Pedro Machuca

Most people who know Pedro Machuca's name know a building, the Palace of Charles V with its round courtyard inside the Alhambra in Granada, begun to his design in 1528. Before he was an architect he was a painter, and a Spaniard in Italy. His only signed work, a Virgin and the Souls in Purgatory now in the Prado, is dated 1517 and came to light in Spoleto.

The small Holy Family at the Galleria Borghese belongs to the same Italian years, around 1518. For a long time it sat among the anonymous derivations from Raphael, and an old inventory may have listed it as Giulio Romano. Nicole Dacos, the Belgian scholar of the foreign painters around Raphael, gave it to Machuca in 1984. The debt to Raphael's Madonna della Seggiola in Florence is plain, yet the arrangement feels uneasy. The Child pulls away holding a goldfinch while Mary draws him back against her.

Machuca went home to Spain around 1520 and worked in Granada, Jaén and Toledo as both painter and architect until his death in 1550.