Doni-Tondo

This is the only finished panel painting by the mature Michelangelo that still survives, and it hangs in the frame he most likely helped design, carved with five heads that push out into the room. He painted it around 1506 to 1507, in the same short window when the ancient Laocoon statue was dug up in Rome and just before he climbed the scaffolding of the Sistine Chapel. You can feel the sculptor in it. Mary twists round to take the child from Joseph in a pose that reads like carved stone, her arms and shoulders muscled like the marble figures he really wanted to be making. Behind the Holy Family, five nude young men lounge against a low wall for no obvious biblical reason, an echo of the antique bodies that were on his mind the whole time he worked.