Madonna and Child

The museum dates this small panel to around 1517, when Giulio Romano was still working in Raphael's busy Roman workshop, years before he left for Mantua. It is only 37 centimetres high, made for private prayer. Mother and Child emerge, lit, from the half-dark of a room. Behind them stands the Virgin's bed, its curtain partly drawn back, and Mary lifts her son's arm so that he blesses, a gesture the museum ties to the role medieval theology gave her as co-redeemer. The rarest detail is the door. A small cord with a counterweight, the kind used to pull a door shut, hangs there, and yet the door stands open with no one pushing it. The museum reads this as an allusion to the mystery of the Incarnation. The nickname comes from Henriette Hertz, a collector from Cologne living in Rome, who bought the panel in 1890 and left it to the Italian state at her death in 1913.