A panel transferred to canvas, about 72 by 56 cm, in the Hermitage, St Petersburg: the Virgin, seated, holds the naked Child on her lap; he sits turned towards Joseph, who leans on his staff at the left, looking down at him with his chin resting on his hand; the Virgin looks down at the Child; behind, a wall with a round-headed window through which a landscape is seen. Joseph is young and beardless — hence the picture's name — which is unusual: the tradition showed him old and bearded, and the beardless Joseph, a young man of gentle face, is a rarity in Raphael and in the period. The Virgin wears a red dress and a blue mantle; Joseph a violet-grey robe and a yellow mantle; the light falls from the left; the colour is the classic Florentine harmony.

The picture entered the Hermitage with the Crozat collection, bought by Catherine the Great in 1772 — Pierre Crozat's Paris gallery, assembled in the early eighteenth century, was one of the great collections of Italian drawings and paintings, and the Hermitage's Saint George (now in Washington) came with it — and it has been in St Petersburg since; it was transferred from panel to canvas in the nineteenth century, like the Conestabile, and the transfer has flattened the surface somewhat. It is usually dated around 1506, in the middle Florentine years, by its relation to the Canigiani Holy Family and the Holy Family with the Palm (Q3212679), which share its theme — the Holy Family with an attentive, contemplative Joseph — and its type of composition.

The Beardless Joseph is one of the small group of Florentine Holy Families in which Raphael took up a theme that Leonardo had made fashionable — the family group bound by mutual attention — and gave it a domestic quietness. The three figures form a compact triangle: Joseph at the left, leaning in; the Virgin at the right, looking down; the Child between them, turned to Joseph. The binding is done by glance: Joseph watches the Child, the Virgin watches the Child, the Child looks up at Joseph; and by the Virgin's hands, which hold the Child with the usual precision. Joseph's pose — leaning on the staff, chin on hand — is the pose of the contemplative, and his youthful face, with its soft features and its absorbed expression, gives the group a tenderness that the bearded patriarch of tradition does not have. The Hermitage catalogue has suggested that the beardless Joseph reflects a Florentine devotional fashion of the moment; it is at any rate a choice, and a gentle one.

The picture's handling is the thin, smooth oil of the period, the flesh modelled softly, the draperies in local colour with glazes, the landscape through the window in fine strokes; the transfer has flattened the impasto of the highlights and the surface has a slightly dry quality. Infrared examination has shown an underdrawing with changes in the Child's position. The attribution has occasionally been doubted — the picture is less brilliant than the Canigiani — but it is generally accepted as Raphael's, with the possibility of some workshop participation in the draperies.

The Beardless Joseph hangs in the Hermitage's Raphael Loggia wing with the Conestabile Madonna, and the two together — a tondo of 1504 and a Holy Family of 1506 — are the Hermitage's share of the early Raphael, the remains of a larger group that included the Alba Madonna and the Saint George until the Soviet sales of 1931 sent them to Washington. Its subject, the family at rest, and its mood, quiet and inward, have made it a favourite of Russian visitors; it is less known abroad than it deserves.

Crozat's collection, from which it came, was one of the decisive events in the history of taste: Pierre Crozat (1665–1740), a Paris banker, assembled in his hôtel in the rue de Richelieu some four hundred paintings and nineteen thousand drawings, the greatest private cabinet of its time, and his Raphaels — the Saint George, the Beardless Joseph, the Holy Family under the Oak (later in Madrid) — were among the pictures that French connoisseurs studied in the first half of the eighteenth century and that Mariette catalogued; their sale to Catherine the Great in 1772, negotiated through Diderot, took them to St Petersburg and made the Hermitage, overnight, a museum of the first rank. The Beardless Joseph stayed; the Saint George went to Washington in 1931; and the Hermitage's Raphael holdings, reduced by the Soviet sales, are now the Conestabile and this picture. It was transferred to canvas in the nineteenth century in the Hermitage's own workshops, which handled the operation more gently than the Paris restorers had handled the Oddi altarpiece.

The beardless Joseph is the picture's puzzle. The iconography of the Holy Family, from the early Renaissance on, required an aged Joseph — a guardian rather than a father, whose years guaranteed the Virgin's purity — and Raphael's own Josephs, in the Canigiani, the Holy Family with the Palm and the Roman Holy Families, are grey-bearded. This young Joseph, smooth-faced and absorbed, is a departure, and it has been variously explained: as a reflection of a Florentine devotional current that emphasised Joseph's tenderness, as a portrait of the patron, or simply as an artistic choice — the painter preferring, for the compact triangle of the composition, two faces of similar type rather than the contrast of youth and age. Whatever its cause, it gives the picture a quietness that the bearded patriarch would have disturbed, and it makes Joseph, for once, the Virgin's equal rather than her elder. The picture's soft, even light and its quiet mood have made it, for Russian viewers, the gentlest of the Hermitage's Italian pictures, and the museum's guides have long paired it with the Conestabile as 'the two Raphaels' — a phrase that, before 1931, would have meant four. The loss of the Alba and the Saint George to Washington is still felt in St Petersburg; the Beardless Joseph carries, in consequence, more weight than its size. It bears it well.

The picture

A panel, 65 by 45 cm, in the Galleria Palatina of the Palazzo Pitti: a young man of about thirty, seen in half-length and three-quarter view, turned to the right, his hands resting on the ledge of a parapet in the lower corner, before a landscape of hills, trees and a pale sky; he wears a black gown with wide red sleeves over a black doublet, a white shirt at the neck and wrists, and a black cap over shoulder-length brown hair; a single ring is on his left hand. The face is long, clean-shaven, with a strong nose, a firm mouth and dark, watchful eyes that look straight at the viewer. The light falls from the left; the modelling is firm; the expression is that of a man who knows his worth and is content to be looked at.

The sitter

Agnolo Doni (1474–1539) was a Florentine wool merchant of new wealth and old ambition — the kind of man, Vasari says, who "liked to spend as little as possible on everything else but took pleasure in works of painting and sculpture," and who haggled with Michelangelo over the price of the Doni Tondo, the round Holy Family now in the Uffizi, which was painted for him at about this time (perhaps for his marriage, or for the birth of his daughter in 1507). He married Maddalena Strozzi, of the great banking family, on 31 January 1504, and the two portraits — his and hers (Q2607055) — were probably commissioned around 1506 to commemorate the marriage, or the couple's establishment in their house in the Corso dei Tintori. They are pendants, designed to hang together, and they remained in the Doni family until 1826, when Grand Duke Leopold II bought them for the Pitti.

The portrait

The Doni portraits are the first in which Raphael fully possessed the Florentine portrait formula, and they are the pictures in which the Mona Lisa's influence is most productive. The pose is Leonardo's — three-quarter view, hands on a ledge, landscape behind — but the treatment is the opposite of Leonardo's: where the Mona Lisa dissolves into shadow and smile, Agnolo is given to us entire, in clear light, with every feature, every fold of the sleeve, every strand of hair defined. The portrait is a statement of fact: this is the man, this is his face, this is his dress, this is his land behind him. The hands on the ledge — one over the other, the ring prominent — are painted with the precision that Raphael's hands always have, and they do something the Umbrian portraits never did: they make the sitter present in the space, leaning slightly towards us. The face is a real face — not an Umbrian ideal but a Florentine merchant's, with its long nose and its guarded eyes — and the painter has neither flattered nor satirised it. It is a portrait of a man by a painter who found him interesting and did not need to like him.

Maddalena, and the pair

Seen beside his wife's portrait, Agnolo's is the more assured and the more austere: he is in black and red, she in red and blue; his background is a landscape with a stand of trees, hers a lake; his hands rest on the ledge, hers fold in her lap; his gaze is direct, hers slightly withdrawn. The two pictures share a horizon, so that when hung together — as they are, in the Pitti — the landscape runs behind both and the couple sit in one world. Their reverses carry grisaille scenes of the Flood and of Deucalion and Pyrrha repopulating the earth with stones, painted by an assistant (the so-called Master of Serumido): a humanist allegory of marriage and fertility, appropriate to a young couple hoping for children. The panels were probably framed as a diptych, hinged, to be opened and closed.

Technique and condition

The panel is poplar; the ground white; the paint thin and firmly modelled, the flesh built up from a warm mid-tone with cooler half-lights, the black of the gown laid over a brown underlayer and the red sleeves in vermilion glazed with lake; the landscape is painted with a fine brush in the manner of the Florentine Madonnas. The picture is in very good condition; a restoration in the 2010s, for the Uffizi's reinstallation of the Doni portraits with Michelangelo's tondo, cleaned the surface and confirmed the quality. The two portraits and the tondo were shown together in 2018 — the first time, probably, since the sixteenth century — and the comparison was instructive: Michelangelo's Holy Family, twisting and sculptural, beside Raphael's merchant and his wife, still and exact, made for the same patron in the same years.

Afterlife

The Doni portraits have been among the most admired of Raphael's works since they entered the Pitti; Burckhardt and Wölfflin used them as the type of the High Renaissance portrait, and the pair has been reproduced in every survey of Renaissance portraiture as the moment when the Florentine likeness became a classical form. Agnolo's portrait in particular — the man in black with his hands on the ledge — is the direct ancestor of the Baroque state portrait and of Ingres's Monsieur Bertin; it is one of the pictures in which Raphael invented something that later painters could not do without. The Doni house in the Corso dei Tintori, where the portraits and the tondo hung together, was the setting of one of the more remarkable private collections of the High Renaissance; Vasari's story of Agnolo's attempt to pay Michelangelo forty ducats instead of the agreed seventy, and Michelangelo's response of doubling the price to a hundred and forty, has given the merchant a reputation for meanness that the portraits — commissioned, after all, from the most promising young painter in the city — do not quite support. The portrait, at any rate, shows a man who could afford Raphael and Michelangelo in the same year. He died in 1539; his collection was dispersed in the nineteenth century; the portraits went to the Grand Duke and the tondo to the Uffizi.

A panel, 71 by 50 cm, in the Uffizi: a man of about thirty-five, seen in half-length and three-quarter view, in a black cap and a black gown with a high collar over a white shirt, against a dark background, his face long, pale, bearded and heavy-lidded, his expression weary. The sitter is identified as Guidobaldo da Montefeltro (1472–1508), Duke of Urbino from 1482, the son of Federico, the husband of Elisabetta Gonzaga and the host of The Book of the Courtier — a prince whose life was spent in ill-health (the gout that Castiglione describes) and in the losing defence of his small state against Cesare Borgia, and who died at thirty-six, childless, leaving Urbino to his della Rovere nephew. The identification rests on the resemblance to his medals and to the portrait in the Urbino double panel by Justus of Ghent; the attribution to Raphael, around 1506, rests on the picture's arrival in Florence with the Urbino inheritance of 1631 and on its relation to the Elisabetta Gonzaga (Q2627028), of which it is the pendant in size, format and provenance. Both attributions have been doubted — the portrait is dry and sombre, and Timoteo Viti or an Urbino hand has been proposed — but the Uffizi gives it to Raphael with a query, and the majority of scholars accept it as his, painted on one of his returns to Urbino in the Florentine years. The picture is a plain, honest likeness of a sick man, without flattery and without landscape: the duke in black, against the dark, looking out with the eyes of someone who knows his time is short. It hangs in the Uffizi's Raphael rooms beside his wife, and the two together are the faces of the court that made Raphael — painted by its most famous son at the moment he was leaving it behind.

The duke's life gives the portrait its pathos. Guidobaldo, educated as a humanist prince under Federico's tutors, was a scholar and a soldier in the family tradition, but his body failed him early: the gout (or, as modern diagnoses suggest, a rheumatic or venereal illness) that crippled him from his twenties made him an invalid at a court famous for its active pleasures, and the marriage to Elisabetta, by his own admission, was never consummated. He was driven from Urbino by Cesare Borgia in 1502, returned in 1503, adopted his nephew Francesco Maria as heir in 1504, and died in April 1508 at Fossombrone, aged thirty-six. Castiglione's Courtier is set in his palace but excludes him from the conversations on grounds of health — he retires early each evening — and his absence is the book's silent centre. The portrait shows what the book implies: a man of intelligence and dignity, worn out. The attribution question — Raphael or a court painter — is, in the end, secondary to the document; no other likeness of Guidobaldo as an adult survives. The panel has darkened; the black of the gown has lost its modelling; but the face is intact.

The picture

A panel, 63 by 45 cm, in the Galleria Palatina of the Palazzo Pitti, the pendant of the Portrait of Agnolo Doni (Q2515309): a young woman of about twenty-five, seated in three-quarter view, turned to the left, her hands folded in her lap, before a landscape of hills and a lake under a pale sky; she wears a dress of red with wide sleeves of blue over a white chemise, a dark mantle over her shoulders, and her hair, parted at the centre and drawn back, is covered by a transparent veil; at her throat a gold chain with a large pendant — a ruby, an emerald and a sapphire set in gold, with a great pear-shaped pearl hanging from it — and on her fingers several rings. The face is broad, pale, a little heavy, with small dark eyes, a straight nose and a full mouth; the expression is composed, slightly distant, the gaze just to one side of the viewer.

The sitter

Maddalena Strozzi (1489–1540), daughter of Giovanni Strozzi of the great Florentine banking family, married the wool merchant Agnolo Doni on 31 January 1504, at fifteen; she was perhaps seventeen when Raphael painted her. Her portrait, like her husband's, remained in the Doni house until the Grand Duke bought the pair in 1826. She is the woman whose dowry and lineage Agnolo's new money had bought, and the portrait — with its jewels, its silk and its composure — shows what he had paid for: a Strozzi, sitting as a Strozzi should.

The portrait and the Mona Lisa

Maddalena's portrait is the one in which the dependence on Leonardo's Mona Lisa is most exact and most instructive. The pose — seated, turned three-quarters, the hands folded one over the other in the lap, the right over the left — is Leonardo's to the detail; the loggia is gone, but the landscape with its lake and hills is a Leonardesque distance; the veil over the hair, the dress with its gathered bodice, the placement of the figure in the frame are all the Mona Lisa's. And yet no two pictures could be more different in spirit. Leonardo's woman is a mystery — smiling, shadowed, melting into her landscape; Raphael's is a fact — lit evenly, outlined clearly, set against her landscape like a statue on a terrace. The pendant at her breast, with its three coloured stones and its pearl, is painted with a goldsmith's precision, each stone catching its own light; the sleeves, in their heavy blue silk, fall in folds of sculptural definition; the veil is a film of white over the dark hair; the hands, plump and beringed, rest on each other with a weight that Leonardo's do not have. The portrait is, in a sense, a correction of Leonardo — or rather, a translation of his invention into a different language, the language of the Florentine merchant class, which wanted to see itself exactly and handsomely, without mystery.

The pair and the reverses

Her portrait and her husband's were made to hang together, and they do: the horizon runs through both, the lighting is consistent, the formats match; Agnolo at the left, Maddalena at the right, turned towards each other. On the reverses are grisaille scenes from Ovid — the Flood, and Deucalion and Pyrrha throwing the stones that became a new human race — painted by an assistant (the Master of Serumido): an allegory of the fruitful marriage, appropriate to a couple whose first child, a daughter, was born in 1507. The panels were probably hinged as a diptych.

Technique and condition

The panel is poplar, the ground white, the paint thin and smooth; the flesh is built up from a pale, slightly cool mid-tone with warmer touches in the cheeks, the red of the dress in vermilion glazed with lake, the blue of the sleeves in ultramarine over azurite, the jewels in small touches of pure colour over a dark ground with white highlights; the veil is a thin white scumble over the hair and forehead. The picture was restored in the 2010s and is in excellent condition; the pendant and the sleeves, in particular, have recovered their brilliance.

Afterlife

The Maddalena Doni is the portrait in which the nineteenth century found Raphael at his most "Florentine," and it has been reproduced, compared with the Mona Lisa and discussed as the model of the Renaissance female portrait ever since — the bourgeois Gioconda, as it has been called. It hangs in the Pitti's Sala di Saturno beside her husband, and the pair, with the Uffizi's Doni Tondo a few hundred metres away, constitute the most complete record of one Florentine family's patronage of the two greatest painters of the age.

One further observation concerns the hands. Leonardo's Gioconda rests her hands on the arm of a chair, the right over the left, in a pose of perfect ease; Maddalena's are folded in her lap in the same way, but the painter has given them weight — they press on each other, the rings dig slightly into the flesh, the fingers are plump — so that what in Leonardo is a gesture of grace becomes in Raphael a gesture of possession: these are the hands of a woman sitting for her portrait, conscious of her rings. The difference is the difference between the two painters' conceptions of what a portrait is for. Leonardo's is a meditation; Raphael's is a record, and the record is generous, exact and a little ironic. The jewel, too, has been read as a statement: the ruby, emerald and sapphire were the stones of the Strozzi arms' colours and of the traditional virtues of marriage, and the pearl, hanging from them, the bride herself. Whether or not that was intended, the pendant is the most beautifully painted object in either portrait, and Raphael placed it at the exact centre of the composition. The horizon line passes behind her shoulders at the level of her eyes, so that the landscape — a lake, a few trees, soft hills — serves as a quiet ground for the head without competing with it.

A study of a woman's head in profile, in the Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe of the Uffizi, in metalpoint or chalk, of the Florentine years: the head turned to the left, the hair drawn back and bound, the features of the type Raphael used for his Virgins — the high forehead, the straight nose, the small mouth — drawn from the model and idealised. Sheets of this kind, in which a head is studied for a Madonna or a saint, are the intermediate stage between the composition sketch and the cartoon, and the Uffizi holds several from the Florentine years; this one has been connected with the Virgin of the Madonna of the Meadow or the Belle Jardinière, whose inclined profiles it resembles, without certainty. The drawing is a fine instance of Raphael's Florentine draughtsmanship — the contour clean, the modelling soft, the hair indicated with a few strokes — and of his habit of drawing the same type of head again and again until it became his own.

A small panel, 28.5 by 21.5 cm, in the National Gallery of Art, Washington (Andrew W. Mellon Collection): Saint George, on a rearing white horse, drives his lance into the mouth of the dragon, a winged, scaly, long-necked beast that writhes beneath the horse's hooves; the saint's broken lance lies on the ground; at the right the princess, in a red dress, kneels with her hands raised; behind, a landscape of trees, a distant town and hills under a pale sky. The saint wears full plate armour and a blue cloak; on his left leg, below the knee, is the Garter of the English order, with the motto HONI — the first word of Honi soit qui mal y pense — legible on it. The picture is signed RAPHELLO V. on the horse's harness.

The Garter is the key to the commission. In 1504 Henry VII of England conferred the Order of the Garter on Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino; in 1506 the Duke sent Baldassare Castiglione to England to receive the insignia and to present the King with a gift, and the Washington Saint George — Saint George being the patron of the Order — has long been identified as that gift, painted by the court's native prodigy for the purpose. The argument is circumstantial but strong: the date fits, the Garter is there, and the picture was in England, in the collection of the Earls of Pembroke at Wilton, by the seventeenth century. From Wilton it passed to the Paris collection of Pierre Crozat, then to Catherine the Great (1772) and the Hermitage, where it hung until the Soviet government sold it, in 1931, to Andrew Mellon, who gave it to the National Gallery he founded.

The picture is the second and grander of Raphael's two small Saint Georges — the Louvre version (Q2529918) is its first attempt — and it shows the progress of a year or two. The horse, seen now from the right and rearing higher, is more powerfully built and more energetically drawn; the saint's body, turned in the saddle as he drives the lance downward, has a torsion the Louvre version lacks; the dragon is larger and more monstrous; and the princess, kneeling and praying at the right, is given a real place in the composition instead of fleeing at the edge. The landscape is broader and more atmospheric; the colour is richer — the blue cloak, the white horse, the red princess, the green and brown of the ground. The whole has the assurance of the Florentine years, and the horse in particular — arched neck, flying mane, drawn-up forelegs — shows the study of Leonardo's horses and of the antique.

Technically the panel is of the highest finish: the armour painted in small touches of white and grey over a dark ground, the horse's coat in fine strokes, the dragon's scales individually lit, the landscape in a miniaturist's detail; the signature on the harness is in gold. The picture is in excellent condition. A drawing in the Uffizi, in pen, shows the composition being worked out, with the horse tried in two positions; a study for the horse is in Oxford.

The Saint George is among the most celebrated small pictures in America — the Mellon purchase of 1931, part of the group of Hermitage masterpieces (with the Alba Madonna) that the Soviet government sold for foreign currency, was one of the founding acquisitions of the National Gallery — and it is one of the most reproduced of all Raphael's works, the image of the knight and the dragon that every child knows. Its history — Urbino, England, Paris, Russia, America — is a map of the movement of art across four centuries, and its Garter is a small piece of diplomatic history: the gift by which a small Italian duchy thanked an English king, painted by the young man who would shortly be the most famous painter in the world.

Castiglione's embassy of 1506, which took him to London in the autumn and back by the spring of 1507, is documented in his letters; he was received by Henry VII at Windsor, installed as the Duke's proxy, and presented the King with the gifts Guidobaldo had sent — horses, falcons, and a picture. That the picture was this one is inference, not record, but the Garter on the saint's leg is hard to explain otherwise, and the small scale — a picture to be carried in a courier's baggage — suits the occasion. The Saint George would then be Raphael's first work for a foreign sovereign and his first to leave Italy: a painter of twenty-three, still working in Florence on private Madonnas, supplying the diplomatic gift of his native duchy to the King of England.

Its later wanderings are a history in themselves. It was at Wilton House, seat of the Earls of Pembroke, by the early seventeenth century, when it was recorded in the collection of the fourth Earl, Charles I's Lord Chamberlain; it passed to France in the eighteenth, to the cabinet of Pierre Crozat, whose heirs sold it, with the rest of the collection, to Catherine the Great in 1772; it hung in the Hermitage for a hundred and sixty years, among the Russian court's most admired small pictures, and was engraved in the Hermitage catalogues; and in 1931, when the Soviet government sold twenty-one Hermitage masterpieces to Andrew Mellon for the currency the first Five-Year Plan required, it crossed the Atlantic with the Alba Madonna, Botticelli's Adoration and van Eyck's Annunciation. The sale was secret, and the pictures' arrival in Washington, when the National Gallery opened in 1941, was the first the public knew. The Saint George thus belongs to five countries' histories and has been a royal, an aristocratic, a bankers', an imperial and a national picture in turn — a small panel that has been, for five hundred years, exactly the kind of object that powers exchange. It is also, with the Louvre version, the picture that fixed the image of Saint George for the modern world.

One of the Uffizi's sheets from the long preparatory campaign for the Baglioni Deposition (Q2500226): a study for the bearers' group, in pen, from the sequence of some sixteen surviving drawings — Oxford, London, Paris, Florence — that carry the design from Lamentation to Entombment. The Uffizi's sheet belongs to the middle of the sequence, where the body is lifted and the carriers appear; its figures, tried in the quick pen of the Florentine years, show the composition mid-transformation, neither Perugino's mourning nor the final procession. The Baglioni drawings are treated at length in the Deposition's entry; this records the Uffizi's principal sheet, which the 2020 Rome exhibition displayed in the sequence's reconstruction.

A tondo, 101.5 cm in diameter, transferred from panel to canvas, in the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh (on loan from the Duke of Sutherland's collection, bought for the nation in part in 2009): the Virgin, seated at the right, holds the naked Child on her lap; Joseph, kneeling at the left, offers the Child a handful of flowers, which the Child reaches for; behind the Virgin a palm tree rises, and behind Joseph a landscape of hills and a town; the three figures form a shallow triangle across the circle. The picture belongs to the group of Florentine Holy Families — with the Canigiani and the Beardless Joseph — in which Joseph is an active, tender participant rather than a bystander, and to the small group of Florentine tondi (with the Terranuova) in which Raphael took up the round format. The palm tree is the tree of the Flight into Egypt, which bent to give the Holy Family its fruit, and its presence places the scene on the journey; Joseph's offering of flowers is a gesture of fatherly tenderness without precedent in the iconography, and it gives the picture its particular sweetness. The composition is the most successful of Raphael's early tondi: the figures are disposed in a curve that follows the frame, the Virgin's seated body and Joseph's kneeling one answering each other, and the palm's vertical anchors the circle. The picture came to Britain with the Orléans collection in 1798 and was bought by the Duke of Bridgewater; it has been on loan to Edinburgh, with the Bridgewater Madonna, since 1945. The transfer to canvas has somewhat flattened the surface, but the faces and hands are well preserved, and the colour — the Virgin's red and blue, Joseph's yellow and grey — is fresh. The date of c. 1506–07 places it in the middle Florentine years.

The Bridgewater loan, under which the tondo has hung in Edinburgh since 1945, is one of the great arrangements of British museum history: the Dukes of Sutherland, heirs of the Bridgewater collection, placed its principal pictures — Titians, Raphaels, Poussins, Rembrandts — on long loan to the National Gallery of Scotland after the war, and the nation has since bought several of them, including the two Titian Dianas in 2009 and 2012; the Raphaels remain on loan. Edinburgh is, in consequence, one of the few places outside Italy and the great capitals where two Florentine Raphaels can be seen, and the Holy Family with the Palm, with its kneeling Joseph and its flowers, is the gentler of the pair. Its round format, its kneeling Joseph and its palm make it one of the most distinctive of the Florentine Holy Families, and its relative neglect in the literature — it is overshadowed by the Canigiani and the Madonnas — is undeserved; the composition is among the most resolved of the early tondi, and the flowers Joseph offers are a touch of fatherly invention that has no parallel in the period. Its condition, after the transfer, is fair; the faces are good.

The Wikidata record for the predella of the Baglioni altarpiece as a set: three panels, each about 16 by 44 cm, oil on wood, in the Vatican Pinacoteca, showing the three Theological Virtues as grisaille figures seated in roundels flanked by putti — Faith (Q3740794), with chalice and book, between two putti holding inscribed tablets; Charity (Q3658723), with children at her breast and feet, between putti with burning vases; Hope (Q3966501), with hands joined in prayer, between putti with scrolls. The three panels stood below the Deposition (Q2500226) in the Baglioni chapel, went with it to the Borghese in 1608, to Paris in 1797 and to the Vatican in 1815. They are painted in a monochrome of green-grey, imitating sculpture, in the Florentine manner; the figures are of the full, classical type of the Florentine years, and the putti — playing with their tablets and vases — are among the earliest of the putti that would fill Raphael's Roman decorations. The entries for the individual panels describe them.

A panel transferred to canvas, 81 by 56 cm, in the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh (Bridgewater collection, on loan from the Duke of Sutherland): the Virgin, seated at three-quarter length against a dark ground, holds the naked Child, who lies across her lap in a twisting pose — his body turned towards us, his head thrown back to look up at her, his legs drawn up — while she looks down at him and steadies him with both hands; her red dress and blue mantle, and a transparent veil, are the only colour against the dark. The picture takes its name from the Duke of Bridgewater, who bought it at the Orléans sale of 1798; it had been in the Orléans collection in Paris since the early eighteenth century, and before that, probably, in Italy. It has been on loan to Edinburgh since 1945.

The Bridgewater Madonna is the Florentine Madonna in which Michelangelo's influence is most direct: the Child's twisting, sprawling pose — the body turned one way, the head another — comes from the marble Taddei Tondo (Royal Academy), in which the Christ Child flees across the Virgin's lap, and from the Michelangelesque studies Raphael was making in 1506–07; the drawings for the picture, in the British Museum and Vienna, show him working out the Child's torsion with unusual care. The dark ground is unusual and has been questioned — as with the Granduca, a landscape may have been painted out — but the picture's concentration depends on it: the two figures, the Virgin's bending head and the Child's straining body, make a single knot of movement against the dark. The modelling is soft and Leonardesque; the Virgin's hands, holding the Child at the waist and shoulder, are among the most beautifully drawn of the Florentine Madonnas. The transfer to canvas has flattened the surface and the picture has been somewhat abraded; it remains, with the Holy Family with the Palm, one of the two Raphaels that the Bridgewater loan has made Scottish. Its date, c. 1507, places it at the end of the Florentine years, when the painter of the serene pyramids was beginning to absorb the energy of the Baglioni Deposition. The Bridgewater collection, assembled by the third Duke from the Orléans sale and augmented by his heirs, was the most important private collection in Britain for a century and a half, shown to the public in the Bridgewater House gallery in London; its Raphaels were among the pictures that Victorian painters copied, and the Bridgewater Madonna's twisting Child was a standard model for students of the figure. Seen today in Edinburgh beside the Holy Family with the Palm, it is the more Michelangelesque and the more concentrated of the two — a Madonna about movement, where its companion is about rest. Edinburgh shows them together, and the pairing is one of the best small lessons in the Florentine Raphael that any gallery offers. The Bridgewater loan has made Scotland, improbably, a place to study the Florentine Raphael; the Sutherland family's generosity is the reason.

The third of the Baglioni predella panels, about 16 by 44 cm, in the Vatican Pinacoteca: Charity, a seated woman in classical drapery, nurses an infant at her breast while two others play at her feet and knee, within a painted roundel; on either side a naked putto holds up a flaming vase — the fire of love — and turns towards her; the whole in green-grey grisaille. Charity with children was the standard Renaissance image of the virtue — love as the nursing mother — and Raphael's figure is the most animated of the three: the infants climb and cling, the mother bends to them, and the group is a small study in the intertwined bodies of mother and children that the Florentine Madonnas had taught him to draw.

The Charity is the predella panel most often singled out, because its group of mother and children is the seed of a long line: the Roman Charity drawings, the putti of the Farnesina, the allegorical Charities of the workshop and of Giulio Romano. The putti with flaming vases at the sides are among the liveliest of the set, and the left-hand one, seen from behind as he lifts his vase, is a figure that Raphael would reuse. The grisaille is handled with the same fineness as the other panels; the figures are of the full Florentine type; the composition is a triangle within the roundel, with the putti as outliers.

The Baglioni predella as a whole is an important document of the Florentine Raphael's interest in sculpture: the painted imitation of relief, with its restricted palette and its emphasis on contour and modelling, was a discipline the Florentines prized — Michelangelo's and Leonardo's paragone arguments about the relative merits of painting and sculpture were current — and Raphael's three panels show him meeting the sculptors on their ground, making painted figures that look carved. The panels are shown together in the Vatican; the Charity is at the right, as it was in the chapel. The Wikidata item gives it the type "painting" without material; it is oil on wood, like its companions. The children at Charity's breast and knee — one nursing, one climbing, one looking up — are drawn with the same knowledge of the infant body as the Florentine Madonnas' Christ and Baptist, and the mother's bending head, seen in three-quarter view, is the Virgin of the Goldfinch in monochrome; the predella is, in that sense, the Florentine Madonnas translated into relief, and the translation shows how much of their effect depended on drawing rather than colour. Of the three, Charity has suffered most from the darkening of the grisaille, and the children's forms are harder to read than they were; but the mother's face and the putti at the sides are clear, and the panel is the one most often reproduced in studies of Raphael's putti. It was lent, with its companions, to the Rome exhibition of 2020, where the three panels were shown beneath a photograph of the Borghese Deposition — the nearest the altarpiece has come to reassembly in four centuries.

A drawing in the Palais des Beaux-Arts at Lille, about 35 by 23 cm, in pen or metalpoint on paper, of the Florentine years: a study for a Holy Family group, with the Virgin seated and the Child on her lap, related to the series of Holy Families of 1506–07 — the Canigiani, the Beardless Joseph, the Holy Family with the Palm and the Holy Family with a Lamb — in which Raphael was working out the multi-figure domestic group under Leonardo's influence. The Lille collection, formed by the painter Jean-Baptiste Wicar, who bought in Italy during the Napoleonic years and bequeathed his drawings to his native city in 1834, is one of the richest in early Raphael drawings — the Baronci and Oddi studies, the Alba Madonna studies and many Florentine sheets are there — and this study belongs to that group. The sheet shows the painter's method of trying a group in several positions, the pen moving quickly over the figures, and it is among the documents of the Florentine Holy Family series.

The first of the three grisaille predella panels of the Baglioni altarpiece, about 16 by 44 cm, in the Vatican Pinacoteca: Faith, a seated woman in classical drapery, holds a chalice with the Host in her raised right hand and a book in her left, within a painted roundel; on either side stands a naked putto holding up a tablet inscribed with the Greek letters of Christ's monogram — the Alpha and Omega, or the IHS — the two children turning towards the central figure with the easy contrapposto of the Florentine infants. The whole is painted in a monochrome of green-grey with white heightening, in imitation of a relief in stone or bronze, on a darker ground.

The grisaille predella was a Florentine idea — Fra Bartolomeo and the circle of Michelangelo used painted monochrome to give altarpieces a sculptural base — and its use at Perugia, under the Deposition's high colour, was a deliberate contrast: the drama above in flesh and blood, the virtues below in stone. Raphael's figures are of the full, classical type he had developed in Florence, seated in poses of monumental ease; Faith's raised chalice and lowered book make a clear emblem, and her face, seen in profile, has the gravity of the Florentine Madonnas. The putti, which are the predella's liveliest passages, are studies of the infant body in movement — the one at the left leaning on his tablet, the one at the right turning to show his — and they are among the first of the playing children that would become, in Rome, a signature of the workshop.

The panel is in good condition, the grisaille somewhat darkened; it has been cleaned with its companions. The three panels are shown together in the Vatican Pinacoteca's Raphael room, below the Oddi Coronation and near the Madonna di Foligno, and the visitor who knows the Deposition in the Borghese can, with a little imagination, put the altarpiece back together. The choice of Faith, Hope and Charity for the predella of a memorial altarpiece was a statement of consolation — the virtues by which a mother might bear her loss — and the sculptural calm of the grisaille, against the anguish of the main panel, is part of the statement. The tablets the putti hold, with their Greek letters, are a humanist touch — Faith shown with the language of the New Testament — and a sign of the learned Franciscan milieu of San Francesco al Prato, where the Baglioni and Oddi chapels faced each other across the nave. The Faith is the left-hand panel of the three as they were arranged, and its putti turn inward, towards the central Hope, as the Charity's turn inward from the right — a small symmetry that only the reunited predella shows. The Vatican hangs the three in their original order. Faith's chalice, raised with the Host visible above it, was the emblem the Franciscans of the chapel would have prized most — the sacrament as the object of belief — and its placement at the left, under the bearers of the body, makes a quiet point: the body carried above is the body held up below.

The central panel of the Baglioni predella, about 16 by 44 cm, oil on panel, in the Vatican Pinacoteca: Hope, a seated woman in classical drapery, her hands joined in prayer and her face raised, within a painted roundel; on either side a naked putto, each holding a scroll or tablet and turning towards her; the whole in green-grey grisaille with white heightening, imitating relief. Hope's attribute — the raised face and joined hands, the posture of the soul looking up — is the oldest of the three virtues' emblems, and Raphael's figure gives it a Florentine monumentality: the body seated in an easy contrapposto, the head lifted in the manner of the London Saint Catherine, the drapery falling in the long structural folds of the Florentine years.

As the central panel, directly beneath the Deposition's central group — the Magdalen bending to Christ's hand — Hope was the predella's pivot, and its upward gaze answered the altarpiece's downward grief: below the dead Christ, the virtue that looks beyond death. The composition of the three panels was symmetrical — Faith and Charity, the active virtues, at the sides; Hope, the contemplative, at the centre — and the putti of the central panel, quieter than those of the flanking ones, respect the hierarchy. The grisaille technique — monochrome over a darker ground, the highlights in white — is handled with the fineness of the early panels; the figure's profile and her joined hands are drawn with the precision of Raphael's best hands.

The three predella panels were separated from the Deposition only by the Napoleonic transfers — they went to Paris with it in 1797 — and the Vatican's decision to keep them in 1815, rather than return them to the Borghese, reflected the view that the Pope's gallery, newly founded for the returned pictures, had the better claim. The panels are in good condition, cleaned in the twentieth century; the grisaille has darkened a little and the white heightening has lost some of its brilliance. The Hope has been connected with a drawing in the Louvre for the seated figure, which shows the pose being studied from the model. The figure's classical drapery, with its deep folds over the knees, and her lifted profile give her the air of an antique Muse; she is the most sculptural of the three, and the grisaille suits her best. It is worth noticing how Raphael handled the roundel: the seated figure fills the circle without touching its edges, her knees and her head just within the frame, in the manner of a carved medallion — a small anticipation of the problems of the tondo that the Alba Madonna would solve in colour. The predella's monochrome also reveals, more plainly than any coloured work, how Raphael constructed a figure: contour first, then the large planes of light and shadow, then the drapery folds as a secondary system over the body — the method of the Florentine drawings, carried onto the panel with the brush. Nowhere else in the early work is that skeleton so exposed.

The picture

A round-topped poplar panel, 122 by 80 cm, in the Louvre, dated MDVII on the hem of the Virgin's mantle (the date is partly legible; a signature, RAPHAELLO VRB., has also been read): the Virgin, seated on a rock in a meadow full of small plants, turns to her left and looks down at the naked Christ Child, who stands at her knee, his foot on hers, looking up at her and resting his hand on her arm; the infant Baptist kneels at the right in his camel-skin, holding his reed cross and gazing up at Christ; behind, a landscape of water, a town with a church tower, trees and blue hills under a sky with pale clouds. The Virgin wears a red dress and a blue mantle, with a yellow sleeve and a transparent veil over her fair hair, and her head inclines in profile towards the Child; the three figures form a tall pyramid, steeper than the Meadow's or the Goldfinch's, whose apex is the Virgin's head and whose base is the children's feet among the flowers.

The commission and the name

Vasari says that Raphael painted for Filippo Sergardi of Siena a Madonna with the Child and the Baptist that he left unfinished when he went to Rome, and that Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio completed the blue drapery; the Louvre picture has long been identified with it, though the identification has been questioned and the date of 1507 would mean that Raphael left it in Florence a year before he departed. It entered the French royal collection under Francis I, who bought it from a Sienese source, and it was at Fontainebleau by the mid-sixteenth century; it passed to Versailles, to the Louvre at the Revolution, and has been the Louvre's best-known Raphael Madonna since. The name La Belle Jardinière — "the beautiful gardener" — was given in the eighteenth century, from the meadow of flowers in which the Virgin sits; it is not a title but a nickname, and it has stuck because it is apt: the Virgin as a young woman in a garden, with her child.

The third pyramid

The Belle Jardinière is the last and the grandest of the three Florentine Madonnas in landscape, and the one in which the pyramid is steepest and the figures most monumental. The Virgin is larger in relation to the panel than in the Meadow or the Goldfinch; her body is seen almost in profile, turned to the Child, so that the group has a stronger directional movement; the Child stands close against her, looking up, so that the two heads — hers inclined down, his raised — make a vertical axis of glance that the Baptist, kneeling apart at the right, regards from outside. The effect is at once more intimate and more formal than the earlier pictures: intimate because the Virgin and Child are absorbed in each other, formal because the composition has the shape of a monument — a tall triangle on a broad base, set against a landscape that recedes behind it.

The relation to Leonardo's Saint Anne is here at its closest: the Virgin's turning pose, her extended leg, the Child standing at her knee and looking up, the rocky seat, all come from the cartoon; so does the slight sfumato of the faces, which are modelled in softer shadow than the Meadow's. But the picture also shows Raphael's distance from Leonardo: the light is clear, the colour clean, the landscape open, the mood serene — none of Leonardo's mystery, all of his structure.

The Child's foot

A detail worth singling out: the Christ Child stands with his right foot placed on the Virgin's foot, a motif that appears also in the Goldfinch and that gives the standing infant a plausible support while binding him physically to his mother. It is a small observed truth — a child steadying himself on an adult's instep — and it is characteristic of the way Raphael's compositions are built from such truths. The Baptist's kneeling pose, with one knee on the ground and the cross held upright, is taken from the Meadow and simplified; his adoring upward gaze makes him the spectator's surrogate, the figure through whom we enter the group.

Technique and the question of completion

The panel is poplar, with a round top (the format of the Marriage of the Virgin and the Umbrian altarpieces, unusual for a private Madonna); the ground is white; the paint is thin and smooth, with the flesh modelled in soft gradations and the draperies in local colour glazed in the shadows. The Louvre's technical examination, published in the 1980s and again for the 2012 restoration, showed an underdrawing with many pentimenti — the Virgin's head, the Child's position, the line of the mantle were all adjusted — and confirmed the date; it also showed that the blue mantle, in its lower part, is painted in a slightly different manner from the rest, which has been taken to support Vasari's story of Ridolfo's completion, though the difference is small and the attribution of the passage to another hand remains a matter of judgement. The picture was restored in 2012 and is in excellent condition; the flowers of the meadow — violets, columbines, strawberry plants — are painted with botanical exactness and are among the finest such passages in the early work.

The flowers

The meadow is a garden, and its flowers have meanings: the violet for humility, the columbine for the Holy Spirit, the strawberry for the fruits of righteousness, the plantain at the Virgin's feet for the path of Christ; they are the flowers of the Marian gardens of Flemish painting, and their presence here, rendered with a naturalist's care, is one of the picture's Northern notes. The landscape behind — water, a walled town with a church, trees, hills — is a Tuscan valley seen through Umbrian eyes, and its pale, cloud-flecked sky is one of the few in Raphael's Florentine Madonnas to show weather.

Drawings

A composition study in pen in the Musée Condé at Chantilly shows the group essentially as painted, with the Virgin's turn and the Child's upward gaze already fixed; a study for the Virgin's head is in the Louvre; and the Ashmolean sheets of children, made for the Goldfinch and Meadow, supplied the infant types. The Chantilly drawing is squared for enlargement, which shows how the design was carried from sheet to panel.

Reception

The Belle Jardinière has been the Louvre's Raphael for five centuries — the picture that generations of French painters copied, from the Fontainebleau school through Poussin and Ingres to the Salon academicians, and that French writers from Félibien onward took as the type of Raphael's grace. Its position in the royal collection made it, in the seventeenth century, the standard against which the Académie Royale measured the Madonna; its accessibility in the Louvre made it, in the nineteenth, one of the most copied pictures in the world. Ingres's Madonnas are its daughters; Degas copied it as a student. Among scholars it has been valued as the most monumental of the Florentine Madonnas and as the one that most clearly anticipates the Roman ones: the Alba Madonna and the Madonna di Foligno are its descendants in scale and gravity. Wölfflin's analysis of the three Florentine Madonnas ends with it as the culmination — the pyramid raised to the monumental.

What to look at

The Virgin's profile against the sky, inclined to the Child; the Child's upturned face and his hand on her arm; the foot on the foot; the Baptist's cross; the flowers — especially the violets at the lower left and the strawberry plant at the right; and the distant church tower, which stands on the vertical axis behind the Virgin's head. Then step back: the pyramid, the landscape, the round top, and the whole composed with a stillness that is the stillness of a finished thought. It is the last Madonna Raphael painted before Rome, and the first in which the Roman grandeur is already present.

Francis I and Fontainebleau

The Belle Jardinière is one of the earliest Italian pictures to enter the French royal collection, and its presence at Fontainebleau — with Leonardo's Mona Lisa, Saint Anne and Saint John, and the Raphael Saint Michael and Holy Family of 1518 — made the château, in the 1530s and 1540s, the place where French painters first learned the Italian manner. The Fontainebleau school's Madonnas, with their long limbs and serene profiles, are its pupils; Primaticcio and Rosso knew it; and when the Académie Royale was founded in 1648 it was one of the royal pictures on which the conférences — the formal lectures analysing a single masterpiece — were held. Félibien's account of the Académie's proceedings describes the Belle Jardinière as a model of "the noble simplicity of Raphael's grace"; and from the Académie the picture's authority passed into the whole French tradition, so that for Ingres and his pupils it was the Madonna against which all others were measured.

The round top and the format

The arched top is unusual for a private Madonna and has led some to suppose that the picture was intended for a chapel or an oratory — Filippo Sergardi was a Sienese cleric, and an altarpiece for a small chapel would fit — though the intimacy of the subject and the scale argue for a domestic setting with a frame of the arched Florentine type. The format affects the composition: the curve of the top echoes the curve of the Virgin's inclined head and shoulders, and the tall pyramid of the figures fits the arched field as the Marriage of the Virgin's temple fits its. Raphael used the arched top again for the Madonna del Baldacchino, his one Florentine altarpiece, and the Belle Jardinière may be thought of as standing between the domestic Madonna and the altar.

The 2012 restoration

The Louvre's restoration of 2012 removed a yellowed varnish and old retouching, consolidated the panel and recovered the cool tonality of the flesh and the clarity of the landscape; it also allowed a fresh examination of the "Ridolfo" passage in the blue mantle, which proved to be of good quality and not clearly distinguishable from the rest — leaving Vasari's story as plausible but unproven. The picture as now seen is in excellent state, its colours bright and its surface smooth, and it hangs in the Grande Galerie beside the Saint Michael panels and the Baronci angel, in a sequence that lets the visitor follow Raphael from Città di Castello to Florence in a few steps.

Sergardi and the Sienese question

Vasari's Filippo Sergardi was a Sienese — a canon and papal official, later a confidant of Agostino Chigi — and if the Louvre picture is indeed the one Vasari describes, it was made for Siena and stayed there until the French king's agents found it. That would make the Belle Jardinière the one Florentine Madonna painted for a patron outside Florence, and it would connect it, through Sergardi, with the Chigi circle that would employ Raphael in Rome. The identification is not certain — Vasari's description is brief, and the date of 1507 on the picture sits awkwardly with his claim that it was left unfinished at Raphael's departure in 1508 — but the Sienese provenance is well attested, and the round-topped format, unusual for a Florentine domestic panel, would suit a Sienese chapel. The picture's later French life has tended to obscure this; it is worth remembering that the Louvre's Raphael Madonna began, most probably, as a Sienese cleric's altarpiece, and that its grandeur may owe something to that destination. Whatever its origin, it is the Florentine Madonna that Rome would build on: the Madonna di Foligno's Virgin, the Alba Madonna's turning group and the Madonna of Loreto's profile all look back to it, and the painter himself seems to have regarded it as a summation — it is the only one of the three he dated, and, if the reading is right, the only one he signed. A painter signs what he means to stand by. He stood by this.

An altarpiece on canvas (transferred? — the picture is on canvas, unusually, having been enlarged at the top in the seventeenth century), 276 by 224 cm, in the Galleria Palatina of the Palazzo Pitti: the Virgin enthroned under a canopy (baldacchino) whose green curtains two flying angels draw aside, holding the Child on her lap; at the left Saints Peter and Bernard, at the right Saints James and Augustine, the latter two in conversation; at the foot of the throne two child-angels, one holding a scroll, read or sing; behind, a great semicircular apse with coffered vault and pilasters. It is Raphael's only Florentine altarpiece and it was left unfinished when he went to Rome in 1508: the commission came from the Dei family for their chapel in Santo Spirito, and Vasari says the painter had carried it far when the summons came; the family, unwilling to wait, had it set aside, and it was eventually bought by Baldassare Turini of Pescia, who placed it in Pescia Cathedral in the 1520s; Grand Duke Ferdinando de' Medici acquired it in 1697 and had it enlarged at the top, by the painter Niccolò Cassana, to fit a Pitti wall — the upper section of the apse is his — and it has been in the Pitti since.

The Baldacchino is the picture in which Raphael first attempted the grand altarpiece in the Florentine manner of Fra Bartolomeo — the Virgin enthroned in a monumental architecture, saints in animated conversation, angels in flight — and it shows how far, by 1507–08, he had moved from the Umbrian sacra conversazione of the Ansidei. The saints are no longer isolated: Augustine and James talk, Peter and Bernard attend, the angels in the air pull back the curtains with real energy, the child-angels at the foot read; the space is a great apse, drawn in perspective; the whole has a movement and a grandeur that look forward to Rome. It is also, in its unfinished parts, a record of his method: the heads and hands are finished, the draperies partly so, the architecture and the upper angels laid in but not completed, and the Child's body left at an early stage.

The picture was restored in 1991, when Cassana's addition was retained but its junction with the original made clear; it is in fair condition, the original canvas having suffered from its removals. It hangs in the Sala di Saturno, where it is the largest picture and, in a sense, the least finished — the Florentine Raphael's last word, left in the middle of a sentence. The two child-angels at the foot of the throne, reading together from a scroll, are among the most charming inventions of the Florentine years, and the angels drawing the curtains are the ancestors of the Sistine Madonna's curtain. Fra Bartolomeo, who saw the picture in progress, painted his answer to it in the Marriage of Saint Catherine of 1512. The two pictures, Raphael's and the friar's, define the Florentine grand altarpiece at the moment the High Renaissance arrived.

The Wikidata item records the Baglioni altarpiece as a whole — the structure that Atalanta Baglioni commissioned for her family chapel in San Francesco al Prato, Perugia, and that Raphael delivered in 1507 — of which the parts are now in three places. The main panel is the Deposition in the Galleria Borghese (Q2500226). The lunette, with God the Father half-length between two angels in a glory, was painted by Domenico Alfani, a Perugian painter who collaborated with Raphael and who had, from him, the design; it remained in Perugia when the main panel was taken by Paul V in 1608 and is now in the Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria. The predella, with the three Theological Virtues — Faith, Hope and Charity — as seated grisaille figures in roundels, each flanked by putti, went with the main panel to the Borghese, then to Paris in 1797, and was placed in the Vatican Pinacoteca on its return in 1815, where it remains (Q3740794, Q3966501, Q3658723; the group is Q131546455).

The ensemble was of the Umbrian type: a nearly square main panel, a semicircular lunette, a long low predella, and a carved and gilded frame (lost), the whole standing on an altar in a side chapel. Its programme is coherent: the lunette shows the Father who receives the Son; the main panel shows the Son carried to the tomb; the predella shows the three virtues by which the faithful are saved — and, in a memorial to a murdered son, the virtues his mother was asked to practise. The grisaille of the predella — the figures painted in a monochrome green-grey, like sculpture, with the putti in the same tone — is a Florentine device, used by Michelangelo's circle and by Fra Bartolomeo, and it was new in Perugia; it set the drama of the main panel against a base of painted stone.

The description that Wikidata gives — "altarpiece painting by Raphael and Domenico Alfani" — reflects the lunette's authorship; the main panel is Raphael's alone, and the predella is generally accepted as his, with some participation of the workshop in the putti. The ensemble has never been reassembled: the Borghese's Deposition, the Vatican's predella and Perugia's lunette are each part of a structure that exists only in the mind and in the photographic reconstructions that the Raphael exhibitions of 1984 and 2020 displayed. The visitor who wishes to see all three parts must visit three cities. Alfani's lunette, it should be said, is a competent Perugian work and not a Raphael; the God the Father is a Peruginesque type, and the angels are stiff; but the design — the Father's frontal blessing above the procession of the Son — is Raphael's, and it completes the altarpiece's theology: the Father above receiving what the mourners below carry. The Wikidata dimensions for the item — 184 by 176 cm — are roughly those of the main panel with its frame allowance; the ensemble as a whole stood perhaps three metres high with lunette and predella. The frame, carved and gilded in the Perugian manner, is lost; the Cavalier d'Arpino's copy, which replaced the original in 1608, was itself removed in the nineteenth century and is now in the Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria beside the lunette.

The picture

A panel, 65 by 48 cm, in the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche in the Palazzo Ducale at Urbino: a woman of about thirty, seen in half-length and three-quarter view turned to the left, her hands folded one over the other at the lower edge, before a plain dark background; she wears a dress of dark green with full sleeves of brown and white and a chemise gathered at the neck, and over her hair, parted at the centre and drawn back, a thin veil; at her throat a fine chain with a small pendant, and on her fingers rings. The face is narrow, pale, a little severe, with a long nose, thin lips pressed together and dark, very alert eyes that look straight at the viewer. The light falls from the left and models the face with a softness that is new in Raphael's portraits — the transitions from light to shadow are gradual, the shadows warm, the whole head bathed in a gentle half-light that comes directly from Leonardo. She has been called La Muta, "the silent woman," since the nineteenth century, for her closed mouth and her air of withheld speech.

Identity and history

The sitter is unknown. The picture came to Florence in 1631 with the Urbino inheritance of Vittoria della Rovere, which suggests that the sitter was connected with the Urbino court, and various ladies have been proposed — Giovanna Feltria della Rovere, the duke's sister; Elisabetta Gonzaga again; a Florentine — without proof. It hung in the Uffizi until 1927, when it was returned to Urbino, its presumed place of origin, for the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche; in February 1975 it was stolen from the Ducal Palace, with Piero della Francesca's Flagellation and Madonna of Senigallia, and recovered in Locarno in March 1976. The attribution to Raphael, once doubted, is now general, and the date — c. 1507, in the last Florentine years — is fixed by the Leonardesque modelling and by the relation to the Doni portraits, which it follows and surpasses.

The portrait

La Muta is the finest of Raphael's Florentine portraits and the one in which the lesson of Leonardo is most completely absorbed. The pose is the Doni pose — three-quarter, hands folded, the body turned — but the light has changed: the hard clarity of the Doni portraits has given way to a soft, enveloping half-light that models the face in gradations rather than planes, and the background, instead of a landscape, is a plain dark ground against which the pale face and hands emerge as from shadow. This is the sfumato that Raphael had resisted in the Lady with a Unicorn and the Doni portraits, now accepted — not as mystery, but as a means of giving the face an interior. And the face has one. The thin pressed lips, the slightly raised brows, the direct, watchful, unsmiling eyes: this is a woman of intelligence and reserve, who is looking at the painter as hard as he is looking at her, and who has decided not to speak. The hands, folded at the lower edge with the fingers interlaced, are drawn with the usual precision and painted with a new softness; the sleeves, in their brown and white, fall in heavy folds; the veil over the hair is a film of light.

What distinguishes the picture from everything Raphael had painted before is its psychological density. The Umbrian portraits are likenesses; the Doni portraits are statements; La Muta is a presence — a person who exists independently of the picture and whom the picture has caught in a moment of attention. That is what Leonardo had shown was possible, and what Raphael, two years after arriving in Florence, had learned to do in his own way: without the smile, without the mystery, with a clarity that is not the opposite of depth but its vehicle.

Technique and condition

The panel is poplar; the ground white; the paint thin and smooth, the flesh built up in very soft gradations from a warm mid-tone, the shadows in transparent glazes, the highlights on the forehead and nose restrained; the dress in layers of green and brown, the white of the chemise and the sleeves laid on with a loaded brush. The dark background is original. The picture was restored after its recovery in 1976 and again in the 2010s; it is in good condition, with some wear in the dress. It hangs in the Ducal Palace at Urbino, in a room near Piero della Francesca's Flagellation — two pictures that between them state the two poles of the Urbino tradition, geometry and grace.

The name La Muta deserves a word, since it has shaped the picture's reception. It was given in the nineteenth century, when the portrait was in the Uffizi, by analogy with the Pitti's La Velata and La Gravida, and it fixes on the closed mouth — the lips pressed together, slightly downturned — as the portrait's defining feature. There is something in it: the woman's silence is part of her presence, and the painter has made the mouth the point where the face's reserve is concentrated. But the eyes are the real subject. They are large, dark, a little tired, and they meet ours with an attention that is the portrait's whole drama; Raphael had not painted eyes like these before, and the Leonardesque half-light around them is what allows them to look out rather than merely to be seen. The 1975 theft — the three pictures were cut from their frames at night and found, a year later, rolled in a Swiss hotel — left the panel with a few small losses along the edges, since restored; the surface elsewhere was unharmed, and the portrait's return to Urbino was a civic event. It is the most important Raphael in the painter's native city, and the Ducal Palace shows it accordingly. It has been lent sparingly since — to Rome in 2020, where it hung beside the Doni portraits and showed how far, in a year, the painter had gone. Few portraits of the period reward slow looking more.

A panel, 72 by 56 cm, in the National Gallery, London: Saint Catherine, at three-quarter length, stands in a landscape, leaning on the wheel of her martyrdom, her body turned to the left and her head turned up and to the right, her eyes raised to a ray of golden light that falls from the upper left; her right hand rests on her breast, her left on the wheel; she wears a red dress, a yellow-ochre mantle and a blue-green cloak, and her fair hair is bound with a fillet; behind, a landscape of hills and a lake, with small flowers at her feet and a dandelion — the plant of the Passion — in the foreground. The picture was in the Borghese collection in Rome until the early nineteenth century, when it was sold; it passed to England and was bought by the National Gallery in 1839, one of its earliest Raphaels.

The Saint Catherine is the Florentine Raphael's most complete essay in the spiralling contrapposto that Leonardo had invented and Michelangelo had made heroic. The saint's pose is a spiral: her weight on one leg, her hips turned to the left, her shoulders turning back, her head turned further to the right and lifted, so that the body rotates through three turns from the feet to the eyes, and the eyes, following the ray of light, carry the movement out of the picture. It is the figura serpentinata — the serpentine figure that would become the signature of Mannerism — stated with perfect control in a single standing woman, and it comes from Leonardo's Leda (which Raphael had copied in a drawing now at Windsor), from the turning figures of the Battle of Cascina, and from the antique. The cartoon, in the Louvre, shows the spiral worked out at full scale in black chalk, and a pen study at Oxford shows it being found.

The saint's expression is the picture's other subject: the upturned face, lit by the golden ray, is an image of ecstasy — the mystic marriage, the vision — rendered without excess; the lips are slightly parted, the eyes raised, the hand on the breast a gesture of acceptance. It is the most emotionally explicit of Raphael's Florentine figures and the one that most directly anticipates the Roman saints — the Saint Cecilia of 1514, with her upturned gaze, is its descendant. The wheel, broken, is her attribute; the landscape, with its lake and hills, is of the Meadow's type; the dandelion at her feet, a plant associated with the Passion in Northern painting, is a Flemish note.

Technically the panel is in the Florentine manner, over a white ground, with a freehand underdrawing (revealed by infrared) that shows adjustments to the turn of the head and the fall of the mantle; the flesh is modelled in soft gradations with a warm light; the draperies — the yellow mantle especially — are painted in layers of local colour with glazes, and the yellow has been identified as lead-tin yellow; the golden ray is applied over the sky. The picture is in good condition and was cleaned in the twentieth century; the National Gallery's technical study confirmed the date of c. 1507 and the autograph status.

The Saint Catherine is unusual in Raphael's Florentine work in being a single standing saint — a devotional image of a female saint at three-quarter length, of a type more common in Venice and the North than in Florence — and its destination is unknown; it was presumably painted for a private patron, perhaps for a woman named Catherine. Its later fame was considerable: in the Borghese it was among the admired Raphaels, and its arrival in London in 1839, under the Gallery's first keeper, made it one of the first Raphaels the British public could see; it was engraved and copied, and its spiralling pose became a standard exercise for students. Among scholars it is valued as the clearest evidence of what Raphael took from Leonardo's Leda and from Michelangelo before Rome: the moving figure, held in balance.

The cartoon in the Louvre is the picture's other half. Drawn in black chalk at full scale on joined sheets, pricked for transfer, it shows the saint's figure in its final form, with the spiral of the pose and the upturned face fixed, and with the modelling of the drapery more fully worked than in most of Raphael's cartoons; it was evidently made with care, and it is among the best-preserved of the early cartoons for panel paintings. The relation between cartoon and panel is close — the pounced underdrawing follows it — but the picture departs in small ways, particularly in the fall of the mantle and the position of the wheel, and these departures are the painter's last thoughts. A pen study at Oxford shows the pose being found, with the saint's body tried at two angles; and a sheet in the British Museum has a study for the head.

The golden ray that falls from the upper left, and the saint's gaze towards it, are the picture's devotional point. Catherine — the learned princess of Alexandria who confounded the philosophers and was broken on the wheel — was the patron of scholars and of young women, and her image as a standing saint absorbed in a vision was a common devotional type; what is uncommon is the physical conviction Raphael gives the vision: the body's spiral rises through the upturned head into the ray, so that the saint's ecstasy is a movement of the whole figure rather than a look. The Roman Saint Cecilia would take this further, and the Baroque would make it a formula; the Saint Catherine is its first classical statement, and its restraint is the measure of its power. The picture's arrival in London in 1839 — bought from the collection of William Beckford's heirs, who had acquired it from the Borghese dispersal — made it one of the first Raphaels in the young National Gallery, and it has hung there ever since, a small, quiet, turning figure among the Madonnas.

The full-scale cartoon for the London Saint Catherine (Q2165279): black chalk on joined sheets, pricked for transfer, in the Département des Arts graphiques of the Louvre. The saint's spiralling figure — the turning body, the upturned face, the hand on the breast — is worked to a high degree of finish, the drapery's folds modelled fully, and the sheet is among the best preserved of Raphael's cartoons for panel paintings: with the Dream of a Knight's cartoon in London and the Mackintosh Madonna's in the British Museum, it is one of the three cases where cartoon and painting both survive and can be collated. The pricking follows every contour; the National Gallery's infrared examination of the panel found the pounced dots beneath the paint, completing the demonstration. The cartoon shows small differences from the picture — the mantle's fall, the wheel's angle — that are the painter's final adjustments after transfer; and its chalk handling, soft in the face and firm in the drapery, is the Florentine Raphael's draughtsmanship at the moment of the Deposition. In the French royal collection since the seventeenth century, it is shown in the Louvre's drawings rotations; the panel is in London, and the two have been reunited in exhibition — most recently in 2004 — to make the standard textbook pairing of Renaissance design and execution.

The picture

A panel, 174.5 by 178.5 cm, nearly square, in the Galleria Borghese, Rome, signed and dated on a stone at the lower left RAPHAEL VRBINAS MDVII: the dead Christ, his body slack, is carried towards the tomb — a dark opening at the left — by two bearers, a young man at the head who strains backward with the weight and an older, bearded man at the feet; Saint John, behind, holds the winding-sheet and looks down; the Magdalen, at the centre, bends to take Christ's hand and gazes into his face; Nicodemus stands behind her; at the right, the Virgin faints into the arms of three women, one of whom kneels and twists to support her; behind, a landscape of hills and sky with the three crosses of Calvary small on the horizon at the right. The composition moves from right to left — the procession of the body towards the tomb — and is divided into two groups, the bearers with Christ and the women with the Virgin, joined by the Magdalen, who belongs to both. It is the most ambitious picture of Raphael's Florentine years and the one in which he tried hardest to be something he was not yet.

The commission

The altarpiece was commissioned by Atalanta Baglioni, of the ruling family of Perugia, for the family chapel in San Francesco al Prato — the same church as the Oddi altarpiece — in memory of her son Grifonetto, who in July 1500, in the bloody family feud remembered as the "Red Wedding," had taken part in the murder of his kinsmen and had himself been killed in the street the next day; his mother, the story went, reached him as he died and forgave him. The picture was thus a mother's memorial to a murdered son, and its subject — the dead Christ carried to the tomb, the Virgin fainting — was chosen with that grief in mind: the Virgin is Atalanta, the dead Christ Grifonetto, and the painter was asked to make an image of a mother's loss. It was delivered in 1507 and stood on the Baglioni altar until 1608, when Pope Paul V had it removed, by night, for his nephew Cardinal Scipione Borghese; the Perugians protested, the Pope replaced it with a copy by the Cavalier d'Arpino and a papal brief forbidding further complaint, and the original has been in the Borghese collection ever since. It went to Paris in 1797 and returned in 1815.

The struggle

No picture of Raphael's is better documented in its making, and none shows the making more plainly. Some sixteen drawings survive — in Oxford, London, Paris, Florence, Vienna — and they record a transformation. The first sheets show a Lamentation: the dead Christ laid on the ground or across the Virgin's lap, the mourners standing and kneeling around him, in the static, grieving manner of Perugino's Pietà for San Giusto — the picture Atalanta and her Perugian Franciscans would have expected. Then, sheet by sheet, the design changes. The body is lifted; bearers appear; the group begins to move; the Virgin's faint is introduced as a separate group; the whole becomes a transport of the body — an Entombment in the manner of the antique reliefs of the death of Meleager, in which the hero's corpse is carried by his companions, which Raphael had seen on Roman sarcophagi in Florence and knew from drawings, and which Michelangelo's Battle of Cascina cartoon, with its straining nudes, had made the language of the moment. Along the way there are anatomical studies of the bearers, nude; a study of the dead Christ's body from the model; a study of the kneeling woman at the right, whose twisting pose is the Doni Tondo's Virgin reversed. The sequence is the fullest record we have of a Renaissance painter converting a devotional subject into a dramatic one, and it shows Raphael deciding, in 1506–07, to be the painter of istorie as well as of Madonnas.

The result

The finished picture is the result of that decision, and it is both magnificent and unresolved. The left-hand group — the body, the bearers, John, the Magdalen — is a passage of great power: the young bearer at the head, leaning back against the dead weight with his legs braced and his face turned to us, is a Michelangelesque figure of real energy; the body of Christ, slack and heavy, with its fallen arm and its lolling head, is among the most convincing dead bodies in Renaissance painting, studied from the model and from the antique; the Magdalen, bending to Christ's hand, is a figure of tragic tenderness, her hair loose, her face close to his. The right-hand group — the fainting Virgin and her three women — is a second, separate drama, and the kneeling woman who twists to support her is a tour de force of Michelangelesque contrapposto. But the two groups do not quite join. The Magdalen bridges them, and the landscape runs behind both, but the eye moves from one to the other as from one picture to another; the composition has been assembled from parts rather than conceived as a whole; and the emotion, distributed among so many expressive faces, loses the concentration that the Colonna Pietà, at a twentieth the scale, had achieved. Raphael knew this. The tapestry cartoons of 1515, in which a few large figures carry one action, are the answer he found; the Deposition is the question.

The figures and their sources

The bearers come from the Meleager sarcophagi and from Michelangelo's Cascina nudes; the Christ from the same sources and from Signorelli; the Magdalen from Leonardo's turning figures; the fainting Virgin from the Doni Tondo and from Fra Bartolomeo; the kneeling woman from the antique and from Michelangelo's Pitti Tondo. The borrowings are conspicuous — Vasari, who admired the picture, said nothing of them, but every modern account has catalogued them — and they are the measure of what Raphael was doing: assembling, consciously, the whole vocabulary of the Florentine grand manner and trying it out on one canvas. The picture is a demonstration of learning, and its slight stiffness is the stiffness of a demonstration. What is Raphael's own is the colour — the clear reds, blues, greens and golds of the draperies against the grey of the body and the pale sky — and the faces, each one studied, each one expressive, the Magdalen's and the young bearer's above all.

Technique and condition

The panel is poplar; the ground white; the underdrawing, seen in infrared, is detailed and follows a cartoon, with some changes in the bearers' legs; the paint is the thin, smooth oil of the Florentine years, the flesh modelled in soft gradations, the draperies in layers of local colour glazed in the shadows, the landscape in fine strokes. The picture was cleaned and restored in the 1970s and again in the 2000s and is in good condition; the sky has some wear and the greens have browned slightly. The signature and date on the stone are original.

The ensemble

The altarpiece was a complete structure: the main panel; a lunette above, with God the Father between angels, painted by Raphael's Perugian collaborator Domenico Alfani from his design (now in the Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria, Perugia); and a predella below, with the three Theological Virtues — Faith, Hope and Charity — as grisaille figures in roundels with putti (now in the Vatican Pinacoteca, Q3740794, Q3966501, Q3658723). The lunette stayed in Perugia when the main panel was taken in 1608; the predella went with the main panel to the Borghese, then to Paris, and was placed in the Vatican on its return in 1815. The Wikidata item Q3428030 records the ensemble.

Reception

The Deposition has been, since Vasari, the picture around which the discussion of Raphael's Florentine development turns. Vasari praised its "divine" figures and its expression of grief; the seventeenth century, in the Borghese, ranked it with the Transfiguration; the Academies made the bearers a model of the carried body. The nineteenth century was more divided: the Nazarenes and the Pre-Raphaelites, who preferred the Umbrian Raphael, saw in it the beginning of the fall into rhetoric, and Ruskin disliked it; the formalists of the twentieth, from Wölfflin onward, read it as a transitional work — an "academic" picture, Wölfflin said, in which the young painter had not yet found how to make the parts a whole — and the study of the drawings, by Fischel, Oberhuber and others, made it the classic case of Raphael's method of design. More recent writing has been kinder: the Borghese's restoration and the exhibitions of 1984 and 2020 showed the picture's colour and its individual passages to advantage, and the understanding of its function — a mother's memorial — has given its grief a context. It is, in the end, the picture in which Raphael failed at the highest level, and learned from the failure everything the Roman frescoes would need.

What to look at

The young bearer's face, turned to us, and his braced legs; the dead Christ's fallen hand and the Magdalen's reaching for it; the Virgin's faint, and the kneeling woman's twist; the stone with the signature; and the three crosses on the hill at the far right, small and distant, which tell us where the procession began. Then step back and watch the two groups fail, by a hair, to join — and consider that the man who painted this, at twenty-four, would in seven years paint the Death of Ananias.

Atalanta, and the chapel

Atalanta Baglioni (c. 1460–1509) was the widow of Grifone Baglioni and the mother of Grifonetto; the chronicle of Matarazzo describes her running through the streets of Perugia to her dying son and forgiving his murderers, and the story — true or not — gave the commission its meaning. She dedicated the chapel, built the altar and paid for the picture; she died two years after its installation. The chapel in San Francesco al Prato, on the right of the nave, kept the Arpino copy after 1608 and lost it, too, in the church's decline; the lunette by Alfani is in the Galleria Nazionale, and the church itself is now a concert hall. The Borghese's Sala di Didone is the altarpiece's home, and there, at eye level, in a room of moderate size, it can be seen as it could not be in its chapel — close enough to read the faces and the signature, and far enough to judge the whole.

The 1608 removal

The taking of the picture deserves its paragraph, because it is one of the founding scandals of the history of collecting. Scipione Borghese, the Pope's nephew and the most voracious collector in Rome, wanted it; the friars of San Francesco would not sell; and in March 1608, with papal authority, the altarpiece was removed from the chapel at night and carried to Rome. Perugia rose: the city council protested to the Pope, the Baglioni heirs protested, and the friars were, for a time, in revolt. Paul V answered with a brief declaring the removal lawful, sent the Cavalier d'Arpino's copy as compensation, and granted the city certain privileges by way of balm. The episode established a pattern — the powerful collector, the legal fiction, the copy left behind — that would be repeated across Italy for two centuries, and it made the Deposition the first of Raphael's altarpieces to be wrenched from its altar for a gallery. Perugia has not forgotten; the Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria shows the Alfani lunette under a label that notes where the rest of the altarpiece went.

The drawings, in more detail

Because the drawings are the picture's most discussed aspect, a few of them deserve naming. The sheet at Oxford (Ashmolean) with the first Lamentation composition — the body across the Virgin's lap, the mourners around — is the starting point; the British Museum has the developed Lamentation with the body on the ground, a composition that could have been painted as it stands and that would have satisfied Perugia; the Uffizi has the sheet on which the bearers first appear and the body is lifted; the Louvre has the studies of the two bearers nude, drawn from the shop boys in the poses of the Meleager relief; the British Museum has the squared study of the whole Entombment composition, close to the painting; and the Ashmolean has the study for the fainting Virgin's group, with the kneeling woman's twist worked out. Taken in order they show a design moving from stillness to action in perhaps twenty steps, and they show the painter deciding at each step in favour of the more difficult solution. Fischel's publication of them in the 1920s, and Oberhuber's analysis in the 1960s, made the Baglioni drawings the standard example of Renaissance design as a process; no other Raphael composition is so fully recorded on paper, and the sheets have been exhibited together more than once.

A small panel, 29 by 21.5 cm, in the Prado, Madrid, signed and dated RAPHAEL VRBINAS MDVII on the Virgin's neckline: the Christ Child sits astride a lamb, held by the Virgin, who kneels beside him; Joseph, standing behind, leans on his staff and looks down; a landscape of hills, a town and a lake under a pale sky. The composition is taken directly from Leonardo's Virgin and Child with Saint Anne — the Child astride the lamb, the Virgin bending to hold him, the third figure above — with Joseph in Saint Anne's place, and it is the clearest evidence of how closely Raphael studied Leonardo's second great Florentine composition (the painting now in the Louvre, then in progress), as the Meadow and the Goldfinch are of the cartoon. The picture came to Spain in the sixteenth century and was in the Escorial; it passed to the Prado in the nineteenth. A second version, formerly in the Lee of Fareham collection and now in a private collection, has been claimed as the original, with the Prado's as a copy; the Prado's signature and date, its underdrawing, and the Prado's own technical examination have persuaded most scholars that the Madrid panel is Raphael's, though the question has not entirely closed. The picture is among the smallest of Raphael's works and among the most Leonardesque in conception; its execution — the small figures finely modelled, the landscape delicate — is of the Florentine manner at its most refined, and the lamb, which the Child rides as a boy rides a pony, is the Passion made into play, in the spirit of the Pinks. The Prado shows it in its Raphael room with the great late Holy Families, of which it is the tiny Florentine ancestor.

The relation to Leonardo's Saint Anne deserves a closer look. Leonardo's painting — begun around 1503, carried to Milan and France, and never quite finished — shows Saint Anne seated with the Virgin on her lap, the Virgin reaching down to the Child, who straddles the lamb; the group descends in a cascade of bodies from Anne's head to the lamb's. Raphael's Holy Family with a Lamb takes the lower half of that cascade — the Virgin, the Child, the lamb — and replaces Anne with a standing Joseph, so that the composition becomes a triangle rather than a fall; it keeps the Child's straddling pose and the Virgin's bending embrace exactly. The picture is thus a record of how far Leonardo's second composition had advanced by 1507, and of how quickly the young painter absorbed it; and it shows, as the Meadow shows for the cartoon, the Raphaelesque habit of taking a Leonardo invention and clarifying it into legibility. The lamb, in Leonardo, is a symbol heavy with foreboding; in Raphael it is an animal a child is playing with, and the Passion it signifies is present as lightly as the pinks in the London panel.

The dispute over the two versions — Madrid and the ex-Lee picture — turned on the Prado panel's condition, which is somewhat worn, and on the other's high finish; the Prado's technical examination of the 2010s, which found an underdrawing with changes and materials consistent with Florence in 1507, tipped the balance, and the Madrid panel is now generally regarded as the original. It is the smallest Raphael in the Prado and the earliest, and it introduces, in that museum, the sequence that ends with the Spasimo and the great Holy Families of 1518.

One of the four rectangular scenes at the corners of the Segnatura vault, about 120 by 105 cm: Adam, seated on a rock at the left, reaches up for the fruit that Eve, standing at the right, takes from the serpent — a serpent with a woman's head and torso, coiled round the tree of knowledge between them; the ground is a landscape with a few trees and the blue sky of the vault. The scene sits between the roundels of Theology and Justice, and its subject links them: the Fall is the origin of the need for both theology (redemption) and justice (law). The figures are among the first nudes Raphael painted in Rome, and they show the Florentine lessons at work — Adam's seated pose, with his weight on one arm and his body turned, is a Michelangelesque contrapposto in the manner of the Cascina bathers; Eve's standing figure, her arm raised to the fruit, is a variation on the antique Venus; the woman-headed serpent is a medieval convention that the Sistine ceiling, a few rooms away, would also use. The composition is compact and the modelling soft, in the Florentine manner; the small scale makes the figures legible from the floor. The four rectangles, painted in 1508–09 with the roundels, are the least-known parts of the Segnatura and among the most revealing of Raphael's state on arriving in Rome: a Florentine painter of nudes and landscapes, working at small scale on a programme he had not yet fully made his own. The Vatican's restoration of the 1990s cleaned the scene, which had been much darkened.

The Fall is also the one scene on the ceiling with a direct counterpart in the Sistine, where Michelangelo's Fall and Expulsion — painted in 1510, a year or so after Raphael's corner — shows the same woman-headed serpent, the same tree, the same reaching Eve; the two are independent treatments of a common iconography, and the comparison is instructive: Michelangelo's is vast, tragic and sculptural, Raphael's small, graceful and lyrical, the figures set in a landscape like a Florentine Madonna's and the tree placed as a compositional axis. Raphael's Adam, seated with his leg drawn up and his arm raised, would be reused, in variant, for the river-gods of the Judgement of Paris engraving; his Eve, standing with one arm raised and the other lowered, is of the Venus type he would return to in the Three Graces of the Farnesina. The scene's theological function — the Fall as the origin of theology and law — is a learned placement, and it shows the adviser's hand; but the painting is the Florentine Raphael's, and its charm is that of a small picture of two young bodies in a garden, set at a corner of a great programme. The woman-headed serpent, which both Raphael and Michelangelo used, was a medieval invention — the serpent as Lilith, or as a mirror of Eve — and it would disappear from Italian painting within a generation. Raphael's is among its last graceful appearances.

The rectangular scene at the corner between the Poetry and Philosophy roundels, about 120 by 105 cm: Apollo, seated at the left and crowned with laurel, holds his lira da braccio and watches as the satyr Marsyas, bound to a tree at the right, is about to be flayed by a figure with a knife, while a second figure — the judge, or a Muse — stands by; the ground is a landscape. The subject — the contest between the god of the lyre and the satyr of the pipes, won by Apollo and punished on the loser's skin — was, for Renaissance humanists, an allegory of the victory of harmonious (Apollonian) over sensual (Dionysian) music, and of divine over earthly inspiration; its place between Poetry and Philosophy makes it the link between the inspired and the rational faculties, and a warning about the cost of challenging the god of poetry. The composition, with the seated Apollo and the bound satyr, derives from antique reliefs and gems, and the figures — Marsyas's straining body especially — are among the first in Raphael's work to show the study of the Roman antiquities he had just begun; Apollo's seated pose, with the lyre on his knee, is that of the Parnassus Apollo below in miniature. The scene has sometimes been attributed, in part, to an assistant or to Sodoma's surviving work on the ceiling, but its design is Raphael's, and its learned subject is the kind of thing the room's adviser would have prescribed. It was cleaned in the 1990s. Nietzsche, who made the Apollonian and the Dionysian the terms of his Birth of Tragedy, did not, so far as is known, look up at this corner of the Segnatura; he would have found his argument painted there.

The figure of Marsyas bound to the tree is the first of Raphael's studies of the suffering male body, a subject he rarely treated — his later Saint Sebastians are portraits, not martyrdoms — and its pose, with the arms raised and the torso stretched, derives from the Marsyas types of antique sculpture (several were in Roman collections) and from the bound figures of the Laocoön, excavated in 1506. The flayer with his knife, seen from behind, and the seated Apollo with the lyre make with Marsyas a triangle of figures across the small field; the judge or Muse at the right completes it. The scene's placement between Poetry and Philosophy has been read in more than one way: as the triumph of inspired poetry (Apollo) over mere technique (Marsyas), as the subordination of the senses to reason, or as a warning to presumption — Marsyas having challenged the god. All fit the room; none excludes the others. The scene is the least well preserved of the four rectangles, with abrasion in the landscape and some retouching in the figures, but the bound satyr and the seated god are clear, and the composition is legible from the floor. It is a scene a visitor rarely notices, tucked at a corner of the vault; it is worth finding.

The rectangular scene at the corner between Philosophy and Justice, about 120 by 105 cm: a female figure — Urania, the Muse of astronomy, or Astronomy personified — leans over a great transparent sphere of the heavens, set with the constellations, and touches it with her hand, while two putti look on; the ground is the blue of the vault, and the sphere, painted as a globe of crystal with the signs upon it, is the scene's invention. The subject links Philosophy (natural philosophy, the study of the cosmos) to Justice (the order of the heavens as the model of law), and it has been read as a reference to the Pope's horoscope or to a particular configuration of the stars — the constellations on the globe have been studied, and various dates proposed, without agreement. The figure's pose — bending over the sphere from behind, her body turned, her arm extended — is a graceful study of a woman in movement, and the putti are of the type Raphael was using throughout the ceiling; the transparent sphere, through which the figure's arm and the sky can be seen, is a small technical feat in fresco. The scene is among the best-preserved of the four rectangles after the 1990s cleaning, and its cool blues and the sphere's pale constellations are among the most beautiful passages of the ceiling. It is also, with the Parnassus below and the School of Athens's astronomers (Ptolemy and Zoroaster with their globes, at the right), part of the room's recurring interest in the heavens as the image of order — the Pythagorean and Platonic idea, dear to the Roman humanists, that the cosmos is a harmony that knowledge can read.

The globe has attracted a small specialist literature. The constellations visible on it — the figure's hand rests near the Northern sky, and the signs of the zodiac are shown — have been compared with the sky over Rome on various dates (the election of Julius II, the start of the Stanze, the feast of a particular saint), and one reading makes the globe a horoscope of the papacy; the evidence is suggestive and inconclusive. What is certain is that the painting of a transparent celestial sphere, with the figure partly seen through it, was a deliberate display — Raphael showing that fresco could render glass — and that the motif connects the ceiling to the astronomical instruments in the School of Athens below, where Ptolemy holds a terrestrial globe and Zoroaster a celestial one. Astronomy was the mathematical science that linked natural philosophy to the divine order, and its place at the corner between Philosophy and Justice is exact: the heavens as the law that nature obeys. The figure is among the loveliest on the ceiling — a woman leaning, her drapery following the turn of her body, her hair bound — and she is close in type to the Muses of the Parnassus, painted a year or two later. The restoration made her the most legible of the corner figures. Her sphere, transparent and exact, is the ceiling's one painted instrument, and it is the detail a scientist visiting the room tends to notice first.

A panel, 77 by 56 cm, in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin: the Virgin, seated at three-quarter length before a landscape, holds an open book in her left hand and turns her head to look at the naked Child, who sits on her lap and reaches up to pull at the neckline of her dress — the gesture of a child who wants to be fed, or simply wants attention; the Virgin's reading has been interrupted, and she looks at him with an expression between reproof and amusement; behind, a landscape of hills and a pale sky. The picture is named after the Colonna family of Rome, in whose collection it was in the eighteenth century; it passed to Edward Solly and came to Berlin with his collection in 1821. It is generally thought to be unfinished — the landscape is summary, the draperies thinly laid in, parts of the surface left at an early stage — and to have been among the pictures Raphael left incomplete when he went to Rome in 1508; it is usually dated 1507–08.

The Colonna Madonna is the most animated of the Florentine half-length Madonnas and the one with the most narrative: the Child's tug at the dress, the Virgin's turned head, the interrupted book, make a small domestic incident — a moment rather than a pose — and the picture has a liveliness, almost a humour, that the other Madonnas do not attempt. The motif of the Child reaching for the breast is that of the Orléans Madonna, made explicit; the interrupted reading is that of the Solly and Norton Simon Madonnas, reversed; and the whole is the Florentine Madonna at its most human, on the eve of Rome.

Its unfinished state is instructive. The faces and hands are fully modelled, in the soft Leonardesque manner of the Tempi and the Granduca; the Virgin's red dress and the Child's body are carried to a high finish; but the blue mantle is laid in thinly, without the final glazes, the landscape is a sketch of hills and sky, and passages of the ground show through — so that the picture reveals the sequence of Raphael's working method: faces and hands first, to full finish; then the principal draperies; then the background. The Berlin catalogue notes that the picture may have been completed in part by another hand, but the principal passages are Raphael's own.

The composition is a compact pyramid — the Virgin's body, her turned head, the Child across her lap — with the landscape opening behind; the binding is done by the Child's reaching hand and the Virgin's answering glance, and by her right hand, which holds him at the waist. The colour, so far as it is finished, is the classic harmony. The panel is in fair condition, with the unfinished passages somewhat abraded.

The Colonna completes the Berlin sequence of early Madonnas — Solly, Diotalevi, Saints Jerome and Francis, Terranuova, Colonna — and it is the last of them: the picture in which the Florentine Raphael, having learned everything Florence had to teach about the Madonna, turned the image towards incident and feeling, and then left it, unfinished, for Rome. Its relation to the Tempi — the same moment, the same half-length format, the opposite mood (the Tempi is all embrace, the Colonna all interruption) — shows the range of the Florentine achievement in its last months.

The Colonna provenance connects the picture with one of the great Roman families and suggests that it may have been among the works Raphael took with him to Rome in 1508 — unfinished pictures were portable capital, and the Esterházy Madonna in Budapest, also unfinished and also begun in Florence, shows the same pattern. If so, the Colonna Madonna was completed, or left as it is, in Rome, and its presence in the Colonna palace would be explained by a Roman sale; the family's collection, one of the largest in the city, was rich in sixteenth-century Florentine and Roman pictures, and it was from the Colonna that Edward Solly, buying in Rome in the 1810s, acquired it.

The picture's incident — the Child tugging at the dress — deserves a word, because it is rare in Raphael and tells something about the Florentine moment. The painter of the serene pyramids had been looking, in 1506–08, at Michelangelo's Taddei Tondo and Bruges Madonna, with their restless, half-rebellious infants, and at Leonardo's Benois Madonna, with its playing child; the Colonna's tugging Child and interrupted Virgin are his response — a Madonna with a plot, in which something is happening and something is about to happen (she will put down the book; he will be fed or scolded). It is the nearest Raphael came to the domestic comedy of Northern painting, and it is a sign of how various, by 1508, his Madonnas had become: the Tempi's embrace, the Pinks's game, the Colonna's interruption, all within a year.

Technically, the unfinished passages are of great interest for what they show of the method. The blue mantle is laid in as a flat mid-tone without the modelling and glazes that would have given it depth; the landscape is a thin wash of green and blue with the hills indicated; the Child's hair is sketched; and in the sky the ground is barely covered. Against these the Virgin's face and hands, finished to Raphael's usual standard, and the Child's body, nearly so, show where the painter concentrated his attention first — on the passages that carried expression — and left the rest for later, or for others. The picture is, in this respect, a rare open window onto the workshop, and the Berlin gallery has wisely left it as it is: a Raphael interrupted, like the Virgin's reading. Few pictures show so plainly what a Raphael looked like halfway through; and the halfway Raphael, it turns out, already has the face and the hands — the parts that matter — complete. That is the order of his priorities, visible on the panel; and it is the order of a painter who began from the human face and worked outward to the world.

A small panel, 28.5 by 21.5 cm, in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, unfinished: the Virgin, kneeling in a landscape, holds the Christ Child, who leans down towards the infant Baptist, kneeling at the right with a scroll; behind them, at the left, a landscape with ancient ruins — the remains of a Roman temple and a columned building, rendered from a drawing of the Roman Forum — and hills under a pale sky. The picture is named after the Esterházy princes, whose collection the Hungarian state bought in 1870; it had come to them from the Habsburg empress Elisabeth Christine, to whom Pope Clement XI gave it in the early eighteenth century. It was stolen from the Budapest museum in 1983, with six other pictures, and recovered in Greece in 1984.

The Esterházy Madonna is a transitional picture in two senses. In composition it is the last of the Florentine pyramidal groups — Virgin, Child and Baptist in a landscape, bound by glance and gesture, in the manner of the Meadow and the Belle Jardinière, but with the Virgin kneeling rather than seated and the group turned more sharply in space; drawings in Florence and Vienna show the arrangement being worked out. In setting it is the first of the Roman pictures: the ruins at the left, which reproduce the Temple of Vespasian and the Forum as seen in drawings of the period, show that the picture was begun in Florence and taken to Rome, or painted from Roman drawings in the first Roman months, around 1508. It is unfinished — the Virgin's mantle, the landscape and parts of the Child are laid in but not completed — and it shows, like the Berlin Colonna, the sequence of Raphael's method: faces and hands first, draperies and landscape after.

The small figures are of the Florentine type at its most refined; the Child's downward lean and the Baptist's upward gaze make the Florentine chain of attention; the Virgin's kneeling pose, with her body turned, is a new invention that the Alba Madonna would develop. The panel is in good condition, apart from its unfinished state; the theft of 1983 left it unharmed. It hangs in Budapest with the Portrait of a Young Man (Bembo?), and the two make the Hungarian share of Raphael — one Umbrian, one on the road to Rome. The Roman ruins, which have been identified with the Temple of Vespasian and the Forum as they appeared in the drawings of Raphael's contemporaries, are the first antiquities in his painting — the first sign of the archaeological interest that would make him, a decade later, the papacy's commissioner of antiquities and the author of the letter to Leo X on the ruins of Rome. That they appear in a small, unfinished Madonna begun in Florence is a neat emblem of the transition: the Florentine group, placed before the Roman past. The panel has hung in Budapest since 1870 and was restored after its recovery in 1984. It is small, unfinished and much travelled, and it is one of the most telling pictures of the career.

The rectangular scene at the corner between Justice and Theology, about 120 by 105 cm: Solomon, enthroned at the left, gives judgement; at the centre a soldier, seen from behind with his sword raised, holds the living child by the leg; at the right the true mother throws herself forward to stop him while the false mother stands by; the dead child lies on the ground. The subject — the judgement by which Solomon, threatening to divide the disputed child, discovered its true mother — was the standard image of judicial wisdom, and its place between Justice and Theology makes it the link between the law of the Pope's tribunal and the wisdom of God. The composition is the most dramatic of the four rectangles and the one that most anticipates the Eliodoro: the soldier's twisting back, the mother's lunge, the raised sword, make a small istoria of action, and the figures — the soldier especially, a nude seen from behind in the manner of the Cascina bathers — show Raphael applying the Florentine lessons of the body to narrative. The enthroned Solomon, grave and frontal, is a first sketch for the enthroned figures of the room's walls; the true mother's gesture is the ancestor of the lunging women of the Heliodorus and the Fire in the Borgo. The scene was cleaned in the 1990s. It is, with the Adam and Eve, the most often reproduced of the four, and the one in which the Roman Raphael's dramatic power is first glimpsed, at small scale, above the room where his classical calm is most complete.

The scene's compositional device — the executioner seen from behind at the centre, with the two mothers at either side and the enthroned king above — is a compact version of the judgement-scene formula that Raphael would use for the Justinian and Gregory panels of the Jurisprudence wall, and it shows how the small corner scenes served as trials for the larger ones. The soldier's twisting back, with the sword raised, is a Florentine nude of the Cascina type set into a Roman narrative; the true mother's lunge, arms outstretched, is the first of the outstretched-armed women who carry emotion in the Eliodoro and the Incendio; and Solomon, enthroned and frontal, is the Segnatura's first image of the judge — the type that Julius would sit for in the Gregory scene below. The dead child on the ground, and the false mother's impassive stance, complete a scene that is, for all its small size, a full istoria with a beginning, a crisis and a judgement. The placement between Justice and Theology is the room's logic at work: the wisdom of Solomon is both legal and divine. The scene was cleaned with the rest of the ceiling, and its figures — the soldier's back especially — are well preserved. Of the four rectangles it is the one that a visitor entering from the Eliodoro sees first, above and to the left, and its violent little action is an odd welcome to the room of harmony — a foretaste, perhaps, of what the next room would hold.

The medallion above the Jurisprudence wall, about 180 cm in diameter: a female figure seated on clouds, crowned, holding a sword upright in one hand and scales in the other, robed in red and green, attended by four putti — two holding tablets inscribed IUS SUUM UNICUIQUE TRIBUIT, "she gives to each his due," the Roman definition of justice from the Institutes, and two flanking her — against the gold-mosaic ground. Justice is the most conventional of the four roundels in its attributes — the sword and scales are the standard emblems — and the most crowded, with four putti rather than two; the figure is frontal and calm, a Florentine type in allegorical dress. Her position above the Jurisprudence wall, where the Cardinal and Theological Virtues fill the lunette and the scenes of civil and canon law flank the window, makes her the governing virtue of the room's fourth faculty; and her sword and scales are repeated, below, in the Fortitude and Prudence of the lunette. The motto, from Justinian's Institutes, was a commonplace of legal humanism and would have been chosen by the adviser. The roundel was painted in the first campaign of 1508–09, with the others, and cleaned in the 1990s. It is the least discussed of the four, which is perhaps fair; but its putti, holding up the tablets with the unselfconscious ease of children, are among the charming inventions of the ceiling, and the figure's crown — a mark of sovereignty — quietly asserts that justice, in the Pope's library, is a royal virtue.

The four putti — two more than the other roundels have — are there for a reason: the Jurisprudence wall below divides into three parts (the virtues' lunette and two law scenes), and the roundel's additional figures, with their tablets, anticipate the division; the motto ius suum unicuique tribuit is the definition that the civil and canon lawyers below both served. The crowned figure, with her scales level and her sword upright, sits in the pose of the enthroned rulers of the wall beneath — Justinian and Gregory — and her frontality is theirs; she is the only roundel figure to wear a crown, and the only one whose attributes are instruments of power rather than of knowledge, which marks the fourth faculty's difference from the other three. The roundel's gold ground and its red and green robe were cleaned in the 1990s; the figure's face, a Florentine Madonna's, is well preserved, and the putti's tablets are legible from the floor with a little effort. The roundel is the one most visitors overlook, being above the window wall; it rewards a craned neck. The figure's red and green — the colours of the Theology roundel's robe repeated — link the two virtues of the room's first and last faculties, theology and law, across the vault; whether intended or not, the echo is one of the ceiling's small symmetries. The roundel is also the only one whose motto comes from a law book rather than from a poet or philosopher — a small sign of the faculty's different character.

A drawing in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (NMH 313-1863): a Madonna lactans — the Virgin nursing the Child — catalogued under Raphael in the Tessin tradition. The nursing Madonna hovers at the edge of Raphael's painted work (the Colonna and Niccolini-Cowper Madonnas approach it; the Orléans implies it) and drawings of the motif from his circle survive in several cabinets; Stockholm's sheet belongs to that family. Autograph status unverified in the modern literature; the entry records the tradition. The motif's delicacy — the oldest and most intimate of Marian images, which the era's decorum was beginning to veil — gives the sheet its interest whatever its hand: it preserves a subject the paintings mostly declined.

The medallion above the School of Athens wall, about 180 cm in diameter: a female figure seated on a throne whose arms are carved with the many-breasted Diana of Ephesus — the emblem of Nature — holding two books inscribed MORALIS and NATURALIS, the two branches of philosophy, and robed in a garment whose colours are those of the four elements, from the blue of air at the top through the red of fire and the green of water to the earth-brown at the hem; two putti hold tablets inscribed CAUSARUM COGNITIO, "the knowledge of causes," the Virgilian and Aristotelian definition of philosophy; the ground is gold mosaic. The figure is the grandest of the four roundels — frontal, enthroned, monumental — and her elemental robe and Ephesian throne are a compressed iconography of philosophy as the study of nature's causes, matching the School of Athens below, where Plato points to the heavens and Aristotle to the earth. The roundel was painted in 1508–09, before the wall, and its relative stiffness beside the fresco below shows how fast Raphael's Roman manner developed in the course of a year; but the figure has a sculptural authority the Theology lacks, and the device of the robe's colours — a painted theory of the elements — is the kind of learned wit the room's programme demanded. The motto causarum cognitio was probably supplied by the room's humanist adviser, whoever he was (Inghirami and others have been proposed); the painter's task was to make it visible, and the seated Philosophy, with her books and her throne of Nature, does so with economy.

The roundel is the key to reading the wall below. The School of Athens has no inscription; its meaning depends on the figures' gestures and on the roundel above, whose motto — the knowledge of causes — tells the viewer what the assembly is for. The two books in the figure's hands, Moralis and Naturalis, are the two philosophies that Plato and Aristotle, below, divide between them (Plato's Timaeus is natural philosophy; Aristotle's Ethics, moral); the throne's Ephesian Diana is Nature, the object of both; and the robe's elements are the matter that philosophy investigates. The roundel is thus a summary of the wall in six emblems, and it shows how the room's programme worked — the ceiling as the index, the wall as the text. The figure's face, grave and frontal, is of the Florentine type; her hands, holding the books, are drawn with the usual care; and the putti, who lean on their tablets with the easy contrapposto of the Baglioni predella's, are the first of the many putti of the Roman decorations. The roundel was cleaned in the 1990s and its gold recovered. It is, with Poetry, the roundel most often reproduced, and its enthroned figure has served as an emblem of philosophy on the covers of books that never mention the School below. Her Ephesian throne — the many-breasted Diana carved on its arms — is the ceiling's one openly pagan image, and it sits, without embarrassment, in the Pope's library.

The medallion above the Parnassus wall, about 180 cm in diameter: a winged female figure seated on a marble block, crowned with laurel, holding a lyre and a book, her head raised as in inspiration, robed in white and blue; two putti hold tablets inscribed NUMINE AFFLATUR, "inspired by the divine" — Virgil's phrase for the Sibyl — against the gold-mosaic ground. Poetry is the most animated of the four roundels and the one that most anticipates the Roman Raphael: the wings, the upturned head, the turning body and the lyre held against the block give her a movement the other three lack, and her raised face — the look of inspiration — is the look of the London Saint Catherine transposed into allegory. The Virgilian motto makes poetry a matter of divine breath rather than craft, and the wings make the point visible; the laurel crown is the poet's, and the book and lyre the two instruments of verse, written and sung. Below her, on the wall, Apollo plays his lira da braccio among the Muses and the poets, and the roundel's lyre is the link. The figure's seat — a plain marble block, not a throne — and her white robe give her an antique simplicity that the Parnassus's company of poets continues. The roundel was restored with the rest of the ceiling in the 1990s; its blues, which had darkened, recovered their clarity.

The roundel's relation to the Parnassus below is the closest of the four pairings. The figure's lyre and laurel are Apollo's; her raised face is the poets' look of inspiration, repeated in Homer's upturned head on the wall; her wings — the only wings on the ceiling — mark poetry as the faculty that rises above the others, divinely breathed rather than reasoned. The motto numine afflatur (Virgil, Aeneid VI, of the Sibyl) is the most literary of the four and the one that most clearly declares the room's humanist programme: poetry is prophecy, the poet is the Sibyl, and the Pope's library shelves the inspired with the reasoned. The figure's seat, a block of marble inscribed with nothing, and her white robe have an antique plainness that contrasts with Philosophy's elaborate throne — poetry needs no apparatus — and her body, turning on the block with the lyre raised, is the most graceful of the ceiling's figures, the one in which the Roman Raphael's fluency first appears above the walls. Her wings, incidentally, have sometimes been read as a compliment to the winged Pegasus of the Parnassian spring; they are more simply the sign of inspiration's flight, and they make her the ceiling's one airborne figure. The roundel is directly above the room's second window and is best seen from the Disputa wall. Of the four roundels it is the one in which the painter's pleasure is most evident — a figure made for the joy of the turn and the lifted face, which is what poetry, on the wall below, is about. She is also the roundel that suffered most before cleaning, and gained most from it.

What they are

Four rooms on the third floor of the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican, overlooking the Cortile del Belvedere, which Julius II chose in 1507 as his private apartment in preference to the Borgia rooms below, and which Raphael and his workshop decorated between 1508 and 1524: the Stanza della Segnatura (1508–11), the Stanza d'Eliodoro (1511–14), the Stanza dell'Incendio di Borgo (1514–17) and the Sala di Costantino (1517–24, finished after his death by Giulio Romano and Gianfrancesco Penni). Together with the Sistine Chapel they are the most famous decorated interiors of the Renaissance and, by general consent, the central achievement of Raphael's career — the work by which his reputation was made in his lifetime and has been sustained since. The Wikidata item records the suite as a whole; each room and most of the individual frescoes have their own entries in this catalogue.

The rooms and their order

The rooms were not painted in the order one visits them. The Segnatura, the second room in the present visitor's sequence, was painted first, because it was the Pope's library and study; the Eliodoro, the first room, was painted second, as the antechamber to the library; the Incendio, the third, was painted third, as the dining room; and the Sala di Costantino, the great hall at the end, was painted last, for ceremonies and receptions. Each room had a programme suited to its use. The Segnatura's is the four faculties of knowledge — Theology, Philosophy, Poetry and Law — as the walls of a library. The Eliodoro's is four miracles of divine protection for the Church — Heliodorus expelled, the Mass at Bolsena, Peter freed from prison, Attila turned back — as the walls of a pope at war. The Incendio's is four acts of the two earlier popes named Leo — Leo III and Leo IV — as the walls of Leo X's dining room. The Costantino's is the life of the first Christian emperor — the Vision of the Cross, the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, the Baptism, the Donation — as the walls of the papacy's triumph.

The making

Julius II, soon after his election in 1503, had resolved not to live in the rooms of his enemy Alexander VI, and by 1507 a team of painters — Perugino, Sodoma, Bramantino, Lotto, Ruysch, Peruzzi — was at work on the floor above; Raphael, recommended by Bramante, joined them in 1508 and within a year had displaced them all. The Segnatura was entirely his; the Eliodoro was his with growing workshop participation; the Incendio was designed by him and executed mostly by the workshop; the Costantino was begun on his designs and painted after his death. The progression is also the progression of his manner: from the classical balance of the Segnatura through the drama of the Eliodoro to the Michelangelesque energy of the Incendio and the rhetorical grandeur of the Costantino — and the progression of the workshop from assistants to authors.

The frescoes were painted in buon fresco, in giornate mapped by the Vatican's conservators, from cartoons transferred by pouncing and incision; details and blues were added a secco; in the Eliodoro some passages were tried in oil on the wall. The ceilings of the Segnatura and Eliodoro were painted first, in each room, and then the walls from the top down. The total surface — four rooms, each with four walls and a vault — is among the largest fresco programmes of the century after the Sistine, and it was done, in its essentials, in twelve years by a man in his late twenties and early thirties with a team he built as he went.

What they mean

The Stanze are the painted statement of the High Renaissance papacy's idea of itself: a Church that inherited Athens as well as Jerusalem, that was defended by God against its enemies, that reached back to Charlemagne and Constantine for its legitimacy, and that could be shown, on the walls of the Pope's own apartment, in the most accomplished painting of the age. The Segnatura's facing walls — the Disputa and the School of Athens, the theologians and the philosophers — are the clearest image ever painted of the reconciliation of faith and reason that humanist Rome believed it had achieved; Ruskin, who hated the idea, saw in that room "the doom of the arts of Europe," and he was responding to something real: the confidence of a culture that thought it had brought the two traditions into one building. The Eliodoro's violent miracles are the same confidence under pressure — Julius's wars against Venice and France made into sacred history. The Incendio's Leos are Leo X's claim to the Carolingian past. The Costantino's emperor is the Church's claim to the empire. Taken together the four rooms are a single argument, and the argument lost — the Sack of 1527 and the Reformation made the Stanze, within a generation, the monument of a world that had ended — which is part of why they have seemed, ever since, so beautiful and so remote.

The individual rooms

The Stanza della Segnatura (Q9292247) contains the Disputa (Q549953), the School of Athens (Q186953), the Parnassus (Q2715152) and the Jurisprudence wall with the Cardinal and Theological Virtues (Q2568776); its ceiling has the four roundels of Theology, Philosophy, Poetry and Justice (Q3983944, Q3733771, Q3906946, Q3771745) and four rectangles — Adam and Eve, Apollo and Marsyas, Astronomy and the Judgement of Solomon (Q3605053, Q3620697, Q3921896, Q3769195). The Stanza d'Eliodoro (Q774018) contains the Expulsion of Heliodorus (Q2294201), the Mass at Bolsena (Q2529969), the Liberation of Saint Peter (Q2719737) and the Meeting of Leo and Attila (Q2716974), with a ceiling of Old Testament scenes (Q3620832, Q3941955, Q3951391, Q3944652). The Stanza dell'Incendio contains the Fire in the Borgo (Q2531790), the Coronation of Charlemagne (Q1450935), the Oath of Leo III (Q1619548) and the Battle of Ostia (Q2564496). The Sala di Costantino (Q3945256) contains the Vision of the Cross (Q2405750), the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, the Baptism of Constantine (Q1996917) and the Donation of Constantine.

Reception

The Stanze were famous before they were finished — Vasari's account of the Segnatura is among the longest descriptions of any work in the Lives — and they have been the measure of mural painting ever since: the Carracci, Poussin, Mengs, Ingres and the Nazarenes studied them as the canon; the French Academy sent its pensioners to copy them; the School of Athens became, through engravings, the most reproduced secular image of the Renaissance. The Romantics found the Segnatura cold; Ruskin found it fatal; the twentieth century, through Wölfflin, Shearman and the Vatican's campaigns of restoration (the Segnatura in the 1990s, the Eliodoro and Incendio since), has recovered both their colour and their argument. They remain the one place where Raphael can be seen whole — painter, designer, architect of space, director of a workshop — and where the word "classical," as applied to him, can be understood by looking.

Visiting

The rooms are entered, in the Vatican Museums' itinerary, from the Costantino and visited in reverse order of their painting; the visitor who wants the sequence Raphael lived should go straight to the Segnatura, then the Eliodoro, then back. The light is from the windows and is best in the morning. The frescoes are large — the School of Athens is nearly eight metres wide — and they are meant to be seen from the middle of the room, where the perspective of each wall resolves; standing at the centre of the Segnatura, one is at the point from which all four walls were designed to be read. The rooms are always crowded; the frescoes do not mind.

The workshop in the Stanze

The Stanze are also the history of Raphael's workshop, and the change of hands can be read on the walls. In the Segnatura every figure is his; in the Eliodoro the Heliodorus and the Mass at Bolsena are his, the Liberation of Peter largely his, and the Attila shows assistants at work in the secondary figures; in the Incendio the Fire in the Borgo is his design executed with much help, and the other three walls are workshop pictures on his sketches; in the Costantino the designs are his in part and the execution is Giulio Romano's and Penni's, after his death. The names are known: Giulio Romano, who arrived as a boy around 1515 and became the principal executant; Gianfrancesco Penni, "il Fattore," the keeper of the drawings; Perino del Vaga, Polidoro da Caravaggio, Giovanni da Udine for ornament; and earlier, in the Eliodoro, perhaps Lotto and others. The sequence of rooms is the clearest case study in the Renaissance of how a master's manner was transmitted, diluted and transformed by the hands that carried it out, and the Prado's Late Raphael exhibition of 2012 used the Stanze as its central evidence for the argument that the late workshop was an extension of Raphael, not a betrayal of him.

Restoration and study

The Vatican's modern campaigns of restoration — the Segnatura in 1994–97, the Eliodoro and the Incendio in the 2000s and 2010s, the Costantino completed in 2024 — have transformed the study of the rooms. Centuries of candle-smoke, varnish, retouching and the "restorations" of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (which repainted whole passages) had darkened and coarsened the frescoes; the cleaning recovered the original colour, mapped the giornate and the transfer methods, identified the secco additions and the oil experiments, and in the Costantino confirmed that two figures — Justice and Comitas — were painted in oil on the wall by Raphael himself, his last work there. The published reports are the foundation of all current writing on the Stanze, and the rooms as now seen are, for the first time in three centuries, close to what Raphael and his heirs painted.

The Stanze and the Sistine

The Stanze cannot be thought of apart from the Sistine ceiling, painted a few rooms away in the same years (1508–12), and the relation between the two is one of the great stories of the Renaissance: two young men, rivals in temperament and in patronage, working for the same terrible pope on the two greatest commissions of the age, each knowing what the other was doing. Raphael's Segnatura began in the Florentine manner he had brought with him; the unveiling of the ceiling's first half in 1511 changed his figures (the Jurisprudence virtues, the Heraclitus) and the Eliodoro's drama owes something to the ceiling's energy; Michelangelo, for his part, complained that Raphael had learned everything he knew of art from him — a charge that the Stanze both confirm and refute. The two sets of rooms are the two poles of the High Renaissance, and a visitor who sees both in one morning has seen the whole of it.

A note on the sources

Vasari's description of the Stanze in the 1568 Lives is the earliest extended account and the source of most of the traditional identifications; it is also the origin of several errors (the Disputa's name among them) that the literature has never shaken. The programme's author is unknown: Tommaso Inghirami, the Vatican librarian whom Raphael portrayed, has long been the favoured candidate for the Segnatura; Egidio da Viterbo, the Augustinian theologian, has been proposed; and the Pope himself, a man of decided views, cannot be excluded. The Eliodoro's programme is Julius's own — the miracles chosen in the year of his war with France; the Incendio's is Leo's; the Costantino's, Leo's and Clement's. The modern literature begins with Passavant, runs through Springer, Wickhoff and Wölfflin to Shearman's reconstruction of the library and the Vatican's restoration reports, and shows no sign of ending. The rooms have been the subject of more pages than any other decorated interior in Europe except the Sistine, and the reader who wants one book should take Shearman's Raphael in Early Modern Sources for the documents and the Vatican's restoration volumes for the walls. Everything else is commentary, including this. What the commentary cannot replace is the half-hour at the room's centre, turning slowly, which is the only way the Stanze have ever been understood. Go in the morning.

The first of the Stanze to be painted and the one that Raphael painted entirely with his own hand: a room of about nine by six metres with a cross-vaulted ceiling, windows on two sides, and four lunette-shaped wall fields, which served Julius II as his private library and study and which later housed the papal tribunal of the Segnatura Gratiae — the court that "signed" petitions for grace — from which it takes its name. The decoration, designed and executed between 1508 and 1511, is a painted programme of the four faculties of knowledge, matching the four divisions of a Renaissance library: Theology on the Disputa wall, Philosophy on the School of Athens wall, Poetry on the Parnassus wall, Law on the Jurisprudence wall, each announced on the ceiling above by a personification in a roundel and accompanied at the vault's corners by a rectangular scene — Adam and Eve, Apollo and Marsyas, Astronomy, the Judgement of Solomon — that links each faculty to its neighbours. The ceiling's framework, with its grotesque ornament and gilded stucco, was begun by Sodoma before Raphael's arrival and completed under him; the walls are his alone. The room is the most complete statement of High Renaissance classicism in painting, and it is the subject of a vast literature — Shearman's identification of the room as the library, Gombrich's analysis of the School of Athens as a painted argument, the Vatican's 1990s restoration, which recovered the colour. The entries for the individual frescoes give the detail; this entry stands for the room. A visitor who stands at its centre and turns is standing in Raphael's mind in 1510.

The room's dado, below the frescoes, was decorated later with painted herms and monochrome scenes by Perino del Vaga under Paul III (1541), replacing an earlier wooden revetment with intarsia by Fra Giovanni da Verona; the floor is Cosmatesque, of the fifteenth century; the windows look onto the Belvedere court and the city. Julius's books stood on shelves against the walls below the frescoes — the Disputa above the theology, the School above the philosophy — so that the pictures were, quite literally, the catalogue of what lay beneath them; the arrangement did not survive Julius, and the room became, under Leo X and later, a state room, a tribunal and, at last, a museum. It was restored in 1994–97, when centuries of grime and retouching were removed and the frescoes' colour — the cool blues of the Disputa's sky, the warm architecture of the School — recovered; the restoration also mapped the giornate and the transfer methods, and published them. The room's name has caused a small confusion that is worth clearing: the tribunal of the Segnatura met here only from the later sixteenth century, long after the frescoes, and the old assumption that the decoration was designed for a court of law — and that the Jurisprudence wall was therefore its centrepiece — has been abandoned; Shearman's demonstration that the room was Julius's library, and that the four walls are the four divisions of his books, is now the standard account, and it makes sense of everything on the walls.

A panel, 75 by 52 cm, in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich: the Virgin, standing, seen at three-quarter length before a landscape, holds the naked Child against her breast, her cheek pressed to his; he looks out past the viewer, his arm around her neck; she looks down at him with closed or lowered eyes; her veil falls over her hair and his head; behind, a landscape of hills and a pale sky. The picture is named after the Tempi family of Florence, in whose palace it hung until King Ludwig I of Bavaria bought it in 1829 for his new Pinakothek; its earlier history is unknown, but it was presumably painted in Florence for a Tempi ancestor around 1507–08, at the very end of the Florentine years.

The Tempi Madonna is the most tender of all Raphael's Madonnas and one of the simplest: two figures, cheek to cheek, against a landscape — the mother holding the child close, the child held. The motif of the cheek pressed to cheek is the Eleousa of Byzantine icons, the Virgin of Tenderness, which Italian painting had inherited and which Raphael here renews: the Virgin's face, turned to the Child's, is seen almost in profile, and the Child's, turned outward, in three-quarter view, so that the two heads make a single compact mass at the top of the panel, and the embrace — her arms around him, his around her neck — is the whole composition. There is no attribute, no book, no bird, no Baptist; there is only the embrace and the landscape.

The picture shows the Florentine Raphael at his most Leonardesque in modelling and his most personal in feeling. The faces are painted in soft, continuous gradations, the shadow under the Virgin's chin and along the Child's cheek melting into the light; the veil is a film of white over both heads; the Virgin's hands, holding the Child's body and shoulder, are drawn with the usual precision; the Child's body, pressed against his mother, is foreshortened with the knowledge the Florentine drawings had won. The landscape — hills, trees, a pale sky — is simplified to a few tones, so that the figures stand out against it like a sculpture against a wall; and the colour is reduced, as in the Granduca, to red, blue and flesh.

Technically the panel is in the thin, smooth oil of the period, with the flesh in soft gradations and the draperies in local colour; the surface is in very good condition, cleaned in the twentieth century, and the modelling of the two heads — the passage on which everything depends — is intact. Infrared examination has shown a light underdrawing with small adjustments.

The Tempi belongs with the Granduca and the Small Cowper to the group of half-length Madonnas without attendant figures, and it is the last of the Florentine group — the picture in which the lessons of three years (Leonardo's light, the real infant, the binding of two figures into one) are applied to the oldest and simplest of Marian images. Its influence was considerable: the cheek-to-cheek Madonna became, through it, a type for the sixteenth century, and the nineteenth, which loved it, reproduced it endlessly. Ludwig I's purchase, in the year after the Alte Pinakothek's foundation stone was laid, was one of his most important acquisitions of Italian painting; with the Canigiani, the Tempi made Munich one of the places where the Florentine Raphael could be studied, and the two hang together in the Pinakothek's Italian rooms.

Among Raphael's Madonnas it is the one that most directly addresses the feeling it represents: not the Virgin presenting the Child, not the Virgin teaching or reading, but the mother holding her baby, and the baby held. It was painted at the moment of his departure for Rome, and nothing he painted there is quite so simple.

The cheek-to-cheek motif has a long history and Raphael's version is its classical statement. The Byzantine Eleousa — the Virgin of Tenderness, of which the Vladimir Madonna is the most famous instance — showed the Child pressing his cheek to his mother's as a sign of the divine love that the Incarnation expressed; the type reached Italy through Venice and the Adriatic, and Tuscan painters of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries adapted it; by 1500 it was an old devotional formula, more common in small panels and in the workshops than in the great commissions. Raphael took it and did what he did with every inherited form: he kept the structure — the two heads pressed together, the embrace — and made it new by observation, so that the Virgin's closed eyes, the pressure of her cheek, the Child's arm around her neck and his outward gaze are not emblems of love but its appearance. The picture's power depends on this fidelity to the look of an embrace, and on its economy: two figures, three colours, a landscape reduced to a ground.

The Tempi were an old Florentine family with a palace on the Lungarno; how and when they acquired the picture is not recorded, and it may have been painted for an ancestor around 1507–08 or acquired later. Ludwig I's agent bought it in 1829 for the new Pinakothek, then building to Klenze's designs, and the King — who made Raphael the presiding genius of his gallery, with the Nazarene frescoes of its loggia illustrating the painter's life — regarded it as one of his finest purchases. It hangs today in the Alte Pinakothek's room of Florentine High Renaissance painting, near the Canigiani; in that company its simplicity is its distinction, and the two Munich Raphaels — one a crowded pyramid, the other an embrace — are the two poles of the Florentine achievement. The Tempi was cleaned in the 1960s; its condition is among the best of the Florentine Madonnas, and the pressure of cheek on cheek, which is the picture, is exactly as painted. Ludwig's Nazarene loggia, upstairs, tells the painter's life in frescoes; the Tempi, downstairs, tells it in two faces. Between the two, a visitor learns most of what Munich has to teach about him.