Madonna del Granduca

Raphael painted this soon after he moved to Florence around 1505, a young outsider from Urbino who had come to study what the city's two giants were doing. He clearly spent time in front of Leonardo's pictures, because the soft, smoky transitions here, the way the Virgin's face melts gently into shadow with no hard outline, are Leonardo's sfumato technique picked up by a fast learner. The Madonna stands quietly holding the child against a plain dark ground. But that background is a later decision. X-rays show Raphael first painted her in a room with an arched window behind her, and the flat black was added long after his death. The picture gets its name from a much later owner, Ferdinand the Third, Grand Duke of Tuscany, who bought it around 1800 and reportedly liked it so much he took it with him when he travelled.