Holy Family

At the end of 1516 Cardinal Giulio de' Medici ordered two altarpieces for the cathedral of Narbonne. One went to Raphael, who painted the Transfiguration. The other went to his rival Sebastiano del Piombo, whose Raising of Lazarus, built partly on drawings by Michelangelo, is now in the National Gallery in London. Pedro Machuca, a young Spaniard, was in Italy in those years, and this panel from around 1518 draws on both camps. Mary and the Child come from Raphael, from designs like the Madonna of the Chair and the Madonna of the Tent, turned the other way round, which suggests Machuca knew them through prints. Joseph, bald and bearded in the shadows behind, recalls a figure in Sebastiano's Lazarus, and the museum also sees Michelangelo in the heavy, solid bodies. The panel hangs in the Room of Dido.