Attributed to Perino del Vaga

The Virgin kneels with one hand on her chest and the other on the shoulders of the young Saint John, while Joseph lifts the Child from a white cloth among ancient ruins, the ox and donkey in a stable behind. The invention probably goes back to Raphael, and related drawings survive in the Uffizi. The panel is dated to around 1518, just after Raphael's workshop finished the Vatican Logge.

Two of his assistants are candidates. The Galleria Borghese keeps the traditional name, Perino del Vaga, with attributed to, because a very close painting of the same subject by Gianfrancesco Penni, another Raphael assistant, has led part of the criticism to prefer Penni. Recent exhibitions split on it. A show in Rome in 2011 kept Perino, while the Raphael exhibition at the Prado and the Louvre in 2012 presented the panel as Penni's.

Perino, born in Florence in 1501, worked on the Logge as a young man. After the Sack of Rome in 1527 he went to Genoa and decorated the palace of Andrea Doria, the Genoese admiral and statesman, then came back to Rome to work for Pope Paul III. He reused motifs from this composition in his Basadonne altarpiece, now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington.