Holy Family

Raphael painted his Madonna of the Veil in Rome around 1511, and it hung for decades in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo. It became one of his most copied designs. The original, now at Chantilly in France, shows Mary lifting a thin veil over the Child on his bed, with Joseph behind her. This canvas from the middle of the 16th century keeps that trio and adds a fourth figure. The boy with a slender cross and joined hands is the young John the Baptist. Scholars think the unknown painter worked from a lost version by Giulio Romano, who had trained in that same workshop, rather than from the Chantilly panel. Since 1916 the picture has been on deposit at the church of Santo Spirito in Urbino, the town where Raphael was born.