the young Castiglione and Bembo were about to arrive. The hypocrites, in their cloaks "gilded outside and all of lead within," walk in a slow file at the left; the thieves, at the right, are entwined with serpents in the manner of Canto XXIV. Both punishments are of the sin of falseness — the hypocrite's and the thief's — and Michael, the weigher of souls and the conqueror of the great deceiver, is their judge. The little picture thus has a moral programme under its fantasy.

The Northern sources are equally specific. Schongauer's engraving of the Temptation of Saint Anthony, with its crowd of flying, clawed demons, was known throughout Italy (Vasari says the boy Michelangelo copied it); Dürer's Apocalypse woodcuts of 1498, with their Saint Michael fighting the Dragon, had reached Italian workshops within a year or two; and Bosch's paintings, of which several were in Venice by the early sixteenth century, may have been known at Urbino through the Flemish connections of the Montefeltro. Raphael's monsters are closest to Schongauer's; the burning city with its red sky is a motif from the Netherlandish painters; the tiny crawling creatures in the foreground have the quality of a Flemish drôlerie. The picture is thus a meeting-point of Umbria and the North, of Perugino's grace and the Northern grotesque — and the meeting is entirely characteristic of a painter whose genius lay in assimilation. A further point: the panel is among the very few works of Raphael in which a burning city appears, and the red glare it casts on the smoke and on the archangel's armour is the earliest instance of his interest in reflected light — an interest that would be fully developed only in the Roman nocturnes. The picture has been in France since 1661 and has never travelled; it hangs in the Louvre's Grande Galerie beside its pendant, and the two together, at a few centimetres each, are easy to miss among the great altarpieces around them — which is a pity, for they are the most personal things of the Umbrian years.

The left-hand predella panel of the Colonna altarpiece, about 24 by 29 cm, oil on wood, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Funds from various donors, 1932). Christ kneels on a rocky rise at the centre, his hands raised in prayer towards a small angel who appears at the upper left bearing the chalice; around him, in a ring, the three apostles sleep in three different attitudes — Peter slumped forward with his head on his arm, James stretched out with his head on his hand, John curled against a rock — while in the distance, beyond a wattle fence, the landscape recedes to blue hills under a dawn sky. The picture is among the smallest and most perfect of Raphael's narrative panels.

The subject was a predella standard, and Perugino had painted a famous version (now in the Uffizi) for San Giusto alle Mura in Florence in the 1490s, with the same ring of sleeping apostles around a praying Christ; Raphael's is plainly built on it. But where Perugino's apostles are three variations on a formula, Raphael's are three studies of sleep — the weight of the head, the slackness of the hand, the way a body settles into the ground — and the relation between them and the praying Christ, isolated and upright against their collapse, is the whole drama of the scene. The angel with the chalice, very small, is a Peruginesque detail; the landscape is Raphael's own, with the feathery trees and atmospheric distance of the Mond Crucifixion and the Oddi predella.

The panel's history follows the predella's: sold by the nuns of Sant'Antonio in 1663, it passed through Roman and English collections (it was in the Ashburton collection in the nineteenth century) before the Metropolitan acquired it in 1932, sixteen years after the main panel. A study for the sleeping apostles, in pen, is in the Morgan Library; a second drawing, in Oxford, shows the composition being worked out. The panel was cleaned for the 2006 exhibition and is in very good condition, the blues of the sky somewhat darkened.

The Agony is worth comparing with the São Paulo Resurrection of three years earlier, which also sets a central figure against a ring of recumbent or reacting men: the later panel is calmer, more concentrated, less anxious to demonstrate variety, and the figures are better related to the ground they lie on. It is the difference between a gifted beginner and a young master. The motif of the three sleepers would stay with him: the sleeping guards of the Liberation of Saint Peter in the Stanza d'Eliodoro, a decade later, are the same three attitudes — the slumped, the stretched, the curled — transposed into armour and moonlight, and the memory of this tiny panel can be felt in that great nocturne. The Met displays the Agony beside the main panel and lunette, so that the visitor can see at once how the predella's intimate narrative complemented the altarpiece's ceremonial stillness — the two registers of Raphael's early art, the hieratic and the human, placed one above the other as the nuns saw them.

The picture

A tiny panel, 17.1 by 17.3 cm, oil on poplar, in the National Gallery, London, where it arrived in 1847 with its pricked cartoon (which the Gallery also owns). A young knight in armour lies asleep on his shield at the foot of a slender laurel tree, in a landscape of hills, a river and a walled town; at the left stands a woman in a plain dark dress, holding out to him a sword and a book; at the right stands a woman in a light, flowered gown, holding out a sprig of flowers. The tree divides the panel exactly in two, the sleeping figure at its foot; the two women lean inward towards him from either side; beyond, the landscape opens in a pale morning light. It is the pendant of the Three Graces at Chantilly (Q2360329), of identical size and provenance, and the two were almost certainly painted as a pair around 1504–05.

The subject

The picture has been called, at various times, The Dream of a Knight, The Vision of a Knight, An Allegory, Hercules at the Crossroads and The Dream of Scipio, and the variety of titles records the history of its interpretation. The basic scheme is clear: a young man asleep between two women who offer him different things — arms and learning on one side, pleasure on the other — is a choice between two ways of life, the classical theme of Hercules at the crossroads, in which the hero must choose between Virtue and Vice (or Pleasure), which Renaissance humanists took from Xenophon's account of the sophist Prodicus and made one of the standard allegories of the education of a prince. But Raphael's young man is not Hercules — he is a knight in armour, asleep — and the two women are not opposed as virtue and vice: the one with the flowers is not a temptress but a graceful, modest figure, and the picture has none of the moral drama of the crossroads.

Panofsky, in 1930, proposed a more precise reading. The sleeping knight is Scipio Africanus, and the scene is the Dream of Scipio as told not in Cicero's famous Somnium but in the Latin epic Punica of Silius Italicus, in which the young Scipio, at the start of his career, falls asleep and is visited by two goddesses, Virtus and Voluptas, who offer him their ways of life; he chooses Virtus, and the poem makes clear that his choice is not a rejection of pleasure but a preference for the arms and letters that lead to glory. Silius Italicus had been rediscovered in 1417 and was a fashionable text among humanists; and the reading makes sense of the picture's gentleness — the two women are not enemies but alternatives — and of its pendant, where the Graces, with their golden apples, would be the reward of the choice. It also suggests a patron: the Borghese family of Siena and Rome, in whose collection both panels were recorded, had a son named Scipione, born in 1493, and a pair of small panels on the dream of his namesake, for a boy of eleven or twelve, would have been a graceful present. The argument is not proof, but it has been generally accepted as the most probable account.

The figures

Whatever the story, the picture is a demonstration of composition in miniature. The laurel tree, slender and exactly vertical, divides the square panel into two halves; the knight lies along the base, his shield under his head, his body forming the horizontal that the tree bisects; the two women, in their contrasted dresses, stand in mirrored poses on either side, each leaning slightly inward, so that the whole group forms a shallow triangle with the tree as its axis. The symmetry is Perugino's, but it is animated by small asymmetries — the dark woman's sword is held higher than the light woman's flowers, the knight's head turns slightly to the left, the landscape opens more widely on the right — and the result is a perfect equilibrium that is not static. Wölfflin used the little panel, as he used the Graces, to show how the classical composition grows out of the Quattrocento one: the symmetry is kept, but the figures are bound into a single group by their inclination towards a common centre.

The knight himself is a beautiful figure — a boy in armour, with the long hair and smooth face of the young men of the Urbino portraits, asleep with his head on his hand and his legs crossed at the ankle, in a pose that derives from antique river-gods and from the sleeping soldiers of the Resurrection; the armour is painted with tiny touches of light on the steel, and the red cloak under him is the warmest note in the picture. The woman with the sword and book is dressed as a matron, her head covered, her expression grave; the woman with the flowers wears a dress embroidered with a pattern of leaves, her hair in a net, her face young and mild. The landscape — the river, the hills, the walled town with its towers, the morning sky — is among the most delicate of the early panels, and it has a narrative role: the dark woman stands before a steep path that climbs a rocky hill to a castle (the road of Virtue), the light woman before a gentle lake-shore (the way of Pleasure).

Technique and the cartoon

The panel is painted in the thin, enamelled oil of the early period, with the flesh hatched, the armour in fine touches, the landscape in a miniaturist's detail. The cartoon, in the National Gallery since 1847, is a sheet of the same size in pen and ink, pricked along every contour for transfer; it differs from the painting in small ways (the flowers, the fall of the drapery) and it is one of the very few Raphael cartoons for a panel painting to survive together with the panel. The pricking — hundreds of small holes along the outlines — shows the method: the cartoon was laid on the prepared panel and charcoal dust was pounced through the holes, leaving a dotted outline that the painter followed; infrared examination of the panel has confirmed the dotted underdrawing. The little picture is thus a complete document of the early working process, from drawing to paint, and it has been used as such by every technical study of the period.

History

The panel and its pendant were in the Borghese collection in Rome in the seventeenth century, listed as Raphael's in the 1693 inventory; they were sold around 1800 and bought by William Young Ottley, who brought them to England. Ottley sold the Dream to Sir Thomas Lawrence, from whose estate it passed to the Rev. Thomas Egerton and then to Lady Sykes, from whom the National Gallery bought it in 1847 — one of the Gallery's earliest Raphaels, bought under the directorship of Charles Eastlake, who was building the national collection of early Italian pictures on the new principles of historical completeness. The cartoon came with it. The Graces went another way, to Chantilly, and the two have not been reunited.

Reception and afterlife

The Dream of a Knight has been one of the most loved small pictures in the National Gallery from the day it arrived. The Victorians, who adored the early Raphael, made it an emblem of the painter's innocence: a knight dreaming of virtue, painted by a youth of twenty-one, in colours of morning. Ruskin, who disliked the Roman Raphael, admired it; Burne-Jones and the Pre-Raphaelites drew on its mood of armoured reverie. For the twentieth century it became a problem of iconography — the Panofsky debate — and a document of technique. What it is, beyond all that, is a perfect small object: a square of poplar the size of a book, on which a young painter set a tree, a sleeping boy, two women and a world, and balanced them so exactly that nothing could be added or removed. Gombrich, in his essay on the norm and form of classical art, used it as an example of the kind of composition that looks inevitable and was, in fact, constructed — the art that hides art, which is the oldest definition of grace, and the one Raphael's whole career would illustrate.

Cicero, Silius, and the Urbino ideal

The two Scipio texts are worth distinguishing, because the choice between them changes the picture. Cicero's Dream of Scipio (the close of the Republic, preserved through Macrobius) is a cosmic vision — the younger Scipio sees his grandfather in the heavens and learns the order of the spheres and the reward of the just — and it has nothing to do with two women. The Punica of Silius Italicus, a first-century Latin epic on the Second Punic War, has in its fifteenth book the episode in which the young Scipio, pondering whether to take command in Spain, is visited in a vision by Virtus and Voluptas, who plead their cases; Virtus is plainly dressed and severe, Voluptas perfumed and adorned, and Scipio chooses Virtus — but Silius, unlike Xenophon's Prodicus, does not make Voluptas a monster, and the scene is a debate rather than a temptation. Raphael's gentle treatment of the right-hand figure fits Silius; so does the knight's armour (Scipio is a soldier), the laurel (the tree of glory), and the pairing of sword and book (arms and letters, the two roads to fame). This is also, and not by accident, the ideal of the Urbino court: Castiglione's courtier is to be a soldier and a scholar, and the little panel reads almost as an emblem of the Cortegiano's programme, painted a few years before the book was written, for the kind of boy it was written to form.

The allegorical moment

The Dream belongs to a particular moment in Umbrian painting, around 1503–05, when the humanist allegory — a classical subject with a moral programme, painted small for a learned patron — was briefly fashionable. Perugino's Combat of Love and Chastity (Louvre), painted in 1503–05 for Isabella d'Este's studiolo at Mantua to a programme supplied by the Marchesa's humanist, is the grandest example, and it shows what Perugino made of the mode: a crowded, rather stiff tournament of figures on a meadow. Raphael's two panels are the opposite — small, spare, perfectly legible — and they show how the pupil understood allegory as a matter of composition rather than of inventory. The knight, the tree, the two women and the road behind them say everything; nothing is labelled. It is the same instinct that would make the Stanze, for all their erudition, readable at a glance.

The National Gallery and the cartoon together

The Gallery's possession of panel and cartoon has made the Dream the most completely documented of Raphael's early pictures, and it has been studied accordingly. The National Gallery's technical bulletins have published the infrared reflectogram of the panel, showing the pounced underdrawing following the cartoon's pricked lines with only minor departures; the cartoon's own small pentimenti — the position of the flowers, the line of the knight's leg — show the design being adjusted at the last stage before transfer. In the 2004 exhibition Raphael: From Urbino to Rome the panel was shown with its cartoon and with the Chantilly Graces represented by a photograph, the nearest the pair has come to reunion; and the display made plain how much the two little pictures depend on each other — the knight's choice at the left, the reward at the right, the same landscape running behind both — and how much is lost by their separation. The panel hangs today in the Gallery's Raphael room with the Mond Crucifixion, the Ansidei Madonna, the Garvagh Madonna, the Saint Catherine, the Pinks and the Julius II — the most complete sequence of his development outside Italy, of which it is the smallest and, in its way, the most perfect item. Visitors who find it — it is easy to walk past — tend to stay; the Dream has the rare property of growing larger the longer it is looked at.

The picture

Oil on a round-topped poplar panel, 170 by 118 cm, in the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, signed and dated on the frieze of the temple RAPHAEL VRBINAS MDIIII. It was painted for the chapel of Saint Joseph in the church of San Francesco at Città di Castello, at the order of the Albizzini family, and it is the earliest of Raphael's works that survives complete, in its original format, with a secure date and signature — the picture, as every account of him says, with which the apprenticeship ended.

The subject is the betrothal of the Virgin, as told in the Golden Legend and the apocryphal gospels: the suitors of Mary, each bearing a rod, presented themselves at the Temple; the rod of Joseph flowered, and he was chosen; the disappointed suitors broke their rods. In the foreground, on a broad paved piazza, the High Priest joins the hands of Joseph and Mary, who stand on either side of him; Joseph, with his flowering rod, is about to place the ring on her finger; behind Mary, a group of young women; behind Joseph, the suitors, one of whom, at the far right, bends his rod over his knee and snaps it. The piazza recedes in long perspective lines to a flight of steps and a circular temple — a sixteen-sided drum with a colonnade, a dome and a lantern, its door open to show the sky beyond — which rises at the vanishing point, exactly at the centre of the panel; small figures walk on the steps and in the porticoes; behind, hills and a pale sky.

Perugino and the difference

The composition is Perugino's. Between 1500 and 1504 Perugino had painted for the chapel of the Holy Ring in Perugia Cathedral — which possessed the Virgin's wedding ring, the Sant'Anello, and was the natural place for such a subject — a Marriage of the Virgin (now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts at Caen) that set the ceremony before a centralised temple on a piazza in exactly this way; and behind that picture stood Perugino's own Delivery of the Keys in the Sistine Chapel, with its vast piazza and its octagonal temple. Raphael took the whole arrangement — the foreground ceremony, the piazza, the temple, the distribution of men to one side and women to the other, the breaking of the rod — and the comparison between the Caen and Brera pictures has been, since the nineteenth century, the classic demonstration of what distinguishes a great painter from a good one working with the same materials.

Perugino's temple is a heavy octagon that sits on the horizon; Raphael's is a tall, light drum that rises into the sky, with the steps leading up to it foreshortened so that the eye climbs them, and its open door framing a patch of distance that pulls the gaze through the whole depth of the picture. Perugino's figures stand in a frieze parallel to the picture plane; Raphael's bend in a shallow arc that echoes the curve of the temple and gives the group a three-dimensional coherence. Perugino's suitors are a row of types; Raphael's are individuals — the one who snaps the rod, with his legs braced and his body twisted, is a figure of real physical energy, and the young man behind him, looking on with his hand on his hip, is a portrait. Perugino's Mary and Joseph are sweet and inert; Raphael's have weight and a slight, expressive hesitancy — Joseph's barefoot stance, the Virgin's lowered head — that gives the ceremony the feel of an event. And the whole picture is taller, more vertical, more aspiring than Perugino's: the temple rises, the figures are elongated, and the relation between the human foreground and the architectural distance is no longer that of actors before a backdrop but of people in a space.

The temple

The temple is the picture's invention. It is a centralised building — a polygon with an ambulatory of slender columns, a drum, a ribbed dome and a lantern, with four porticoed entrances — and it is drawn with the precision of an architect's elevation. Its sources are in the tradition of Urbino: the ideal-city panels of the ducal palace, with their centralised temples on piazzas; Francesco di Giorgio's studies of circular churches; and behind them Brunelleschi and Alberti, and the Roman Pantheon. It has been compared with Bramante's Tempietto at San Pietro in Montorio in Rome, but the Tempietto was built in 1502 or later and Raphael cannot have seen it; the resemblance is a matter of shared sources and shared ideals. What the temple shows is that the twenty-one-year-old painter from Urbino thought of a picture as an architecture before he thought of it as a scene — that the ideal building at the centre of the composition, and the perspective that leads to it, were for him the primary fact, and the figures the inhabitants of a space already constructed. He placed his signature on its frieze, as though signing a building.

The perspective is exact and legible: the lines of the pavement converge on the open door, and the figures diminish towards it in correct proportion. But it is also expressive: the vanishing point is not at the level of the foreground figures' heads, as a strict construction would require, but higher, at the door, so that the ground seems to tilt slightly upward and the temple to rise — the slight distortion that Piero and Perugino had also used, and that Raphael would make a principle in the Stanze.

The figures

The suitor breaking his rod is the picture's most famous figure and the one that announces the Florentine Raphael before Florence. He is seen from behind and slightly to the side, in a red tunic and yellow hose, his right leg braced, his rod bent across his left knee; the whole pose is a study in torsion and effort, and it owes something to Signorelli and something, perhaps, to the Florentine prints that reached Umbria. The other suitors and the women are more conventional — graceful Peruginesque figures in the contrapposto of the period, with the heads inclined and the hands joined — but they are varied in pose and costume with a care that Perugino's rows never show, and the young man in the blue tunic at the right edge, with his hand on his hip and his hat over his long hair, is among the earliest of the figures in Raphael's work who look at the viewer as a courtier might look at a guest. The High Priest, between the couple, with his tall mitre and his beard, is an Umbrian type; the Virgin, with her lowered eyes and her blue mantle, is the Perugino Madonna; Joseph, barefoot, bearded, gentle, is the most human figure in the foreground.

Technique

The panel is painted in the thin, layered oil of the early period over a white gesso ground, with the flesh built up in small strokes and the draperies in local colour glazed in the shadows; the temple and pavement are painted over an incised perspective construction, the ruled lines of which can be seen in raking light. The surface is of extreme smoothness. Technical examination at the Brera has shown an underdrawing transferred by cartoon, with few changes, and confirmed that the signature and date are original. The colour is clear and cool — the pale grey of the temple and pavement, the blues of the sky and the Virgin's mantle, the reds and yellows of the suitors' costumes — and the light is even, without strong shadow, in the Umbrian manner. The picture was cleaned and restored in 2008–09 for the 500th anniversary of the Brera, and its colours, long dulled by varnish, recovered their original brightness.

History

The altarpiece stood in the Albizzini chapel in San Francesco at Città di Castello from 1504 until 1798, when the town, under French occupation, was made to present it to the Napoleonic general Giuseppe Lechi; Lechi sold it in 1801 to the Milanese collector Giacomo Sannazzari, who bequeathed it in 1804 to the Ospedale Maggiore of Milan; the hospital sold it in 1806 to the Brera, the new academy gallery founded by Napoleon's viceroy, where it has been the most famous picture ever since. The frame is not original.

Reception

The Sposalizio has been a touchstone for every generation since Vasari, who called it the picture in which "one sees the manner of Raphael growing in excellence, surpassing Pietro's." For the nineteenth century it was the perfect early Raphael: the Nazarenes copied it, the Brera's visitors made it a place of pilgrimage, Burckhardt in the Cicerone analysed its composition as the model of the "symmetrical-ideal" picture, and Wölfflin in Classic Art used the comparison with Perugino's Caen version as his opening lesson in how classical composition differs from its antecedents — the figures, he observed, have gained in freedom and the group in compactness, and the temple is no longer a backdrop but a space. For the twentieth century it became, in addition, a document — the earliest secure work, the baseline against which the Umbrian attributions are tested, and a demonstration of the young painter's architectural imagination. It was lent to Rome for the quincentenary of 2020, and it remains the one picture by Raphael in which the whole of his later development — the architecture of the School of Athens, the clarity of the tapestry cartoons, the figure in action — can be read in embryo.

What to look at

Stand at the right distance — about twice the panel's height — and the perspective resolves: the piazza opens, the temple rises, the door frames the sky. Then look at the suitor breaking his rod, and at the young man beside him; then at the Virgin's hand, laid in the priest's, and Joseph's, holding the ring; then at the temple's lantern, which is the highest point of the picture and the point to which everything leads. The signature, on the frieze, is small and easy to miss; having found it, one cannot unsee it. A boy of twenty-one, from a small town in the Marche, has written his name on the ideal temple of the Renaissance, and the temple has carried it ever since.

The ring, and the two towns

Why a Marriage of the Virgin at Città di Castello? The subject was, in Umbria, a local one. Perugia Cathedral claimed to possess the Virgin's wedding ring — an onyx band that a Franciscan from Chiusi was said to have stolen and brought to Perugia in 1473, and whose chapel, the Cappella del Sant'Anello, was the focus of a considerable cult; Perugino's altarpiece for that chapel was the prestige commission of the early 1500s, and the Albizzini's chapel of Saint Joseph in the Franciscan church of the neighbouring town was, in a sense, a reply. The Franciscans had a particular devotion to Joseph, and the Sposalizio — in which Joseph is chosen by the flowering rod — was his feast-picture. That the Albizzini gave the job to the young man who had just painted the Gavari Crucifixion in the Dominican church across the town says something about how the small Umbrian towns competed, through their confraternities and families, for the painters who served them; and that Raphael answered Perugino's altarpiece with a better one says something about how he understood the competition.

The drawings

Surprisingly few drawings survive for the picture. A study in Oxford for the head of a young man has been connected with the suitor at the right edge; a sheet in the British Museum with a figure seen from behind has been related to the rod-breaker; and there is a pen study in Lille for the group of women. The scarcity is presumably an accident of survival — the Umbrian-period drawings are thin in general — but it has the effect of making the Sposalizio seem, more than most of Raphael's works, to have arrived whole. What the surviving sheets show is the usual method: figures studied from the model, poses tried in pen, the composition fixed before the cartoon.

Copies and fame

The picture was copied early and often. A full-scale copy, probably of the sixteenth century, remained in Città di Castello after the original was taken; reduced copies and variants are in several collections; and after the Brera acquired the original in 1806 it became one of the most engraved pictures in Italy — Giuseppe Longhi's line engraving of 1820, made for the Brera, was among the celebrated prints of the century and spread the composition through Europe. The Nazarenes in Rome copied it from the print before they saw it; Ingres owned an impression; and the round-topped format with its central temple became, through such reproductions, a kind of shorthand for the Renaissance itself. The Brera's 2009 restoration and the 2020 loan to Rome renewed the picture's fame for a new generation; it is today, with the Sistine Madonna and the School of Athens, one of the three or four images by which the general public knows Raphael.

The central predella panel of the Colonna altarpiece, a long narrow strip of about 24 by 85 cm, oil on wood, in the National Gallery, London, where it arrived with the Lord Windsor bequest in 1913. The scene unrolls from left to right as a frieze: soldiers and horsemen lead, Christ stumbles under the cross at the centre with Simon of Cyrene behind him, and the holy women, supporting the fainting Virgin, follow at the right, with the landscape and the towers of Jerusalem behind. The format imposed a processional composition, and Raphael made of it a relief: the figures move in a single plane, overlapping in measured intervals, the cross a diagonal that cuts the frieze, the horses' heads and the soldiers' spears breaking the line of the sky. The group of women at the right, clustered around the Virgin, is the most expressive passage, and it is the first of Raphael's treatments of a subject to which he would return, on a far larger scale, in the Spasimo di Sicilia (Prado) a decade later. The little panel was separated from the altarpiece in 1663 and reached England in the nineteenth century; it was reunited with the main panel and the other predella pieces in New York in 2006.

The picture

A tiny panel, 17 by 17 cm, oil on wood, in the Musée Condé at Chantilly: three naked young women, the Graces of antique myth, stand in a row before a landscape of rolling hills, a river and a pale sky; the outer two face the viewer, the central one turns her back; each holds in her raised hand a small golden apple, and the two at the sides rest a hand on the shoulder of the central figure; the one at the left wears a coral necklace. The ground at their feet is a green meadow with small flowers. The colour is soft — the pale flesh, the blue of the distance, the green of the grass — and the light is even; the handling is of the miniaturist's fineness of the early panels, with the contours crisp and the modelling smooth.

The pendant and the patron

The Three Graces is the pendant — or the second panel of a diptych — of the Dream of a Knight in the National Gallery, London (Q552040), which is of identical size and was with it in the Borghese collection until the early nineteenth century; the two panels were almost certainly painted together, around 1504–05, for the same patron and the same purpose, and their subjects were almost certainly meant to be read together. The patron is not documented. The most persuasive suggestion, first made by Panofsky, connects the pair with the Borghese family — the Dream shows a young knight who may be Scipio, and the Borghese had a son, Scipione di Tommaso Borghese, born in 1493, for whom a pair of small panels on the theme of the young hero's choice between virtue and pleasure, and the reward of the Graces, would have been an appropriate gift at the age of ten or twelve; the panels were in the Borghese collection in Rome from the seventeenth century, which supports the idea. Other candidates have been proposed; none is certain.

The source

The Graces are taken from an antique marble group — the three Graces in the Piccolomini Library at Siena, which Cardinal Francesco Todeschini Piccolomini had placed there when he built the library for his uncle Pius II's books, and which Raphael saw when he was in Siena around 1502–03 helping Pinturicchio with the library's frescoes. The Roman group (itself a copy of a Hellenistic original) shows the three figures in exactly this arrangement: two facing outward, one turned away, the arms linked. It was one of the most famous antiquities in Italy, drawn by every artist who passed through Siena; and Raphael's little panel is his first direct quotation from the antique — the first of the thousands of borrowings from ancient sculpture that would fill his Roman work. It is characteristic that he did not copy: he clothed the marble figures in flesh, gave them a landscape, softened their stance, and put golden apples in their hands.

The meaning

The apples are the key to the interpretation, and they have been read in two ways. In one reading they are the apples of the Hesperides, which Hercules won by his labours — so that the Graces become the givers of the hero's reward, and the pair of panels tells a single story: the young knight dreams of the choice between Virtue and Pleasure (the Dream), and having chosen rightly, receives from the Graces the golden fruit of his virtue (the Graces). This is Panofsky's reading, in his Hercules am Scheidewege of 1930, and it has the merit of making sense of the diptych. In another reading the apples are simply the attributes that the Graces held in some ancient and Renaissance representations — the Siena group had lost its hands, and artists supplied what they thought appropriate — and the panel is a straightforward image of the three goddesses of grace, beauty and generosity, who in the neo-Platonic thought of the period (Ficino, Pico) stood for the three aspects of love: giving, receiving, returning. The two readings are not incompatible, and a learned patron around 1504 might have expected both.

What the picture does

Whatever it means, the panel is the first of Raphael's nudes, and it shows the gift that would distinguish his treatment of the body from Michelangelo's for the rest of his life: a tenderness of surface, a sense of the flesh as soft and warm and luminous rather than muscular and heroic. The three figures are slender, long-limbed, small-breasted, with the slightly swelling bellies of the Quattrocento ideal; they stand with the weight on one leg, their heads inclined, in the contrapposto of Perugino's saints translated into the nude; and they are bound together by the arms on the shoulders and the rhythm of the raised hands into a single, gently rotating group. This last is the point. The Siena marble shows three figures side by side; Raphael's panel shows a group — the first of the interlocked groups of figures that would be the basis of his art — and the rotation of the central figure, seen from behind, against the two who face us, gives the little composition a spatial fullness out of all proportion to its size. Wölfflin, who loved the panel, saw in it the seed of the classical group — three figures bound into a single rhythm, the model in miniature of the compositions to come.

Technique and condition

The panel is in the thin, enamelled oil of the early period, over a white ground, the flesh built up in soft hatched strokes from a pale mid-tone with the faintest rose in the cheeks and knees, the hair painted strand by strand, the landscape with a very fine brush. A drawing in the Ashmolean, in pen, shows the group being worked out — two of the figures tried in slightly different poses — and confirms that the design, though derived from the antique, was reconsidered from the model. The panel is in good condition; the greens of the landscape have browned a little, as copper greens do, and the sky has been retouched. The pendant in London has the remains of a pricked cartoon, which suggests that both panels were transferred in the usual way.

History

The two panels were in the Borghese collection in Rome — recorded there in the seventeenth century and listed in the 1693 inventory as Raphael's — until about 1800, when, in the financial troubles of the Napoleonic years, they were sold; they were bought by the Englishman William Young Ottley, the collector and connoisseur of early Italian art, and brought to England, where they were separated. The Graces passed through the collections of Sir Thomas Lawrence, Lord Ward (later Earl of Dudley) and others; the duc d'Aumale bought it at the Dudley sale in 1885 and placed it at Chantilly, whose collection, by the terms of his bequest to the Institut de France in 1886, may never be lent or rearranged. So the Graces and the Dream — painted as a pair, and in the same room for three centuries — have not been seen together since the early nineteenth century, and cannot be: the most regretted separation in Raphael's oeuvre.

Afterlife

The Three Graces has had an influence out of all proportion to its size, partly through its subject — it is one of the earliest Renaissance paintings of the Graces and the model for many later ones — and partly through the Chantilly collection's fame. Cranach's and Rubens's and Canova's Graces are its descendants at various removes; the neo-classical sculptors who made the Graces the standard demonstration of the female nude had Raphael's panel, through engravings, in mind. For the nineteenth century it was a cult object: Ingres, who worshipped Raphael, drew it; the duc d'Aumale hung it in his Santuario, the little room at Chantilly where his greatest treasures are kept, beside Raphael's Madonna of Loreto and the Orléans Madonna and Fouquet's miniatures, and there it still is — a panel the size of a hand, in a room the size of a closet, that holds the beginning of Raphael's dialogue with antiquity.

The marble, and what Raphael did with it

The Siena group — now in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, having stood in the Piccolomini Library until the nineteenth century — was excavated in Rome in the fifteenth century and bought by Cardinal Francesco Todeschini Piccolomini (the future Pius III) for his library; it is a Roman copy of a Hellenistic type that survives in several versions, and it had lost its arms and heads, which were restored. Artists drew it as one of the canonical antiquities: Pinturicchio's workshop, in which Raphael was working in 1502–03, used it; a drawing in the Venice Academy records it; and its three-figure arrangement — two frontal, one dorsal, the arms interlaced — passed into the Renaissance vocabulary as the image of the Graces. What Raphael did with it is the point. He kept the arrangement and changed everything else. The marble figures are heavy and stiff; his are slender and supple. The marble has no setting; his has a landscape that opens behind the figures so that they stand in air. The marble is one colour; his panel is a harmony of pale flesh, green ground and blue distance. And the marble is a group of three isolated bodies; his is a rhythm — the raised hands, the inclined heads, the arms on the shoulders, the turn of the central figure — that binds them into one movement. It is the first instance of what would be his lifelong relation to the antique: not imitation but transformation, the ancient form remade as living flesh.

Seneca, Ficino, and the coral necklace

The Graces' Renaissance meaning came largely from Seneca's De Beneficiis, which explains the three linked figures as the three movements of a benefit — giving, receiving, returning — and which Ficino and his circle read in a neo-Platonic key as the three aspects of love and beauty: Pulchritudo, Amor, Voluptas, or, in Pico's version, the triad of beauty emanating from God, drawing the soul, and returning it. Botticelli's Primavera, painted in Florence twenty years earlier for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, had given this triad its most famous image; Raphael's little panel, made in Umbria for a different kind of patron, is simpler and more direct, but the learned reading was available to anyone who knew the sources, and it coexists happily with Panofsky's reading of the apples as the reward of virtue. The coral necklace worn by the left-hand Grace is a small, telling detail: coral was worn by children as a protection against illness and the evil eye, and its presence here, on an antique goddess, has been taken to support the idea that the pair of panels was made for a boy — a protective and educational gift, in which the Graces who reward virtue wear the amulet of childhood.

The Santuario

The duc d'Aumale, fifth son of King Louis-Philippe, exiled in England after 1848, formed at Twickenham and Orleans House one of the great collections of the century, and on his return to France installed it at Chantilly, in the château he rebuilt, with the condition — accepted by the Institut de France — that nothing should ever leave. The Three Graces was among his proudest purchases; he paid a very large sum for it at the Dudley sale, and he hung it in the Santuario, a small room off the Tribune that holds the Madonna of Loreto, the Orléans Madonna, Fouquet's leaves from the Hours of Étienne Chevalier and Filippino Lippi's Esther panels. There it remains, seen by every visitor to Chantilly and lent to none. The pendant in London can travel; the Graces cannot; and so the reunion that would tell us most about the pair's meaning is, by a nineteenth-century collector's will, permanently deferred. It is a consolation that both panels are in public collections and that both are, in their separate rooms, among the most carefully preserved of all Raphael's works; and it is a small irony that the two pictures most often cited as the beginning of his classicism are the two that scholarship can never place side by side.

The picture

An altarpiece on poplar, 210 by 149 cm, in the National Gallery, London, signed on the hem of the Virgin's mantle and dated MDV — the date has been read as 1505, 1506 and 1507, but 1505 is now generally accepted. It was painted for the chapel of the Ansidei family in the Servite church of San Fiorenzo in Perugia, dedicated to Saint Nicholas of Bari, at the order of Bernardino Ansidei, and it stood there until 1764, when the friars sold it, with its predella, to the English Lord Robert Spencer, who gave it to his brother the Duke of Marlborough; at Blenheim it hung until 1885, when the National Gallery bought it, with Van Dyck's Charles I on Horseback, for £70,000 — at the time the largest sum ever paid for a picture, and a parliamentary event.

The Virgin sits on a high wooden throne under a coffered arch, holding on her knee the Child, who reaches towards the open book she holds; at the left stands John the Baptist, in his camel-skin with a red mantle, holding a tall crystal cross and looking up at the Child; at the right stands Nicholas of Bari, in full episcopal vestments, reading a book, his crozier in the crook of his arm, the three golden balls of his legend at his feet. The throne stands on a dais of two steps; the arch frames a view of sky and landscape; on the arch's inner face, above the Virgin's head, is painted the inscription SALVE MATER CHRISTI; hanging from the throne's canopy, a string of coral beads. The light falls evenly from the left; the colour is clear and cool — the Virgin's red and blue, the Baptist's red, Nicholas's white and gold, the grey of the architecture, the blue of the sky.

Perugino and the architecture

The Ansidei Madonna is the last and grandest of Raphael's altarpieces in the Umbrian manner, and the one in which the lesson of Perugino is most fully absorbed and most clearly exceeded. The scheme — the Virgin enthroned between two standing saints, under an arch, with a landscape behind — is that of Perugino's Fano and Vallombrosa altarpieces and a dozen others; the figure types, the quiet contrapposto of the saints, the inclined heads, are all Perugino's. What is new is the structure. The throne, the steps, the arch and the pavement are drawn as a single coherent architecture, with a vanishing point at the height of the Virgin's hands, so that the whole space is constructed around her; the saints stand at measured intervals on the dais, their heights and positions exactly calibrated to the throne and the arch; the relations between the three figures are worked out with a precision that makes Perugino's compositions look improvised. Above all, the picture has a kind of calm that Perugino never achieved — not the vacancy of his late work but the stillness of a perfectly resolved design, in which every interval is right and nothing needs to move.

Within that stillness the figures are alive. The Baptist, looking up at the Child with parted lips, is the most animated — a figure of real physical presence, his weight on one leg, his cross held lightly, his camel-skin painted with attention to its roughness; Nicholas, absorbed in his book, is a study in concentration, his mitre and cope rendered with a jeweller's exactness; the Child, reaching for the Virgin's book, has the weight and the curiosity of the Florentine infants. The Virgin, with her lowered eyes and her long hands, is the Perugino Madonna made monumental.

Technique

The altarpiece has been the subject of a thorough technical study at the National Gallery, and it is one of the best-documented of Raphael's early pictures. The panel is poplar; the ground is gesso; the underdrawing, revealed by infrared reflectography, is of the careful, cartoon-transferred kind, with pounced dots visible along many contours and ruled lines for the architecture; there are few changes. The paint is oil, thin and smooth, the flesh built in hatched strokes, the draperies in layers of local colour with glazes; the blue of the Virgin's mantle is natural ultramarine, the reds vermilion and lake, the whites of Nicholas's vestment lead white with lead-tin yellow in the embroidery. The gold of the halos and the ornament is shell gold, applied with a brush. The surface is in excellent condition, cleaned in the 1950s, and the colours have a freshness that few early Raphaels retain.

The predella and the chapel

The predella consisted of three panels: Saint John the Baptist Preaching (National Gallery, Q3910086), the Marriage of the Virgin (lost) and a miracle of Saint Nicholas (lost). Only the first survives, with the altarpiece. The chapel in San Fiorenzo — a small Servite church near the city walls — was dedicated to Nicholas, which explains his prominence; the Baptist was the patron of Perugia and of the Ansidei's confraternity; the coral beads hanging from the canopy are a protective amulet of the kind hung over cradles, and a touch of domestic piety in a public image. The altarpiece was seen and praised by Vasari, who described "the Virgin with the Child, Saint John the Baptist and Saint Nicholas" in San Fiorenzo "in his second manner"; it was copied for the church when it was sold, and the copy is still there.

History and reception

The sale of 1764 brought the picture to England, where at Blenheim it became one of the most famous old masters in the country — Waagen called it "one of the most admirable works of Raphael's earlier period" — and its acquisition in 1885, after a public campaign and a special grant from Parliament, was a landmark in the history of the National Gallery: the price, seventy thousand pounds for the two pictures, was debated in the Commons, and the Gallery's director, Frederic Burton, was accused of extravagance. The Ansidei Madonna justified him. It is the only large altarpiece by Raphael in Britain, and in the National Gallery's Raphael room, beside the Mond Crucifixion of two years earlier, it shows the distance the painter had travelled in those two years: the Crucifixion is a Perugino; the Ansidei is a Raphael working in Perugino's idiom, which is a different thing.

It is also, in a sense, the end of something. After 1505 Raphael would not paint another altarpiece of this quiet, symmetrical, Umbrian kind; the Florentine Madonna del Baldacchino of 1507–08 is already a different conception, and the Roman altarpieces — the Madonna di Foligno, the Sistine Madonna — are visions rather than sacred conversations. The Ansidei is the last word of the tradition he inherited, spoken with a clarity the tradition had never achieved.

A small panel, about 32 by 25 cm, in the Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo at Brescia: Christ in half-length, nearly frontal, against a dark ground, his right hand raised in blessing and his left holding open his mantle to show the wound in his side; the wounds of the nails are visible in his hands; his head, with its long hair and light beard, inclines slightly to his right; the expression is gentle and grave. The picture is a devotional image of the kind produced throughout Italy for private prayer — the Salvator Mundi or Christ blessing type — and it is among the few such images by Raphael to survive. It came to Brescia with the collection of Count Paolo Tosio in 1832, catalogued as Raphael's, and the attribution, though sometimes doubted, is now generally accepted; the date, around 1505–06, places it at the start of the Florentine years, and the handling — the soft, luminous modelling of the face, the careful drawing of the hands, the thin enamelled oil — is consistent with the Florentine Madonnas of those years. The picture's interest lies in its subject and its restraint: Raphael, who painted so many Madonnas, painted very few independent images of Christ, and this one shows how he handled the problem of the divine face — by making it entirely human, a young man of great gentleness, with the wounds shown not as horror but as signs. The composition is simple and frontal; the light falls softly from the left; the dark ground isolates the figure. The panel is in good condition, with some abrasion in the mantle. It hangs at Brescia near the Baronci angel, so that the gallery holds, in two small panels, the Raphael of 1500 and the Raphael of 1505.

The type has a history that the little panel inherits. The half-length Christ blessing, holding the orb or showing the wounds, was a Flemish invention — Jan van Eyck's and Memling's Salvator Mundi images, which reached Italy through Bruges and Venice — and it was taken up in the later fifteenth century by Antonello, by Bellini and by Perugino, whose Christ figures are the immediate source of Raphael's. What Raphael added, here, was the gesture of opening the mantle to show the side-wound, which shifts the image from the Saviour as sovereign to the Saviour as the Man of Sorrows, and which gives the hands — the blessing right, the left drawing back the cloth — something to do. The face is of the long, gentle Umbrian type, with a beard just beginning, and the light that models it is soft; there is no attempt at majesty, only at tenderness. Small devotional panels of this kind were made for bedchambers and oratories, to be looked at daily; the Brescia panel has the intimacy of such use. Count Tosio, who bought it as a Raphael, was one of the Lombard collectors of the early nineteenth century who gathered Renaissance pictures as the monasteries were suppressed and the old families sold; his bequest of 1832 made Brescia's civic gallery one of the richer provincial collections of Italy, and the little Christ and the Baronci angel are its two claims on the Raphael literature.

The picture

A panel, 66 by 52 cm, in the Galleria Palatina of the Palazzo Pitti: a woman in her late twenties or early thirties, seen in half-length and three-quarter view, turned to the left, looking directly at the viewer; she wears a dark brown dress with a bodice of dull red and full sleeves of blue-grey and brown, a white chemise showing at the neck, and a dark cap or hood from which her hair, parted at the centre, falls in two smooth bands; a fine chain hangs at her breast, and rings are on the fingers of her left hand, which rests on her swelling belly while her right hand rests on the arm of her chair. The background is plain and dark. The face is broad, pale and calm, with dark eyes and a small firm mouth; the expression is direct and unsmiling. She is pregnant — the gesture of the hand, the swell of the dress, the slight tilt of the body announce it — and the picture has been called La Gravida, "the pregnant woman," since the eighteenth century.

Identity and date

The sitter is unknown. She is plainly a Florentine lady of the merchant class — the dress is rich but not extravagant, the jewellery modest — and she was plainly painted in Florence, around 1505–06, in the first years of Raphael's stay there; suggestions that she is Emilia Pia, or a member of the Doni or Nasi families, are guesses. The portrait was in the Medici collections by the eighteenth century and has hung in the Pitti since; its earlier history is unknown. The attribution has been doubted at various times — the sobriety of the handling led some to think of Ridolfo Ghirlandaio — but it is now universally accepted as Raphael's, and its date is fixed by its relation to the Doni portraits, which it closely resembles in format and which it may slightly precede.

The portrait

The Gravida is Raphael's first portrait in the Florentine manner, and it shows him taking the measure of two things at once: Leonardo's Mona Lisa, which fixed the three-quarter pose with hands for the rest of the century, and the Florentine taste for an exact, almost forensic rendering of the sitter's person and possessions. From Leonardo comes the turn of the body, the placing of the hands, the sense of a person seated in a space; from Florence comes the unsparing attention to the fabric of the sleeves, the chain, the rings, the smooth pale flesh. What is Raphael's own is the stillness and the directness. The woman looks at us without expression — neither the Mona Lisa's smile nor the Doni portraits' slight self-consciousness — and her hand on her belly, which is the portrait's subject, is at once a fact and a gesture: she is showing us, with entire composure, that she carries a child. No Italian portrait before this had made pregnancy its subject so plainly, and few after; the picture's frankness, which the nineteenth century found a little embarrassing, is now what makes it remarkable.

The composition is simple and strong: the dark mass of the body fills the lower two-thirds of the panel, the pale face and the pale hands are the three points of light, and the plain background throws them forward. The sleeves — the blue-grey upper sleeve, the brown under-sleeve with its slashes — are painted with a pleasure in the fall of heavy cloth that Raphael's Umbrian portraits had not shown, and the hands are drawn with his usual precision, the left resting on the belly with the fingers slightly spread, the right relaxed on the chair.

Technique and condition

The panel is poplar, the ground white, the paint thin and smooth in the manner of the period, with the flesh built in soft transitions and the dark dress in layers of brown and black over a warm underlayer. The background, which appears plain, may originally have been slightly lighter; the panel has darkened with age and varnish, and a cleaning in the twentieth century recovered some of the modelling of the dress. The face and hands are well preserved.

Its place

The Gravida hangs in the Pitti's Sala di Saturno with the Doni portraits, La Velata and the Madonna della Seggiola; in that company it is the plainest and, in some ways, the most modern — a portrait of a woman as a person rather than as an ornament, painted with an honesty that the later portraits, for all their greater splendour, do not exceed. It was among the pictures that the Prado's Late Raphael and the Uffizi's 2020 exhibitions used to show the consistency of Raphael's portraiture across his whole career: the same stillness, the same exactness, the same refusal to flatter.

A word on the title. La Gravida was not the picture's name in the sixteenth century — it had none, being a private portrait — and the label, which appears in the Pitti inventories of the eighteenth century, reflects the later taste for giving anonymous portraits descriptive nicknames (La Velata, La Muta, La Fornarina). The nickname has had the effect of making the sitter's pregnancy the picture's whole subject, which is fair to the painter's emphasis but unfair to the sitter's face, which is as individual and as closely studied as any Raphael painted. She is not a type of the expectant mother; she is a particular woman, with a particular broad, calm, slightly watchful face, who happened to be pregnant when she sat — and the painter has given both facts their due. Her hand, resting on the belly with the fingers slightly spread, is the gesture the picture is remembered by, and it is painted with the restraint that makes it moving. The pendant that hangs at her breast, a small cross or jewel on a fine chain, and the rings on her hand are painted with the attention to possessions that the Doni portraits would develop; the chair-arm on which her right hand rests is the first appearance in Raphael's portraiture of the furniture that places a sitter in a room.

The right-hand predella panel of the Colonna altarpiece, about 24 by 29 cm, oil on wood, in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston — the first painting by Raphael to enter an American collection, bought by Mrs Gardner in 1900 through Bernard Berenson. The dead Christ lies on the lid of the sepulchre, his upper body supported by Joseph of Arimathea (or Nicodemus); the Virgin kneels at his side, John stands at the head, the Magdalen kneels at the feet, and two figures close the group at either end; behind, the landscape with the hill of Calvary and its three crosses. The composition is built as a compact triangle of figures around the horizontal body — a small monumental grouping that looks, for the first time in Raphael's work, towards the Florentine altarpieces of Fra Bartolomeo and Perugino's own late Lamentation, and that has led scholars to place this panel last in the predella's execution, after the painter had seen Florence. The handling is slightly broader than in its companions. Berenson's letter to Mrs Gardner announcing the purchase called it "a gem" and warned her that it was small; she hung it in the Early Italian Room, where it still is.

The picture

A panel, 84 by 56 cm, in the Galleria Palatina of the Palazzo Pitti: the Virgin, standing, seen at three-quarter length against a plain dark ground, holds the naked Child on her left arm, her right hand supporting his body; her head, covered by a transparent veil, inclines towards him; her eyes are lowered; the Child, held against her breast, looks out at the viewer with a grave, direct gaze, his right hand resting on her bosom and his left on her shoulder. She wears a red dress and a blue mantle; the light falls softly from the upper left; there is no landscape, no throne, no attribute — only the two figures, the dark ground and the light. It is the simplest of all Raphael's Madonnas and, for three centuries, among the most loved.

The name and the history

The picture takes its name from Grand Duke Ferdinand III of Tuscany, who bought it in 1799 from the estate of the Florentine painter and collector Carlo Dolci's heirs (Dolci had owned it in the seventeenth century, and it had passed through several Florentine hands) and who was so attached to it that he carried it with him into his Napoleonic exile in Würzburg and back — hence del Granduca, "the Grand Duke's." Its earlier history is unknown; it was presumably painted in Florence, around 1505–07, for a private patron, and it was in Florence throughout. It entered the Pitti with the rest of Ferdinand's collection and has hung in the Sala di Saturno since.

The dark ground

The plain dark background is the picture's most striking feature and its principal problem. No other Raphael Madonna of the Florentine years has one — all the others are set before landscapes — and the dark ground, which gives the image its extraordinary concentration, has long been suspected of being a later addition. X-radiography and infrared examination, published by the Uffizi in the 1980s, showed beneath the dark paint the traces of a landscape with a window or arch, of the kind the Small Cowper and Tempi Madonnas have; at some point, either during execution or — more likely — in the seventeenth century, perhaps in Carlo Dolci's circle, the landscape was painted out and replaced by the uniform dark ground. Whether Raphael made the change himself (there are precedents: the Madonna della Seggiola has no landscape either, and the Roman Madonnas are often set against dark or neutral grounds) or whether a Baroque owner, preferring the tenebrous taste of his own day, had the background suppressed, cannot now be settled; most scholars incline to the latter. What is certain is that the picture as it now exists — the luminous figures emerging from darkness — is the picture that became famous, and that its fame is inseparable from the effect of the dark ground, which isolates the group, suppresses every distraction, and makes the image an icon.

The Leonardesque turn

The Granduca is usually taken as the first of the Florentine Madonnas, and it shows the first effect of Leonardo on Raphael: not in composition — the group is still frontal and simple, with none of the pyramidal complexity of the Meadow or the Goldfinch — but in modelling. The Virgin's face is painted in a soft, continuous gradation from light to shadow, without the crisp contours and the enamelled flatness of the Umbrian Madonnas; the shadow under the chin, the half-light on the cheek turned away, the transparent veil that softens the hairline, are Leonardo's sfumato adopted for the first time, and used to give the face a tenderness that the Perugino type, for all its sweetness, never had. The Child's face, too, is modelled in soft shadow; his body, held against the Virgin's breast, is a real infant's, with the weight falling naturally on her arm.

And yet the picture is not Leonardesque in feeling. Leonardo's Madonnas smile and are absorbed in one another; Raphael's Virgin looks down and inward, and his Child looks straight out at us, so that the group opens towards the spectator instead of closing on itself. This outward look of the Child — grave, direct, unsmiling — is what gives the Granduca its particular character: the picture is not a scene observed but an address. The Virgin presents the Child; the Child presents himself; and the spectator, who has nothing to look at but the two of them, is held.

Composition

The composition is a single vertical: the Virgin's body, slightly turned, her head inclined to the right, the Child held against her so that his head is at the level of her shoulder; the two heads form the apex of a shallow triangle whose base is the Virgin's hands; the lines of the veil and mantle fall in long, simple curves. Nothing is complex and nothing is casual. The Virgin's right hand, supporting the Child's body, is drawn with Raphael's usual precision and placed at the exact centre of the panel; the Child's right hand, on her breast, echoes it a little higher. The colour is reduced to three notes — the red of the dress, the blue of the mantle, the flesh — against the dark, with the white of the veil as the only other accent. The light, from the upper left, models the faces and the Child's body and leaves the mantle in shadow. It is a picture designed to be seen at close range, in a private room, by candlelight or the light of a window, and it is in such conditions that it is most moving.

Technique and condition

The panel is poplar; the ground white; the paint thin and smooth, the flesh built up in soft gradations from a pale warm mid-tone, the shadows in transparent glazes; the blue of the mantle is ultramarine over a darker underlayer, and the red of the dress vermilion glazed with lake. The dark background, whoever painted it, is a thin layer of brown-black over the original landscape, and in raking light the outlines of the underlying forms can faintly be seen. The picture has been cleaned more than once and is in good condition apart from the background question; the faces and hands are among the best-preserved passages in Raphael's Florentine work.

Drawings

A study in the Uffizi, in metalpoint heightened with white, shows the Virgin and Child in a pose close to the painting's, with the Child turned slightly more towards his mother; it is one of the sheets from the first Florentine years in which Raphael, under Leonardo's influence, was rethinking the half-length Madonna, and it shows the group being simplified rather than elaborated — the opposite of the process that produced the Meadow and the Goldfinch. The Granduca is, in that sense, the Florentine Madonna that looks back towards Umbria while absorbing Leonardo's light: the form is the old one, the modelling the new.

Reception

The Madonna del Granduca was, from the moment Ferdinand III bought it, one of the most famous pictures in Florence, and in the nineteenth century it became one of the most famous in the world. Its simplicity made it reproducible — the engravings of Longhi and Morghen, the chromolithographs, the photographs of Alinari and Brogi — and its piety made it portable: it hung, in reproduction, in Catholic and Protestant homes alike, as the image of the Virgin and Child that asked nothing but attention. The Nazarenes adored it; Overbeck's Madonnas are its children. Wölfflin, in Classic Art, used it to show how the classical style achieves the greatest effect with the fewest means — the two figures, the dark, the light — and Gombrich cited it as the type of the image whose perfection depends on what is left out. The twentieth century, which found its sweetness cloying, preferred the Doni portraits; the discovery of the painted-out landscape made it, for a generation of scholars, a problem rather than a masterpiece. Seen today, cleaned and in good light, with the Pitti's other Raphaels around it, it is neither cloying nor problematic: it is a young painter's first statement, in the new Florentine language, of the simplest and oldest subject in Christian art, and it has the authority of something said once and for all.

What to look at

The Child's gaze, which meets the viewer's from the centre of the panel and holds it; the Virgin's lowered eyes, which do not; the right hand, at the centre, which supports the Child with an exactly observed pressure of the fingers; the veil, where it crosses the forehead, painted as a film of light over the flesh; and the edge of the mantle against the dark, where the underlying landscape, if one knows to look, faintly declares itself. The picture is small and the Pitti hangs it at eye level among larger works; it is easy to pass. Those who stop tend to stay.

Carlo Dolci and the Baroque Granduca

The picture's seventeenth-century owner is not incidental. Carlo Dolci (1616–1686), the most devout and meticulous of Florentine Baroque painters, made a career of small, highly finished devotional images — Madonnas, saints, Christ — of exactly the intimate, inward kind the Granduca represents, and it is tempting to see in his Madonnas the Granduca's direct descendants: the same isolation of the figure against a dark ground, the same lowered eyes, the same enamelled surface. If the landscape was painted out in his time — and the style of the overpaint, so far as it can be judged, suits the mid-seventeenth century — then the Granduca as we have it is in part a Baroque re-edition of a Renaissance picture, adapted to the taste of an age that wanted its Madonnas to emerge from darkness. That would explain both the picture's extraordinary concentration and the ease with which the nineteenth century took it up: it was already, in a sense, a picture of the Counter-Reformation, and its piety was of a later kind than Raphael's own.

The standing Virgin

One feature that distinguishes the Granduca from the other Florentine Madonnas is easy to miss: the Virgin stands. In the Meadow, the Goldfinch and the Belle Jardinière she sits on the ground; in the Small Cowper and Tempi she sits or stands at half-length before a landscape; here she is shown standing at three-quarter length, her weight on one leg, the Child on her arm — the pose of the Byzantine Hodegetria, the Virgin who shows the way, translated into Florentine terms. The standing pose gives the figure a quiet monumentality, and it is the pose of the Roman Sistine Madonna, who also stands and also carries the Child on her arm, though in a different world. The Granduca is, in that sense, the link between the icon and the vision: the oldest form of the Madonna, given Leonardo's light, on the way to becoming the grandest.

Among the Pitti's Raphaels

In the Sala di Saturno the Granduca hangs with the Doni portraits, La Gravida, La Velata, the Madonna della Seggiola and the Madonna dell'Impannata — eight or nine Raphaels in one room, the largest group outside the Vatican — and in that company it is the quietest. The Seggiola, on the opposite wall, is the picture to compare it with: the same subject, the same intimacy, the same absence of landscape, painted eight years later in Rome in the round, with the Child's back turned and the Virgin looking out; between the two lies the whole development of Raphael's Madonna from the frontal icon to the rotating group. The Granduca is where it starts. And it is worth adding that the picture has been, for two centuries, the one by which ordinary visitors to Florence have first met Raphael's Madonnas — the one on the postcards, the one in the convent parlours — and that this popular life, which the scholars have sometimes held against it, is a form of the authority the painter sought. He painted it for a room; it has hung, in reproduction, in a million rooms. That is not nothing; it is, in fact, the fate he designed it for. A private Madonna is made to be lived with, and this one has been.

The picture

A panel, 113 by 88 cm, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna: the Virgin, seated in a meadow, her left leg extended, supports the naked Christ Child, who stands between her knees and grasps the slender cross held up by the infant Baptist, who kneels at the left; the Virgin looks down at the Baptist, the Child looks at the Baptist, the Baptist looks at the Child; behind, a wide landscape of lake, trees, a town with towers and blue mountains under a pale sky. The Virgin wears a red dress and a blue mantle, and her head is uncovered — no veil — her fair hair parted and drawn back; the date, MDV or MDVI (the last numeral is damaged and has been read both ways), is on the neckline of her dress. The composition is a pyramid, broad-based, with the Virgin's head at the apex and the two children at the base; the group is set slightly to the right, and the landscape opens to the left.

The commission and the history

Vasari records that Raphael painted for Taddeo Taddei, a Florentine merchant and humanist "who wished always to have him in his house and at his table," two pictures, "both in his first manner derived from Pietro, and the other better"; one of them is the Madonna of the Meadow, which remained in the Taddei house until 1662, when Archduke Ferdinand Karl of Austria, governor of the Tyrol, bought it; it hung at Ambras, then in the Belvedere in Vienna (hence its older name, Madonna del Belvedere), and passed to the Kunsthistorisches Museum on its foundation. Taddeo Taddei was also the patron of Michelangelo's Taddei Tondo (Royal Academy, London), a marble Virgin and Child with the infant Baptist of c. 1504–05 — and the two works, made for the same house in the same years, are the most exact measure we have of what the two young men were doing side by side in Florence.

The Leonardo problem and the Michelangelo answer

The Meadow is the most complete of Raphael's responses to Leonardo's Saint Anne cartoon — the full-length pyramidal group in a landscape, the figures bound by glance and gesture into one mass — and the drawings for it, more numerous than for any other Florentine Madonna, show him working through the problem systematically. The sheets in Vienna (Albertina), Oxford, Chantilly and New York show the group tried in pen again and again: the Virgin seated, the children at her feet, the Baptist now at the left, now at the right, now kneeling, now standing; Christ now held, now standing free; the cross passed from hand to hand. On one Albertina sheet five variants crowd together, drawn in quick loops, the painter rotating the group in his mind and on the paper until the arrangement locked. It is the classic document of the Raphaelesque method — design by variation — and the best evidence of how hard the apparent ease was won.

What locked it was, in part, Michelangelo. The Taddei Tondo, which Raphael must have seen in Taddeo's house as it was being carved, shows the Christ Child fleeing across the Virgin's lap from the Baptist's bird, in a twisting movement of great energy; Raphael's Child, standing between the Virgin's knees and reaching across for the cross, takes the tondo's motif of the Child's lateral movement and calms it — the twist becomes a lean, the flight a reach — and his Virgin's supporting arms, which hold the Child under the arms as he leans, come from the same source. The Meadow is thus a synthesis: Leonardo's pyramid, Michelangelo's moving Child, and Raphael's own serenity, which binds the other two.

The group

The composition is the broadest and most stable of the three great Florentine Madonnas. The Virgin's extended left leg and her body, leaning slightly forward and to the left, make a long diagonal that is answered by the Baptist's kneeling body at the lower left; the Child, between, leans back against his mother's knee and reaches forward to the cross, so that the three figures are connected along a single line running from the Virgin's head through the Child to the Baptist's hands. The Virgin's hands do the work of binding: her left holds the Child under the arm, her right supports his side, and both are drawn with the precision and the tenderness that Raphael's hands always have. Her face, uncovered, looks down at the Baptist with an expression of grave gentleness; the Child's, turned to the Baptist, is intent; the Baptist's, looking up, adores. The cross — a thin reed cross, the Baptist's attribute and the sign of the Passion — is the object on which the three gazes converge, and it stands exactly on the picture's vertical axis.

The landscape and the colour

The landscape is the finest of the Florentine Madonnas — a wide lake with a distant shore, a town with towers and a church at the left, trees on the right, and beyond, mountains dissolving in blue air; a few tiny figures walk by the water. It is painted with the atmospheric delicacy of the Conestabile tondo at a larger scale, and the light that fills it — a cool, clear morning light — is the light that models the figures. The colour is the classic triad: the Virgin's red and blue against the green meadow and the blue distance, the children's pale flesh, the Baptist's brown camel-skin; the whole harmony is cool, and it is the cleanness of this colour — the absence of the Umbrian gold and the Roman shadows — that gives the Florentine Madonnas their particular freshness.

Technique and condition

The panel is poplar; the ground white; the paint is thin, smooth and luminous, the flesh modelled in very soft gradations with the faintest rose, the blue of the mantle in ultramarine, the red in vermilion and lake, the landscape in fine strokes over a pale underpaint. Infrared examination has shown an underdrawing with small adjustments, especially in the Child's position, consistent with the drawings. The picture is in excellent condition — the best preserved, with the Belle Jardinière, of the Florentine Madonnas — and has needed little restoration; the date on the neckline is partly abraded, which accounts for the MDV/MDVI uncertainty.

Reception

The Madonna of the Meadow has been one of the treasures of the Habsburg collections since 1662 and of the Kunsthistorisches Museum since 1891; it is the picture by which Vienna knows Raphael, and it has been the subject of some of the most important art-historical writing on him. Wölfflin's Classic Art analysed it as the purest statement of the pyramidal group — "the figures are so placed that the group could be turned on a pedestal and would hold from every side"; Oskar Fischel's study of the drawings made it the central case for Raphael's method of design; and the Albertina's possession of the principal preparatory sheets has made Vienna the place where painting and drawings can be seen together. It was lent to the Raphael exhibitions of 1983–84 and 2020. Among the three great Florentine Madonnas it is, by general consent, the most perfectly balanced — less sweet than the Goldfinch, less grand than the Belle Jardinière, and more completely resolved than either.

What to look at

The five-variant sheet in the Albertina, if one can see it; then the painting's Child, leaning back against his mother's knee and reaching for the cross — the movement that the drawings were made to find; the Virgin's left hand under his arm; the Baptist's upturned face; the cross on the central axis; and the lake, with its tiny figures, which is the most peaceful landscape Raphael painted. The date on the neckline, MDV or MDVI, is the painter's own record of the year the Florentine Madonna was perfected.

Taddeo Taddei

Taddeo Taddei (1470–1528) was a wealthy Florentine merchant with humanist tastes and a house in the Via de' Ginori, a friend of Bembo and of the Medici; Vasari's remark that he "wished always to have Raphael in his house and at his table" suggests that the young painter from Urbino lived, for a time, under his roof, and the two pictures Vasari mentions were presumably made there. Taddeo's patronage of both Raphael and Michelangelo — the tondo and the Madonna, within a year or two of each other — makes his house the scene of one of the closest encounters between the two in Florence, and the Meadow's debt to the tondo is the evidence that Raphael saw the marble in progress. Taddeo also commissioned from Raphael, according to Vasari, a second Madonna "in his first manner"; which picture that was is disputed, and it may be lost.

The uncovered head

The Virgin of the Meadow is the only one of the three great Florentine Madonnas whose head is bare — no veil, the fair hair parted in the middle and drawn smoothly back. The detail is small but it changes the figure: without the veil's softening, the face is more sculptural, the profile clearer, the whole head more classical; and the bare head, with its Leonardesque modelling of the temple and the cheek, is one of the passages in which the picture is closest to the Saint Anne cartoon. The hair itself is painted strand by strand over a warm underlayer, with a highlight along the parting, in the manner of the Umbrian panels but with a new softness at the edges.

The Habsburg picture

The Meadow's three and a half centuries in Habsburg hands — Ambras, the Belvedere, the Kunsthistorisches Museum — have given it a distinctive place in the literature: it is the Raphael that the Austrian and German tradition knew best, and the Vienna art historians from Wickhoff to Schlosser, and Wölfflin in Basel and Munich, made it the central example of the Florentine Madonna in their teaching. Its association with the Belvedere — the baroque palace where the imperial gallery hung from 1776 — gave it its older name; the move to the new Kunsthistorisches Museum on the Ring in 1891 placed it in the Italian galleries with the Habsburg Titians and Giorgiones, where it still hangs, the only Florentine Madonna by Raphael north of the Alps and the best preserved of them all.

Comparing the three

The three Florentine Madonnas in landscape — the Meadow in Vienna, the Goldfinch in Florence, the Belle Jardinière in Paris — are so often discussed together that it is worth saying plainly how they differ. The Meadow is the broadest and calmest: the Virgin's body makes a wide base, the landscape opens on one side, and the group is balanced like a sculpture. The Goldfinch is the most intimate and the most domestic: the children are closest, the Virgin's attention is divided between book and Baptist, and the landscape is a Tuscan valley rather than a vista. The Belle Jardinière is the tallest and grandest: the Virgin in profile, the Child looking up, the pyramid steep, the format arched, the whole approaching the monumentality of an altarpiece. Seen as a sequence they show a single idea — Leonardo's pyramid, inhabited by Raphael's children — being developed over two years from balance to intimacy to grandeur; and the drawings for all three, which overlap and borrow from one another, show that the painter thought of them as one problem with three answers. The Meadow is the first answer, and the most complete. It is also the one in which the painter's hand is most evenly sustained from corner to corner — the landscape as fine as the figures, the children as finished as the Virgin — which is why, of the three, it is the one that specialists most often name when asked for the Florentine Raphael at his purest. The Albertina, a few minutes' walk from the museum, keeps the drawings; a morning spent between the two is the best introduction to Raphael's method that any city can offer. The picture repays the walk; so do the sheets. Between them they show a young man of twenty-two inventing, by trial and patience, a form that Europe would use for three centuries.

The picture

A panel, 107 by 77 cm, in the Uffizi: the Virgin, seated on a rock in a landscape, holds a book in her left hand and with her right steadies the infant Baptist, who stands at her knee holding up a goldfinch; the naked Christ Child, standing between her knees with his foot on hers, reaches out to touch the bird; behind, a wide landscape of meadow, river, bridge, trees and blue hills under a pale sky. The Virgin wears a red dress and a blue mantle; her head, with its transparent veil, inclines towards the Baptist; her eyes are lowered to the book. The two children are related to each other across her lap — the Baptist offering, Christ receiving — and the three figures together form a pyramid whose apex is the Virgin's head and whose base is the children's feet on the grass.

The commission and the disaster

Vasari tells the story. The picture was painted for Lorenzo Nasi, a Florentine wool merchant, on the occasion of his marriage to Sandra Canigiani (1505 or 1506), and it hung in his house on the hill of Monte San Giorgio, south of the Arno, until 12 November 1547, when a landslide brought down the hill and the house with it; the panel was found in the rubble in seventeen pieces, and Lorenzo's son Battista had it pieced together and restored "with great diligence" — by Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio, according to the tradition — so that, Vasari says, it was almost as good as new. It remained in the Nasi family until the seventeenth century, passed to Cardinal Giovan Carlo de' Medici, and entered the Uffizi in 1666; it has been there since. The damage of 1547 and the sixteenth-century restoration determined the picture's condition for four and a half centuries: the joins between the fragments were filled and repainted, and subsequent restorers added layers of retouching and varnish, until by the twentieth century the Goldfinch was among the most heavily overpainted pictures in the Uffizi. A ten-year restoration at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure (1999–2008) removed the accumulated overpaint, stabilised the seventeen fragments and retouched the losses with reversible colour, and the picture as now seen is closer to Raphael's than anyone alive had known it.

The pyramid

The Goldfinch is the second of the three great Florentine Madonnas in landscape — with the Madonna of the Meadow (Vienna) and the Belle Jardinière (Louvre) — and the three together are the fullest demonstration of what Raphael learned from Leonardo. The problem was the one Leonardo's Virgin and Child with Saint Anne cartoon had posed: how to bind three figures into a single sculptural group, with a continuous contour and a real relation between the bodies, so that the composition turns in space and the relationships carry the emotional content. Raphael's solution, here, is the pyramid: the Virgin seated at the apex, the two children at the base, each turned against the Virgin's axis — the Baptist at her right knee, leaning in; Christ between her knees, turning to his left — so that the group has torsion as well as stability. The Virgin's head inclines to the right, her body to the left; her arms reach down on either side; the children's bodies cross in front of her; and the whole is contained within a triangle whose sides are the line of her mantle falling from shoulder to knee. It is a structure of great stability and great inner movement, and it was copied for three hundred years.

The goldfinch and the book

The iconography is simple and exact. The goldfinch, which feeds on thistles and was said to have got its red face from the blood of Christ's brow when it plucked a thorn from the crown, is the bird of the Passion; the Baptist, who foretold the Passion, holds it; Christ, who will suffer it, reaches for it with a child's curiosity — and the gesture is at once natural and prophetic. The book in the Virgin's hand is, as in the Solly and Norton Simon Madonnas, the book of hours in which she reads the future; her lowered eyes rest on it. The landscape — a river with a bridge, a stand of trees, blue hills — is a Florentine valley, and the bridge has been read as a symbol of Christ the mediator; it may simply be a bridge. What is certain is that every element of the picture works on two levels, the domestic and the doctrinal, and that the painter's art lies in making the second invisible in the first.

The children

Raphael's children are the part of the picture that the Florentine years most changed. The Umbrian infants of the Diotalevi and Solly Madonnas are real but static; these two are in motion — the Baptist stepping forward with the bird, Christ turning and reaching, his left foot planted on his mother's instep for balance — and their bodies are drawn with a new knowledge of infant anatomy: the roundness of the belly, the creases at the wrists and thighs, the weight on the small feet. The drawings show where this came from. The Ashmolean sheets for the Goldfinch and the Meadow — pen studies of children, nude, in a dozen poses, tried and retried — are studies from life, from the shop boys and, no doubt, from the children of the Florentine households Raphael frequented; they are among the most beautiful drawings of children in existence, and they show the painter learning, by drawing, what Leonardo had learned before him: that a child's body has its own proportions and its own grace.

The landscape

The landscape is among the most developed of the Florentine Madonnas and, since the restoration, among the most beautiful: a meadow falling away behind the figures to a river, a bridge, a cluster of buildings, and on either side stands of slender trees, their foliage painted leaf by leaf against a sky graded from a warm horizon to blue; far off, the hills dissolve in atmospheric blue. It is a Flemish-Umbrian distance transplanted to Tuscany, and it serves the group as a monument's setting serves the monument — the figures are placed in it, not before it, and the light that falls on them is the light of the valley.

Technique and condition

The panel is poplar; the ground white; the paint thin and smooth, the flesh modelled in soft Leonardesque gradations, the draperies in local colour with glazes, the landscape in fine strokes over a pale underlayer. The seventeen fragments of 1547 are rejoined along lines that run through the Virgin's face, the Baptist's body and the sky; the Opificio's restoration, which used reversible retouching on the joins and removed the sixteenth- and nineteenth-century overpaint, has recovered the cool tonality, the landscape and the transparency of the veil, and revealed that the Virgin's face, though crossed by a join, is largely intact. The picture is now in as good a state as it can be.

Drawings

Besides the Ashmolean studies of children there are composition sketches in Oxford and Vienna, in pen, showing the group being worked out — the Baptist first at the left, then at the right; the Child first seated, then standing — and a study for the Virgin's head. The sequence is the classic instance of Raphael's method of variation: a dozen tries, each slightly different, until the group locked.

Reception

The Madonna del Cardellino was famous from the moment of its rescue from the landslide, and it has remained one of the best-known images in the Uffizi. Its popularity in the nineteenth century was enormous — it was among the most engraved and photographed of all Raphael's pictures, and the copies in British provincial collections listed in Wikidata (at Liverpool, at York) are a small sample of the hundreds made — and it was, for the Victorians, the very type of the Raphael Madonna: sweet, domestic, set in a landscape, with two pretty children. The twentieth century, repelled by the sweetness and the overpaint, preferred the Meadow and the Belle Jardinière; the 2008 restoration, which revealed the picture beneath the accretions, restored it to the company of its peers. It hangs in the Uffizi's Raphael room, where the Opificio's work can be judged; it travelled to Rome in 2020.

What to look at

The Baptist's hand holding the bird, and Christ's reaching for it — the point of contact on which the whole picture turns; the Virgin's right hand on the Baptist's back, steadying him; the Child's foot on his mother's; the line of the Virgin's mantle from shoulder to knee, which is the side of the pyramid; and, in the distance, the bridge. After the restoration, look also at the sky, which was brown for three centuries and is now a pale, clear Florentine blue.

The restoration of 1999–2008

The Opificio's campaign was among the longest and most closely documented restorations of a Renaissance panel. The picture arrived with a surface that was, in effect, a sixteenth-century reconstruction overlaid by three centuries of retouching: the seventeen fragments had been rejoined with nails and glue, the joins filled with gesso and painted over, and successive restorers had extended the retouching far beyond the losses, so that large areas of the sky, the landscape and the Virgin's mantle were not Raphael's paint at all. The Opificio's conservators removed the overpaint layer by layer, consolidated the original fragments on a new support, filled the losses with reversible material and retouched them in a manner distinguishable at close range; the work was documented at every stage and published. The result surprised even the specialists: the picture's tonality, long thought warm and golden, proved to be cool and clear; the landscape, long thought schematic, proved to be as fine as the Meadow's; and the Virgin's face, crossed by a join, proved to be largely original. The restored picture was unveiled in 2008 in an exhibition at the Palazzo Medici Riccardi and then returned to the Uffizi, where it hangs in the Raphael room with the Self-portrait and the Doni portraits.

Lorenzo Nasi and the wedding

Lorenzo Nasi was a wool merchant of the Santa Croce quarter, of a family with commercial ties to the Canigiani, into which he married; the picture was, by Vasari's account, a wedding gift or a commission for the new household, and it is one of several Florentine Madonnas — the Canigiani Holy Family is another — made for marriages within the same circle of merchant families. The domestic destination shaped the picture: it is a private image, made to hang in a bedchamber or a sala, and its subject — a mother and two children in a meadow — is a picture of family as much as of doctrine. The landslide of 1547, which destroyed the Nasi house and several others on Monte San Giorgio, is recorded in the Florentine chronicles; that the panel survived at all, in seventeen pieces, and that the family had it restored rather than discarded, says something about how the Nasi valued it — and about how far, by 1547, Raphael's name had come to stand for something worth keeping.

Copies and descendants

The Goldfinch was among the most copied of Raphael's pictures from the sixteenth century onward — a sign both of its fame and of its subject's appeal — and the copies range from full-scale workshop replicas to the small provincial versions, in British and Continental collections, that Wikidata lists under Raphael's name (see the "copies and works after" section of this catalogue). The composition was also mined for motifs: the Baptist with the bird, the Child's foot on his mother's, the seated Virgin with the book recur in Florentine painting for a generation, and the picture's pyramid — with the Meadow's and the Belle Jardinière's — became the standard form of the Madonna in landscape for Andrea del Sarto, for the Roman school, and ultimately for the academies. Of the three great Florentine Madonnas it is the one most often reproduced and the one whose restoration has most changed what the reproductions show. Anyone who knows it from an old print should look again.

A panel, 46 by 34 cm, on poplar, in a private collection, showing the Magdalen in half-length, holding her jar of ointment, with long hair falling over her shoulders: a small devotional picture of the Umbrian-Florentine type, which a group of Italian scholars proposed in the early 2020s as an autograph work of Raphael of around 1505, on the basis of stylistic comparison and technical analysis, and which Wikidata records with that attribution. The proposal received wide press coverage and has not been accepted by the principal Raphael specialists or by the major museums, who regard the picture as the work of a follower or of the Umbrian school; it is catalogued here as Wikidata catalogues it, with that caveat. The type — a beautiful young woman with loosened hair and a jar, the penitent saint as an object of devotion — was common in Perugino's circle, and the panel, whoever painted it, belongs to that world. Its French Wikipedia article records the attribution debate; there is no English one. Caution is the proper response: new Raphaels are announced every few years, and very few survive scrutiny.

The episode is nevertheless worth a paragraph, because it illustrates how attribution works and why the major museums hold back. A new attribution to Raphael must satisfy several tests at once: the provenance must be traceable, or at least not suspicious; the style must fit a known moment in the painter's development, as judged by those who have handled the secure works; the drawings, if any, must connect; and the technical evidence — the underdrawing, the ground, the pigments, the panel — must be consistent with his documented practice, which is now well understood through the National Gallery, Louvre and Vatican studies. A picture may pass the technical tests (the materials of 1505 were common to every workshop in central Italy) and still fail the others. In this case the proposers relied heavily on computer-assisted comparison of facial types and on pigment analysis; the sceptics replied that facial types were shared by Perugino's whole school and that pigments cannot attribute. The panel's relation to Perugino's own Magdalene in the Pitti — a half-length penitent with loosened hair, of about 1500, which the young Raphael certainly knew — is close enough to suggest that it is a product of that circle, by a hand trained in the same conventions. Until a drawing, a document or a consensus of the specialists connects it to Raphael himself, it belongs to the category of the hopeful. The picture is nonetheless a competent Umbrian panel of around 1505, and a reminder of how many painters in Perugino's orbit could approach, without reaching, the young Raphael's manner. The attribution question will be settled, if at all, by the drawings. For the reader of this catalogue, the entry is best understood as a marker: here is one of the points where the Wikidata record of Raphael's oeuvre extends beyond what scholarship would endorse, and where the reader should weigh the claim rather than accept it. Such items are few — the great majority of the 324 works listed here are securely his or his workshop's — but they exist, and it is more honest to include them with a warning than to omit them silently.

The picture

A panel transferred to canvas, 65 by 51 cm, in the Galleria Borghese, Rome: a young woman, blonde, in her late teens or early twenties, seated in three-quarter view before an open loggia whose two columns frame a landscape of hills, a lake and a pale sky; she wears a dress of red-brown with wide sleeves of a lighter colour and a white chemise gathered at the neck, a pendant of a large ruby and a pearl on a gold chain, and her fair hair falls in loose waves to her shoulders from a centre parting; on her lap, held in the crook of her arm, sits a small white unicorn, which she holds with both hands. She looks at us with a calm, slightly distant gaze. The light falls from the left; the colours are cool and clear; the pose, the loggia, the landscape and the hands follow, closely and deliberately, the formula of Leonardo's Mona Lisa.

A picture in layers

The Lady with a Unicorn has one of the strangest histories of any Raphael. It was recorded in the Borghese collection from the seventeenth century as a Saint Catherine of Alexandria — a woman with a palm, a broken wheel and a cloak — and was attributed to Perugino; in 1935 the restorer Cesare Brandi and the scholar Roberto Longhi, suspecting overpaint, had the picture cleaned, and the cleaning removed the saint's attributes and cloak and revealed the unicorn and the loggia beneath. The transformation into Saint Catherine had been made, it appears, in the seventeenth century, to turn a secular portrait into a devotional image; the unicorn, the columns and the sleeves were Raphael's — or largely so. X-radiography has since shown that under the unicorn there is a small dog, a lap-dog of the kind that appears in Venetian portraits as an emblem of fidelity, and that the unicorn was painted over it, probably by another hand and perhaps soon after the portrait was made; and the transfer to canvas, done in the nineteenth century, has flattened the surface and made some passages hard to judge. The picture as we see it is thus a Raphael portrait with a later unicorn on a Leonardesque design, freed from a Baroque disguise — a palimpsest, and a famous one.

Attribution and identity

The attribution to Raphael, proposed by Longhi after the cleaning, is now general, with reservations about the unicorn and the sleeves, which some give to a collaborator (Ridolfo Ghirlandaio's name has been mentioned). The date, c. 1505–06, is fixed by the relation to the Mona Lisa (begun in 1503 and in Leonardo's studio in Florence when Raphael arrived) and to the Doni portraits. The sitter is unknown; the unicorn — emblem of chastity, which only a virgin could tame — and the jewel suggest a betrothal portrait, painted for a marriage, and various Florentine brides have been proposed: Maddalena Strozzi (before her marriage to Doni), Giulia Farnese (impossibly), a member of the Borghese or Aldobrandini families. None is proved. She is, whoever she was, a young Florentine woman of good family, painted at the moment of her engagement, with the symbol of her virtue on her lap.

The portrait and Leonardo

The picture is the clearest instance in Raphael's work of the direct study of the Mona Lisa. A drawing in the Louvre (Q131786639), in pen over black chalk, shows a young woman in exactly Leonardo's pose — three-quarter view, seated, hands folded, a loggia with columns behind — and is usually taken as Raphael's record of the Mona Lisa as it then was (the columns, which Leonardo's picture has lost or never fully had, appear in the drawing); the Lady with a Unicorn follows the drawing closely, as do the Doni portraits. What Raphael took was the format — the seated three-quarter figure with hands, the parapet or loggia, the landscape — and the sense of a person occupying a space; what he did not take, or did not yet want, was the sfumato, the smile, the atmosphere. His young woman is painted in a clear, even light, with crisp contours and a transparent modelling that owes more to Perugino than to Leonardo; her expression is candid rather than enigmatic; and the landscape behind her is an open, luminous Umbrian distance, not a Leonardesque wilderness. The result is a portrait that is Leonardesque in structure and Raphaelesque in feeling — and that, with its fair hair, its clear colour and its air of composed youth, has become one of the most popular images of the Renaissance woman.

Technique and condition

The picture was painted on panel and transferred to canvas in the nineteenth century; the transfer, and the two cleanings, have left the surface somewhat flattened and the sleeves and parts of the dress abraded. The face, hands and jewel are well preserved, and the landscape — the lake, the hills, the pale sky — retains its delicacy. The unicorn, painted over the dog, is of slightly different handling from the rest. The loggia's columns are drawn with ruled precision, and the light on them is exactly observed.

Afterlife

Since its rediscovery the Lady with a Unicorn has been among the Borghese's most famous pictures and one of the most reproduced of all Raphael's portraits; it is the image that, for the general public, stands for the Renaissance bride. Its history has made it a favourite case in the literature of conservation and connoisseurship — the picture that was a Perugino Saint Catherine until 1935 — and a cautionary tale about what lies under old masters. It was lent to the great exhibitions of 1984 and 2020, and it hangs in the Borghese's Sala di Didone with the Deposition and the small Portrait of a Man — the Borghese's three Raphaels, spanning the Umbrian, Florentine and Roman periods in one room.

The unicorn and the dog

The small animal on the sitter's lap has a double history. Beneath the unicorn, X-radiographs taken after the 1935 cleaning revealed a small dog — a lap-dog with a short muzzle and a curled tail, of the kind that sits on the knees of Venetian and Ferrarese ladies in portraits of the period, where it stands for marital fidelity. At some point — the handling suggests the sixteenth century, and perhaps a date close to the original — the dog was replaced by a unicorn, whose meaning is adjacent but distinct: the unicorn, which in the bestiaries can be caught only by a virgin in whose lap it lays its head, is the emblem of chastity, and it draws the chariot in Petrarch's Triumph of Chastity, one of the most illustrated texts of the Quattrocento. A dog says this woman will be faithful; a unicorn says this woman is pure. The change may reflect a change in the portrait's purpose — from a record of a marriage to a celebration of a betrothal — or simply a patron's second thought; what it shows is that the picture was, from the start, an emblematic object, a portrait in which the attribute carried the message. Whether Raphael painted the unicorn himself is doubtful: its handling is coarser than the face and hands, and most scholars give it to a collaborator or a slightly later hand.

The cleaning of 1935

The story of the picture's recovery is one of the set pieces of twentieth-century connoisseurship. Roberto Longhi, examining the Borghese's "Perugino" Saint Catherine in the late 1920s, was struck by the quality of the head and hands and by the incongruity of the saint's attributes with the sitter's evident worldliness — the jewel, the loosened hair, the fashionable sleeves — and proposed that a Raphael portrait lay beneath a devotional overpaint. The restoration, carried out in 1935–36 under the direction of the Istituto Centrale del Restauro's founders, removed the cloak, the wheel and the palm, and exposed the loggia, the landscape and the unicorn, confirming the hypothesis; Longhi published the result, and the Lady with a Unicorn entered the literature as a rediscovered Raphael. The Saint Catherine disguise had been added, probably in the seventeenth century, when the Borghese inventory required a subject and a secular portrait of an unknown woman was less desirable than a saint; the practice was common. The cleaning was also one of the first major interventions to be documented with photographs at each stage, and the sequence — saint, half-revealed portrait, portrait — is still reproduced as a lesson.

The dress and the jewel

The sitter's costume is a small document of Florentine fashion around 1505: the dress of a warm red-brown (the guarnello of the inventories) with a low square neckline, the full sleeves of a lighter tone tied at the shoulder, the white chemise gathered at the neck, the hair worn loose and long — a style permitted to unmarried girls — and the single great jewel, a ruby set in gold with a pendant pearl, on a chain. The pendant is of the type given as a betrothal gift, and it is painted with the same jeweller's exactness as Maddalena Doni's; the ruby was the stone of passion and the pearl of purity, and the two together made a conventional emblem of the bride. Everything in the picture, in short — the loose hair, the jewel, the animal, the loggia open to the world — says betrothal, and the portrait almost certainly marked one.

The loggia and the question of the columns

The two columns framing the landscape are the feature that most directly connects the picture with Leonardo. The Mona Lisa as it now exists shows at its edges the bases of two columns, cut off — whether by a later trimming of the panel or by Leonardo's own decision is disputed — and the Louvre drawing (Q131786639) shows the columns entire. Raphael's Lady gives them at full height, with the landscape between, and it is the best evidence we have of how Leonardo's composition looked, or was meant to look, around 1505. The loggia also does something for the portrait: it places the sitter on a threshold between the room and the world, so that she is at once indoors and before a landscape, which is the structural idea of the Mona Lisa and of the whole tradition of the Renaissance portrait with a view.

Attribution, again

The attribution to Raphael has been almost universal since 1935, but the picture's condition has left room for argument about how much of it is his. The face, the hands, the jewel and the landscape are accepted as autograph; the unicorn and parts of the sleeves are given by some to a collaborator, perhaps Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, who completed the Belle Jardinière's drapery according to Vasari and who was working beside Raphael in Florence; the transfer to canvas has made the question harder to settle. The date, c. 1505–06, is not in doubt. What the picture shows, in any case, is Raphael's first full engagement with the Leonardesque portrait and his first great female portrait — the start of the line that runs through La Muta and La Velata to the Fornarina.

Afterlife, again

The picture's fame since 1935 has been of a particular kind: it has become the Renaissance portrait of a young woman that the public knows best after the Mona Lisa itself — reproduced on the covers of books about the Renaissance, on the posters of Borghese exhibitions, in the imagery of Italian tourism — and its blonde sitter, with her calm gaze and her improbable pet, has acquired a popular currency that few of Raphael's Madonnas can match. The art-historical literature has been more cautious, preoccupied with the layers and the hands; but the portrait's hold on the general imagination is itself a fact about Raphael, who painted, in the years when he was learning from Leonardo, an image of youthful serenity that has proved as durable as the master's of enigma. The Borghese, which shows it at eye level in a room of moderate size, allows the comparison with the Deposition of two years later on the opposite wall: the same painter, the same gallery, and the distance between a portrait of perfect stillness and a history picture of straining bodies is the distance Florence made him travel.

A pen drawing in the Uffizi: Saint George on his rearing horse, driving his lance at the dragon — the composition study connected with the two small Saint George panels (Louvre, Q2529918; Washington, Q2622161). The sheet tries the group's action — the horse's rear, the saint's turn, the dragon's coil — with the quick, hooked pen-line of the Florentine years, and its variants from both panels place it in the design process between them; it is the principal graphic witness to the little pictures' development. The drawing's energy, looser than either painting, is the usual lesson of Raphael's pen: the first idea is the wildest, and the panels are its discipline. The sheet is shown in the Uffizi's drawing rotations and reproduced in the Saint George literature.

The only surviving panel of the predella of the Ansidei altarpiece, about 26 by 52 cm, oil on panel, in the National Gallery, London, where it rejoined the main panel in 1983 after a separate history (it had remained in England since the 1764 sale but passed through other hands, and was bought by the Gallery from the Lansdowne collection). The Baptist stands on a rocky rise at the centre, in his camel-skin and a red mantle, one arm raised in exhortation, the other holding his cross, preaching to a crowd of listeners who sit and stand around him in the landscape — men in contemporary dress, some turned away, some looking up, a child among them; behind, trees, hills and a pale sky. The composition is a small istoria of the kind the Colonna predella had also shown, with the figures disposed in a loose semicircle around the speaker and the landscape giving depth; the variety of poses among the listeners, and the energy of the Baptist's gesture, look forward to the preaching Paul of the tapestry cartoons, in which the same problem — a speaker and a crowd — is solved at monumental scale. The other two predella panels, a Marriage of the Virgin and a miracle of Saint Nicholas, are lost; the reunion of this one with the altarpiece in 1983 allowed the National Gallery, for the first time, to show a Raphael altarpiece with part of its predella. The panel is in good condition; the small figures are painted with the fineness of the Oddi predella, and the Baptist's red mantle is the brightest note in the room.

The subject was a natural one for an altarpiece whose principal saint was the Baptist, and the predella's programme — the Baptist preaching, the Virgin's marriage, a miracle of Nicholas — gave one scene to each of the altarpiece's three figures. What Raphael made of the preaching is characteristic: rather than a formal assembly he painted a crowd in a landscape, varied in age and dress and attention, with the preacher's raised arm as the single energetic gesture that organises the whole. The small figures are handled with the same economy as the Oddi and Colonna predellas, but with a greater sense of the group — the listeners are related to one another, not merely ranged before the speaker — and the landscape, with its trees and distant hills, is continuous with the world seen through the arch of the altarpiece above. The drawing for the composition does not survive; the underdrawing, seen in infrared, shows the cartoon method of the main panel. The panel's separate wanderings — it left Blenheim before the altarpiece, passed through the Lansdowne collection, and was bought by the National Gallery in 1983 — are a small instance of how predellas, detachable and saleable, tended to part from their altarpieces; its return is one of the Gallery's quiet triumphs. It is shown in a case below the altarpiece. Its survival, when its two companions are lost, is the kind of accident that shapes what we know.

The Wikidata item is for the chapel itself — a small oratory attached to the former Camaldolese monastery of San Severo in Perugia, now a museum — but what it stands for here is the fresco on its end wall, the earliest surviving fresco by Raphael: the Trinity with Saints, about 389 by 175 cm as the whole wall, signed and dated on a cartouche RAPHAEL DE URBINO D[OMI]NO OCTAVIANO STEPHANO VOLATERRANO PRIORE SANCTAM TRINITATEM ANGELOS ASTANTES SANCTOSQ[UE] PINXIT A.D. MDV — "Raphael of Urbino painted the Holy Trinity, the attendant angels and the saints, in the priorate of Ottaviano Stefano of Volterra, in the year of the Lord 1505."

The upper register is Raphael's. Christ sits enthroned on a bank of cloud at the centre, blessing, with the dove above him and (formerly — the figure is lost) God the Father at the top; on either side, two angels; and below, seated on the cloud in a semicircle, six saints of the Camaldolese and Benedictine orders — Maurus, Placidus, Benedict at the left, Romuald, Benedict Martyr and John Martyr at the right — each in his habit, some reading, some gazing up. The lower register, with six standing saints in niches, was painted in 1521 by the aged Perugino, after Raphael's death, at the request of the monks — a poignant reversal, the master completing the pupil.

The fresco is important far beyond its condition, which is poor: the surface is abraded, the colours have sunk, the upper part is lost, and the whole has been restored more than once (most recently in 2010). It shows Raphael, at twenty-two, attempting for the first time the medium and the scale of the Stanze, and it shows the composition of the Disputa in embryo: a celestial assembly on a bank of cloud, seated in a semicircle around a central Christ, with the same problem — how to make a row of saints into a group — that the Disputa's upper zone would solve at full scale four years later. The influence of Fra Bartolomeo's Last Judgement fresco at Santa Maria Nuova in Florence, which Raphael had just seen and which uses exactly this semicircular arrangement, is plain; it is the first fruit of the Florentine journey, planted in Perugia.

The drawings — studies for the saints in Oxford and Lille — show the usual method; the fresco itself shows a painter handling the medium competently but without the fluency the Stanze would bring. The chapel is open to the public and little visited; the fresco, behind glass, in a bare room, is one of the least known and most instructive works of the early career. The monastery of San Severo was suppressed in the nineteenth century and the chapel passed to the commune; it is now part of the civic museum system and can be visited on request, a few minutes' walk from the Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria. The inscription, with its careful Latin and its date, is the earliest instance of Raphael signing a fresco. He would sign the Stanze nowhere.

The picture

A small panel, 47.5 by 33 cm, in the Uffizi: a young man of about twenty-one, seen in half-length and three-quarter view turned to the left, his head turned further so that he looks out past the viewer, wearing a black cap and a plain dark gown over a white shirt whose collar shows at the neck; his hair, dark and shoulder-length, falls from under the cap; the face is oval, smooth, beardless, the eyes large and heavy-lidded, the mouth small and composed; the background is a plain greenish-grey. The light falls from the left; the modelling is soft and luminous; there is no hand, no attribute, no inscription. It is, by long tradition and with a fair degree of probability, the face of Raphael at the moment of his arrival in Florence — the most reproduced image of him, the source of every later portrait, and the picture to which Vasari's description of his "modesty and goodness" has always been attached.

Attribution and identity

The panel is first securely recorded in 1682 in the Medici collection of artists' self-portraits begun by Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici, in which it was catalogued as Raphael's own likeness; it passed with that collection to the Uffizi, where it has hung in the Vasari Corridor and in the Raphael rooms ever since. Its early history is unknown, and both its identity and its authorship have been questioned. That it represents Raphael rests on its resemblance to the figure traditionally taken to be his self-portrait at the right edge of the School of Athens — the young man in the black cap looking out beside Sodoma — and to the Louvre Self-portrait with a Friend; to the woodcut in Vasari's 1568 Lives, which was made from a picture of this type; and to the Ashmolean black-chalk head of a youth (Q137180986), which shows the same features a few years younger. That it is by Raphael has been doubted on grounds of condition — the panel has been much restored, the surface is worn, and some scholars have seen in the flat, rather dry handling the work of a copyist or a later hand — but the majority, and the Uffizi, accept it as an autograph work of about 1504–06, the first Florentine years. The truth is probably that it is Raphael's, and that its present state, after centuries of wear and overpaint, gives an imperfect idea of what he painted.

The portrait

Taken on its own terms, the self-portrait is a work of studied simplicity. The young man does not look at us — his gaze goes past our left shoulder into the middle distance, which gives the picture an air of reserve, of a sitter absorbed in something other than being seen. The cap and gown are of the plainest; the shirt-collar is the only white; the background is neutral. There is nothing of the painter in it — no brush, no drawing, no reference to the craft — and nothing of the courtier either, save the fastidious neatness of the dress and hair. It is a portrait of a face, and the face is remarkable: the long oval, the heavy lids, the slightly melancholy set of the mouth, the luminous, very smooth skin, all rendered with the soft, shadowless modelling that he had learned from Perugino and was about to refine under Leonardo. The head turns in the opposite direction from the body, which gives the still image a small internal movement; the line of the cap, the cheek and the collar makes a continuous curve that the eye follows down into the dark of the gown.

What the portrait tells us is partly what the painter wished it to tell. He presents himself as a young gentleman — not a craftsman — in the sober dress of the Florentine or Urbino bourgeoisie; he presents himself as grave, inward and composed; he presents himself, above all, as beautiful, in the sense the period gave the word — harmonious, refined, without excess. This is the self-image of the man Castiglione would make the type of the courtier-artist, and it has governed every subsequent description of him. Vasari's "modesty," the Romantics' "angelic" Raphael, the nineteenth-century engravings that made this face the face of genius as grace — all derive from this small, worn panel.

Technique and condition

The panel is thin poplar; the medium, unusually, has been described as tempera with oil glazes, though the handling is consistent with the thin oil of the early period; the ground is white; the paint is very thin, the flesh built up in soft transitions with the faintest rose in the cheeks and lips, the hair laid in with a fine brush over a dark underlayer. The background has been repainted; the gown has been reinforced; and the surface bears the marks of at least two old restorations. A cleaning in the 1980s removed some overpaint and revealed the original tonality, which is cooler and more delicate than the nineteenth-century reproductions suggest. Infrared examination has shown a light underdrawing and small adjustments to the outline of the cap and cheek, which are among the arguments for autograph status.

Afterlife

No other image of Raphael has had comparable currency. It was copied for the Uffizi's own series of artists' portraits and for countless private galleries; it was engraved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries more often than any other Raphael except the Sistine Madonna; it was the model for the portrait medals and the statues — Urbino's, Vienna's — and for Ingres's Raphael in the Apotheosis of Homer and the Raphael and the Fornarina series; and it furnished the frontispiece of almost every monograph from Passavant to the present. Its fame has been a disservice to its study: it is so familiar that it is hard to see, and its condition so compromised that it is easy to underrate. Seen freshly — in the Uffizi's Raphael room, where it hangs among the Doni portraits and the Goldfinch — it is a quiet, reticent, very accomplished portrait of a serious young man who did not yet know that he would be famous, or who knew it and chose to paint something else.

The Vasari woodcut and the making of a face

Vasari's Lives of 1568 carried, for each artist, a woodcut portrait in an ornamental frame, and Raphael's was cut from a drawing after a picture of this type — the three-quarter head in the cap, turned to the left. From that woodcut, and from the Uffizi panel once it entered the Medici gallery, every subsequent image of Raphael descends: the engravings in the eighteenth-century editions of Vasari and Bellori, the portrait prefixed to Passavant's monograph, the busts in the Protomoteca Capitolina and the Pantheon, the statues in Urbino (1897) and outside the Künstlerhaus in Vienna, the frontispieces of the twentieth-century catalogues. There is, in consequence, a single canonical face of Raphael — oval, smooth, large-eyed, grave — and it is this one, which means that our sense of the man has been shaped, for four and a half centuries, by a small, worn panel of uncertain status. It is worth remembering that Vasari himself never saw Raphael and that the description of his "modesty and goodness" was written to fit a face already known.

The School of Athens figure

The young man at the extreme right of the School of Athens, standing beside the white-robed Sodoma (or Perugino) and looking out of the picture under a black cap, has been identified as Raphael since the sixteenth century, and he shares with the Uffizi panel the long oval face, the heavy lids and the dark hair under the cap — though he is five or six years older and the fresco's scale and medium make close comparison difficult. The identification is plausible but not certain; what is certain is that the two images have reinforced each other, each being taken as confirmation of the other, so that the circle of evidence is smaller than it looks. The Louvre Self-portrait with a Friend of c. 1518–20 (Q2275653), in which a bearded Raphael stands behind a companion, shows the same features matured and is the third point of the triangle.

The doubts

The case against the panel was put most sharply by Roger Jones and Nicholas Penny in their monograph of 1983, who thought it "much damaged" and were unwilling to treat it as a secure work, and it has been restated by others who find its handling thin beside the Doni portraits of the same years. The case for it rests on the infrared evidence of small autograph adjustments, on the quality of the face where it is best preserved, and on the absence of any plausible alternative author for a picture that was already, by 1682, accepted as Raphael's likeness by himself. The most reasonable position is that the panel is a damaged original: what remains of the surface is consistent with Raphael's Florentine manner, and what is lost has been filled by restorers. The Uffizi's own catalogue takes that view. The visitor should look at the face and ignore the gown.

The artist as gentleman

The convention of the artist's self-portrait in cap and gown, without the tools of the trade, was not new — Perugino had shown himself so, in a fictive frame in the Collegio del Cambio in 1500, with an inscription boasting of his fame; Pinturicchio likewise in Spello — but Raphael's is plainer than either, and plainer than the self-portraits of Dürer, who painted himself as a prince and as Christ. The plainness is itself a statement. The young painter from Urbino, arriving in the city of Leonardo and Michelangelo, presents himself as a person of quality with nothing to prove — no inscription, no emblem, no brush — and the reticence, read in the light of Castiglione, is sprezzatura: the art of seeming not to try. It is a portrait of a man who intends to belong to the world he paints for.

Leopoldo's gallery

Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici (1617–1675), the youngest son of Cosimo II, assembled the first systematic collection of artists' self-portraits, which became the nucleus of the Uffizi's famous series; the Raphael was among its prizes, and it hung in the Vasari Corridor, the long passage over the Ponte Vecchio, with the self-portraits of Titian, Rembrandt, Velázquez and hundreds of others, for three centuries. Its transfer to the Raphael rooms of the Uffizi proper, in the twentieth century, recognised that it is not merely a portrait of a painter but a painting by one, and placed it where its quality could be judged against the Doni portraits and the Goldfinch. There, at eye level, it is a small, still, slightly faded thing — and it is the image through which, for better or worse, the world has always looked at Raphael.

What to look for

The visitor who wants to judge the panel for themselves should look at three places. The eyes, which are the best-preserved passage: large, dark, with the upper lid heavy and the lower softly lit, they have a wet, living quality that no copyist of the seventeenth century could have produced. The line of the jaw against the collar, where a small adjustment of the contour, visible in infrared and faintly on the surface, shows the painter changing his mind about the turn of the head. And the hair at the temple, where the individual strands are laid over the flesh with the fine brush of the Florentine Madonnas. The rest — the gown, the background, much of the cap — is restoration, and should be looked through rather than at. What remains is enough to establish that the panel is, or was, a portrait of the first quality; and its subject, whatever the doubts, has been for nearly five centuries the face the world calls Raphael's. There is a modest pleasure in the fact that the most famous self-portrait of the Renaissance's most famous painter of grace is itself so unassertive: a young man in a black cap, looking away. It is a portrait that declines to explain itself, by a painter whose whole art was explanation.

A panel, 59.5 by 44 cm, in the National Gallery of Art, Washington (Widener Collection): the Virgin, seated, seen at three-quarter length before a landscape, holds the naked Child on her lap with both hands; he stands on her knee, one arm around her neck, and looks out at the viewer; she looks down at him with a gentle smile. She wears a red dress, a blue mantle and a transparent veil; behind, a meadow falls away to a lake and a church with a dome and a campanile — a building that has been identified with San Bernardino outside Urbino, the Montefeltro mausoleum, which Raphael knew from boyhood — and blue hills under a pale sky. The picture is named after the Earls Cowper, whose collection at Panshanger in Hertfordshire held it from the eighteenth century, together with the larger Niccolini-Cowper Madonna (Q2607065), also now in Washington; it was bought by Joseph Widener in 1914 and given to the National Gallery in 1942.

The Small Cowper is among the earliest of the Florentine Madonnas — usually placed around 1505, at the same moment as the Granduca — and it is the one in which the transition from Umbria to Florence is most visible. The format is Umbrian: the half-length Virgin before a landscape with a building, the frontal presentation, the Child looking out; the Perugino type is still present in the Virgin's oval face and lowered lids. But the Child is Florentine — a real infant in motion, his arm flung round his mother's neck, his weight on her knee, his gaze direct — and the relation between the two, the Virgin smiling down and the Child looking out, has a new ease; and the modelling of the faces, with their soft shadows and their luminous half-tones, shows the first effect of Leonardo. It is a picture on the threshold, and its charm is the charm of a young painter trying the new manner on an old form.

The landscape deserves attention. The church with the dome and the slender bell-tower, set on a rise beyond the water, is close enough to San Bernardino at Urbino — Francesco di Giorgio's mausoleum for the Montefeltro, with its dome and its campanile — to suggest that Raphael painted it from memory or from a drawing, and it is a small sign of how the Urbino of his childhood remained his visual home. The rest of the landscape is the feathery, atmospheric Umbrian country of the early panels, with a lake, a few trees and blue hills; the light is the clear, even light of the Florentine Madonnas, and the sky is graded from a warm horizon to blue.

The composition is simple and tight. The Virgin's body, slightly turned to her left, fills the panel; the Child, held in both her hands, stands against her; the two heads — hers inclined, his upright — make a compact group at the top; the horizon runs behind her shoulders. The hands are the binding element: the Virgin's left supports the Child's back, her right holds his side, and his left arm circles her neck — three points of contact that make the pair one mass. The Child's gaze outward and the Virgin's downward make the double address — to the viewer and to each other — that the Granduca also uses.

Technically the panel is in the thin, smooth oil of the period, over a white ground, with the flesh modelled in soft gradations, the blue of the mantle in ultramarine, the red in vermilion and lake, the landscape in fine strokes; the veil is a film of white over the hair. The picture is in very good condition and was cleaned in the 1980s; the colours are fresh and the landscape clear. Infrared examination has shown a careful underdrawing with few changes.

The Cowper provenance is a chapter of English collecting: George Nassau Clavering-Cowper, third Earl Cowper, lived in Florence for much of his life in the later eighteenth century, bought Italian pictures with discernment, and brought home the two Raphael Madonnas that carry his name; at Panshanger they were among the treasures of the house, engraved and admired, until the sales of the early twentieth century sent both to America. The Small Cowper was among the first Raphaels to cross the Atlantic, and its arrival at Widener's Lynnewood Hall, and then at the new National Gallery in Washington, helped to establish the Gallery's Italian collection — with the Alba Madonna, the Niccolini-Cowper and the Saint George, Washington has the finest group of Raphaels in the New World.

The picture is a favourite of the Gallery's public and has been reproduced accordingly; among scholars it is valued as the clearest record of the first Florentine months, before the Meadow and the Goldfinch transformed the Madonna into a pyramidal group. Its Virgin is, perhaps, the last of the Umbrian Madonnas; its Child is the first of the Florentine ones; and the smile that passes between them — the Virgin's the only real smile among Raphael's early Madonnas — is the first sign of Leonardo's mouth in Raphael's work.

The Widener gift of 1942 — Joseph Widener's whole collection, from Lynnewood Hall outside Philadelphia — brought to Washington, with the Small Cowper, Vermeer's Woman Holding a Balance, Rembrandt's Mill and the great Italian bronzes, and it was the second of the founding gifts, after Mellon's, on which the National Gallery was built. The little Raphael has hung in the Italian galleries since the building opened, and its position — among the Gallery's Peruginos and Pinturicchios as well as its later Raphaels — lets the visitor see, in one room, the Umbrian world it came from and the Roman world it led to. It is the earliest Raphael Madonna in the United States and, for most American visitors, the first they see. The picture's nickname — 'Small' to distinguish it from the 'Large' or Niccolini-Cowper — understates it; at sixty centimetres it is not small, and its quality is not modest. It is a picture of the threshold, and the threshold is where Raphael is most instructive.

A small sheet, about 22 by 16 cm, in pen and brown ink over black chalk, in the Département des Arts graphiques of the Louvre: a young woman seated in three-quarter view, her hands folded one over the other in her lap, before a loggia with a column at either side and a landscape between. The pose, the hands, the loggia are those of Leonardo's Mona Lisa, and the drawing is generally taken as Raphael's record of that picture, made in Florence around 1504–06 when Leonardo was still working on it — a record valuable because it shows the columns that the Mona Lisa now lacks (or shows only as fragments at the edges), and so suggests that Leonardo's composition was once, or was planned to be, framed in this way. The sheet is also the immediate source for the Borghese Lady with a Unicorn (Q2344396), whose sitter is posed in the same way before the same loggia, and for the Doni portraits; it is the hinge between Leonardo's invention and Raphael's Florentine portraiture. The drawing is quick, the pen lines summary over a light chalk sketch, the hands and the face more worked than the rest; it has the character of a note made in front of a picture rather than a study from the model. The Wikidata label, "Study for Young Woman with Unicorn," reflects its connection with the Borghese portrait.

A tondo, 87 cm in diameter, in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin: the Virgin, seated at three-quarter length before a low wall and a landscape, holds the naked Child on her lap; he holds a scroll — inscribed, in the Baptist's words, ECCE AGNUS DEI — which the infant Baptist, standing at the left with his hands joined, gazes at; at the right a third child, with a halo, looks on, his hand on the wall — a figure variously identified as the infant Saint James, as a second Baptist, or simply as an attendant child-saint; behind, a wide landscape of lake, hills and sky. The Virgin wears a red dress and a blue mantle, with a transparent veil; her head inclines to the right, her eyes lowered to the scroll. The picture is named after the Dukes of Terranuova, of Naples, in whose collection it was until the Berlin museum bought it in 1854; its earlier history is unknown, but it was presumably painted in Florence around 1505, and it has been associated with the Florentine round-format Madonnas of the moment — the Michelangelo and Luca Signorelli tondi, the Botticelli and Piero di Cosimo tondi — of which it is Raphael's first essay.

The tondo was a Florentine specialty — a round picture, usually a Madonna, made for the domestic camera and hung, often, over a bed or a chest — and Raphael, arriving from Umbria, took it up at once: the Terranuova is his first, the Holy Family with the Palm (Edinburgh) his second, and the Alba Madonna and Madonna della Seggiola, in Rome, the great later examples. The problem of the round format is to fill the circle without distortion and to make the composition turn with the frame; the Terranuova solves it tentatively — the Virgin's body and the wall behind make a horizontal across the circle, the three children are ranged along the base, and the landscape fills the upper segment — without the rotating energy that the Seggiola would bring. It is, in composition, a rectangular Madonna adapted to the round.

What is new in it is the group. Four figures — Virgin, Christ, Baptist and the third child — are held together by the scroll and by their glances: the Virgin and the Baptist look at the scroll, Christ holds it, the third child looks at Christ; the Virgin's hand on the Baptist's shoulder and the Child's hand on hers complete the chain. It is the first of the Florentine Madonnas in which Raphael attempts a group of more than three, and the lesson of Leonardo's Saint Anne — the binding of figures by shared attention to an object — is already being applied. The children are of the new Florentine type: real, plump, active; the Christ Child's body, seen almost frontally as he sits on his mother's knee, is drawn with the knowledge the Ashmolean studies record.

The scroll's inscription, ECCE AGNUS DEI — "Behold the Lamb of God," the Baptist's words on seeing Christ — is the picture's text, and the Baptist's attention to it makes him its speaker; the third child, if he is James, is the apostle who would be the first martyr, and his presence would complete a programme of witness. The landscape, with its lake and its pale hills, is of the feathery Umbrian kind; the wall that runs behind the figures is a Florentine device, placing the group on a terrace between the room and the world.

The panel is in the thin, smooth oil of the period; the flesh is modelled in soft gradations, the draperies in local colour, the landscape in fine strokes over a pale underlayer. The picture is in good condition, cleaned in the twentieth century; the blues have held and the landscape is clear. Infrared examination has shown a careful underdrawing with some changes in the children's positions.

Berlin bought the tondo in 1854, under Gustav Waagen, as a deliberate complement to the Solly Madonnas of 1821 — the gallery was assembling, on principle, a sequence of early Raphaels to show the development from Perugino to Rome, and the Terranuova filled the Florentine place; the Colonna Madonna of 1508 (Q327780), also in Berlin, completes the series. Seen together, the Berlin Madonnas — Solly, Diotalevi, Madonna with Saints Jerome and Francis, Terranuova, Colonna — are the best place to follow the first six years of Raphael's Madonnas, and the Terranuova is the hinge between the Umbrian and the Florentine groups: the last in which the Perugino type governs the Virgin, the first in which the Florentine children and the Leonardesque group appear.

The third child has exercised scholars. He stands at the right, his hand on the parapet, with a halo, looking at the Christ Child — a figure without obvious attribute who has been called the infant Saint James (the Greater, whose feast the patron might have kept), a second angel, or simply a symbolic playmate; his presence makes the tondo a four-figure group, unusual for Raphael's Madonnas, and the asymmetry he introduces — two children at the left, one at the right — is handled by the Virgin's turn towards the Baptist and the scroll, which pulls the composition back to balance. His face is of the same type as the Baptist's, and the two boys, with the Christ Child between, give the picture the air of a nursery — three children around a mother, one of whom holds a message. Whatever he is, he is painted with the same tenderness as the others, and the Berlin catalogue leaves his identity open.

The landscape behind the wall, with its lake, its hills and its distant town, is continuous with the landscapes of the Small Cowper and the Goldfinch, and its pale, clear light is the light of the early Florentine months; the wall itself — a low parapet on which the third child rests his hand — is the device of the Umbrian half-length Madonnas (the Solly, the Norton Simon) carried into the round format, and it gives the tondo a horizon that steadies the circle. Berlin's cleaning of the 1980s recovered the wall's grey and the landscape's blue.

A drawing in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (NMH 292-1863): the Virgin adored by angels — a glory-of-angels composition of the type the Umbrian altarpieces' upper registers and the Foligno's heaven employ — catalogued under Raphael in the Tessin tradition. The last of the eight Stockholm sheets in this catalogue, and the entry repeats the group's refrain: a great early cabinet's traditional attributions, held under the most honoured name, transmitted whole into the modern database, and printed here with their footing shown. The Stockholm group's proper sorting — autograph, school, after — would take a specialist a season; until someone gives it one, the sheets stand as the eighteenth century filed them, which is itself a historical fact worth preserving.

A drawing in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (NMH 288-1863) — a male academy figure seen from the back — from the museum's group of sheets catalogued under Raphael's name ("Rafael, egentligen Raffaello Sanzio") that came with the Swedish royal and Tessin collections. The Stockholm Raphael group, like most old-master attributions formed before modern criticism, mixes autograph sheets, school work and later derivations; this nude study from behind belongs to the Florentine-Roman academy tradition the workshop practised daily, and its status — master or circle — has not been the subject of recent published study. The Nationalmuseum's drawings, from Tessin's purchases of the 1690s–1710s, form one of Europe's oldest cabinets; its Raphael attributions are themselves historical documents of taste, and the eight sheets in this catalogue (Q110746945–Q110799441) are listed on that footing: the collection's tradition, recorded, awaiting the group's modern sorting.

A panel, 131 by 107 cm, in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich: the Holy Family with Saint Elizabeth and the infant Baptist in a landscape — Joseph, standing, leaning on his staff at the apex, looks down; the Virgin, seated at the right, holds the Christ Child, who stands on her knee; Elizabeth, seated at the left, holds the infant Baptist, who kneels and holds a scroll; the two children reach towards each other at the centre of the group; behind, a wide landscape of a walled town, a river, hills and sky, and in the sky, at either side, groups of cherubim in clouds. The five figures form a tall, compact pyramid with Joseph's head at the apex and the two women and children at the base; the Virgin's red and blue, Elizabeth's mauve and yellow, Joseph's grey-violet and yellow make a rich, unusually varied harmony; the signature RAPHAEL VRBINAS is on the neckline of the Virgin's dress.

The picture was painted, Vasari says, for Domenico Canigiani, a Florentine merchant of the family into which Lorenzo Nasi had married — the Goldfinch and the Canigiani are thus pictures for two households of the same clan, made within a year or two of each other — and it remained in the Canigiani house until the later sixteenth century; it passed to the Medici, and in 1691 went to Düsseldorf as part of the dowry of Anna Maria Luisa de' Medici on her marriage to the Elector Palatine Johann Wilhelm, whose gallery passed to Munich in 1806. It is, with the Tempi Madonna (Q2535486), one of the two Florentine Raphaels in the Alte Pinakothek.

The Canigiani is the most ambitious of the Florentine Madonnas and the one that most directly attempts what Leonardo's Saint Anne cartoon and Michelangelo's Doni Tondo had attempted: a multi-figure Holy Family bound into a single sculptural mass. The pyramid is steep and complex — five figures in three tiers, Joseph standing above the seated women, the children between — and the binding is done by glance and gesture: Joseph looks down at the children, the women look at each other and at the children, the children look at each other and touch. The effect is of a closed, self-absorbed group, a family at a moment of quiet exchange, set in the open air; and the composition's difficulty — the problem of making five figures read as one without confusion — is solved by a strict geometry (the pyramid, the crossing diagonals of the women's bodies) that the drawings in Vienna, Oxford and Chantilly show being worked out with great care.

The cherubim in the sky are a story of their own. In the eighteenth century, at Düsseldorf, the upper part of the picture was overpainted — the two groups of angels' heads in clouds at either side were covered with sky, either because they were damaged or because the taste of the time found them intrusive — and for two centuries the picture was known with an empty sky. A restoration in 1983 removed the overpaint and recovered the cherubim, restoring the composition's original balance: the groups of heads at the upper corners fill the spaces that the pyramid leaves empty and echo, in the sky, the heads of the family below. The restored picture is the one now seen, and it is a more complete and more Raphaelesque thing than the one the nineteenth century knew.

The figures show the Florentine Raphael at full stretch. Joseph, leaning on his staff with his weight on one leg, is a grand, Michelangelesque figure — the first of Raphael's large standing men — and his drapery, in grey-violet and yellow, falls in long structural folds; Elizabeth, with her aged face and her turbaned head, is a study in age against the Virgin's youth; the two children, reaching towards each other, are the Florentine infants of the Goldfinch and the Meadow; the Virgin's head, inclined and veiled, is the Florentine type at its most serene. The colour is the richest of the Florentine Madonnas — the mauves and yellows of Elizabeth and Joseph against the Virgin's red and blue — and it looks forward to the cangiante draperies of the Roman frescoes.

The panel is in the thin, smooth oil of the period; the flesh is modelled in soft gradations, the draperies in layers of local colour with glazes, the landscape in fine strokes. The picture was cleaned and restored in 1983, when the cherubim were recovered, and is in good condition; the surface shows some wear in the darker draperies.

The Canigiani has had a curious critical history: admired in the Düsseldorf gallery as one of its treasures, it was somewhat neglected in the twentieth century, when its complexity seemed forced beside the simplicity of the Meadow; the 1983 restoration and the renewed interest in Raphael's relation to Michelangelo have restored its standing as the boldest experiment of the Florentine years — the picture in which the painter of Madonnas first tried to build a history picture out of a family group, and in which the Baglioni Deposition of 1507 is already foreshadowed.

The Düsseldorf gallery, where the Canigiani hung from 1691 to 1806, was the greatest collection of the Rhineland and one of the first picture galleries built for the purpose — the Elector Johann Wilhelm's gallery building of 1709–14, where Rubens's great cycles and the Italian pictures from Florence were displayed to visitors and engraved in a famous catalogue; the Canigiani was among its stars, and Goethe, who saw it there as a young man, remembered it. The gallery's transfer to Munich in 1806, in the Napoleonic reorganisation of the German states, gave the Bavarian capital the nucleus of its Italian collection, and the Canigiani and Tempi have been Munich's Raphaels since. The picture's signature — RAPHAEL VRBINAS on the Virgin's neckline — is one of the few on the Florentine Madonnas, and it suggests that the painter regarded the commission as important: a large, complex, signed picture for a family of standing, and the most ambitious thing he had yet done for a private patron.

A drawing in the Uffizi's Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe: a young woman in half-length profile, her hair bound, drawn in the Florentine years — one of the sheets of female heads and half-lengths connected with the Madonnas and portraits of 1505–07 (the Muta's and the Madonnas' type). The drawing was among the Uffizi sheets lent to the Pushkin Museum's 2016 Raphael exhibition, from whose photograph Wikidata's image comes. Profile studies of this kind sat between the model and the ideal — the painter drawing a Florentine girl and correcting her, stroke by stroke, towards the certa idea — and the sheet is a small document of that daily transaction, the studio's ordinary miracle: the type being made out of a person.

A black-chalk drawing in the Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe of the Uffizi: the Virgin and Child in the composition of the Madonna del Granduca (Q2035209), studied from the model — the sheet usually cited as the Granduca's principal preparatory study. The drawing shows the group with small differences from the panel (the Child turned slightly more inward, the Virgin's contour still loose), and its soft chalk modelling, with the sfumato transitions newly learned from Leonardo, documents the Florentine moment the painting fixes. The sheet — squared in part for transfer — is among the Uffizi's most reproduced Raphael drawings, the painting being ten minutes away in the Pitti; Florence is the one city where such a pairing can be walked between in an afternoon, and the drawing's freedom against the panel's finish is the standard local lesson in what execution added and what it calmed.

A small panel, about 31 by 23 cm, in the Musée Condé at Chantilly: the Virgin, seated in an interior, holds the naked Child on her lap; he sits on a cushion, one foot on her thigh, and looks down at the Virgin's breast, towards which he reaches with one hand while the other holds a fold of her veil; she looks down at him with a gentle gravity. She wears a red dress and a blue mantle, and a transparent veil over her hair; behind her a wall with a shelf on which stand small domestic objects — a jug, a box, a vase — and at the right a window opening onto a landscape of hills and sky. The picture is named after the Orléans collection — the great gallery assembled by Philippe II, duc d'Orléans, regent of France, in the early eighteenth century, which was sold in London in 1798 — and it passed through the hands of English collectors before the duc d'Aumale bought it in 1869 and placed it at Chantilly, where, by the terms of his bequest, it remains.

The Orléans Madonna is one of the small domestic Madonnas of the Florentine years, painted for a private room, and it is unusual among them in being set indoors: the shelf with its jug and box, the window with its view, the wall against which the Virgin sits, make a Florentine camera of the kind the picture itself would have hung in, and the domestic objects — painted with a Flemish exactness — give the sacred pair the setting of an ordinary household. This is a Northern device (the Virgin in a furnished interior is a staple of Flemish painting from van Eyck to Memling, which Florence knew well) and Raphael used it rarely; the Orléans is his most complete essay in it, and one of the most intimate of all his Madonnas.

The group is of the Florentine type: the Child active, leaning and reaching, his weight real on the cushion and the thigh; the Virgin's head inclined, her hands supporting him with the precise, tender grip that Raphael's hands always have; the two bound by the Child's reach towards her breast and her gaze down at him. The motif of the nursing — or about-to-nurse — Child is the Madonna lactans of medieval devotion, domesticated: nothing is shown, but the Child's intention and the mother's acquiescence are. The modelling of the faces is soft and Leonardesque; the Child's body is of the type the Ashmolean studies record; the colour is the classic red and blue against the grey wall and the pale window.

The panel is in the thin, smooth oil of the period, the flesh in soft gradations, the veil a film of white, the objects on the shelf in small precise strokes. It is in good condition, with some wear in the blue of the mantle. Infrared examination has shown an underdrawing with a few small changes in the Child's position. The picture is usually dated around 1506–07, in the later Florentine years, by its relation to the Bridgewater and Tempi Madonnas, which show the same absorption in the mother-and-child pair without attendant figures.

The Orléans provenance places the little panel among the most famous pictures in eighteenth-century Europe: the Orléans collection in the Palais-Royal in Paris was the greatest private gallery of its day, visited by every connoisseur, engraved in its entirety, and its dispersal in London after the Revolution — the Italian pictures sold in 1798 through a syndicate headed by the Duke of Bridgewater — was the founding event of British collecting of old masters. The Orléans Madonna went, with the Bridgewater Madonna (Q3842391), to England; unlike the Bridgewater, which stayed, it returned to France with the duc d'Aumale's purchase and hangs in Chantilly's Santuario with the Three Graces and the Madonna of Loreto — three Raphaels in a room the size of a cupboard, which cannot be lent and must be visited.

The picture is among the least known of the Florentine Madonnas, for that reason, and among the most rewarding: a small, perfect domestic image, in which the painter of the great pyramidal groups shows what he could do with two figures, a shelf and a window.

The objects on the shelf deserve attention for what they tell about Raphael's attention to things. A small covered jar, a box, a vase — domestic objects of the kind found in any Florentine house — are painted with a Flemish exactness of light and surface, the highlight on the jar's glaze, the shadow under the box's lid, and they place the Virgin in a real room as surely as the window places her before a real world. It is the only instance in Raphael's work of a still-life passage of this kind, and it shows that the Northern pictures he had seen in Urbino and Florence — the van Eyck and Memling interiors, with their shelves and windows — had taught him more than landscape. The window at the right, opening onto a sky and hills, does the work that the parapet-and-landscape does in the Umbrian Madonnas: it lets the world into the room.

The picture was engraved in the eighteenth century as part of the Orléans gallery's published catalogue, and the engravings made it known to a wider public than it has had since it went to Chantilly; it is one of the small Raphaels that scholars know from reproduction better than from sight, and those who make the journey to Chantilly usually come away surprised by its quality. It was cleaned in the twentieth century and is in good condition; the transparency of the veil and the modelling of the Child's body are particularly fine. The duc d'Aumale bought it at the Delessert sale in Paris in 1869, outbidding the Louvre; it has not left Chantilly since. Among the Condé's Raphaels it is the least famous and, some would say, the most perfectly preserved — a small panel that has never been transferred, never been overcleaned, and never been far from a wall it was meant for.

A very small panel — 27.9 by 22.4 cm, painted not on poplar but on yew, an unusual wood — in the National Gallery, London: the Virgin, seated in a dim interior before a window, holds the naked Child on her lap; he sits on a white cloth on her knees, and the two of them are engaged with a handful of pinks — carnations — which she holds out and he takes, so that their hands meet at the centre of the picture and their gazes meet above them; she smiles faintly; he looks up at her with a child's concentration. She wears a red dress and a blue mantle, with a transparent veil over her hair; behind her, a grey wall, and at the upper right a window through which a landscape of hills and a ruined tower can be seen. The pinks, whose name in Italian (garofani) and whose red colour associated them with the nails of the Crucifixion, are the flower of the Passion and of betrothal both; the picture is a meditation on the Child's future in the form of a game.

The Madonna of the Pinks has the most dramatic modern history of any Raphael. The composition was known in many versions — some fifty copies and variants are recorded — and the original was assumed lost; the panel at Alnwick Castle, seat of the Dukes of Northumberland, bought by the fourth Duke in 1853 as a Raphael, had been downgraded in the twentieth century to a copy and hung in a corridor. In 1991 Nicholas Penny, then a curator at the National Gallery, examined it and concluded that it was the original; infrared reflectography showed an underdrawing full of the changes of mind — the Child's legs, the Virgin's hands, the line of the veil — that a copyist, working from a finished picture, does not make; the pigments and the yew panel were consistent with Florence around 1506; and the quality, once the picture was cleaned, was of the first order. The attribution was accepted, the picture was lent to the Gallery, and in 2004, after a public campaign and a contested export licence, the Gallery bought it for £22 million (the valuation, with tax concessions, was £35 million) — the most expensive acquisition in its history to that date, and an event in the national press.

The picture itself is among the most intimate of all Raphael's Madonnas — a tiny, jewel-like image for the hand, made for a patron who would hold it and look closely — and among the most Leonardesque. The source is Leonardo's Benois Madonna (Hermitage), painted in Florence in the late 1470s, which shows a young Virgin in an interior playing with her Child over a flower, and which Raphael must have seen in a Florentine collection; he took the motif, the interior, the window and the smile, and made them his own by clarifying everything Leonardo had left in shadow. The Virgin's face is modelled in soft gradations but lit clearly; the Child's body is drawn with exact knowledge; the hands — four of them, meeting over the flowers — are the picture's subject, and they are painted with the precision that Raphael brought to hands throughout his life.

The interior is the Florentine camera of the Orléans Madonna: a grey wall, a window with a view, a cushion or cloth on which the Child sits. The landscape through the window — hills, a tower, a pale sky — is a fragment of the wider world, seen as through a door; the ruined tower has been read as a symbol of the old law, but it may simply be a tower. The colour is the classic red and blue, with the white of the cloth and the veil, against the grey; the flesh is pale and luminous; the pinks, small and red, are the one bright accent at the centre.

Technically the picture is a perfect specimen of Raphael's Florentine manner: a white ground on the yew panel, a freehand underdrawing with many adjustments, thin smooth oil paint, the flesh built in soft gradations from a pale mid-tone, the blue in ultramarine, the red in vermilion and lake, the veil a film of white. The National Gallery's technical bulletin of 2004 published the evidence in full. The panel is in very good condition; a cleaning in 2003–04 removed a discoloured varnish and old retouching and revealed the freshness of the surface.

The picture's many copies — in the Art UK collections, in Continental galleries, in the trade — are the measure of its fame in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when small Raphael Madonnas were the most sought-after devotional images in Europe; the composition was engraved and repeated so often that the original vanished into its own reproductions, and it took a connoisseur's eye, and the new tools of technical examination, to find it again. The case has become a standard one in the teaching of attribution, and the Pinks — hung in the National Gallery's Raphael room with the Ansidei, the Mond, the Garvagh and the Saint Catherine — is now among the Gallery's best-loved small pictures.

The 2004 purchase was controversial, and the controversy is worth recording because it turned on questions of attribution and value that the picture itself raises. When the Duke of Northumberland agreed to sell the panel to the J. Paul Getty Museum for £35 million, the British government deferred the export licence to allow a national institution to match the price; the National Gallery, with help from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Art Fund and private donors, raised the net sum, and the picture stayed. Critics asked whether a panel the size of a paperback, attributed only thirteen years earlier, was worth a sum that could have bought a dozen lesser pictures; defenders answered that it was a Raphael, that the attribution was secure, and that the Gallery's Raphael collection — already the finest outside Italy — needed it. The debate was a public education in how attributions are made and why they matter, and the Pinks, hanging now beside the Ansidei and the Mond, has justified the decision: it is, as Penny said, "a small picture of the highest quality by the most influential painter in European history," and the public has taken to it.