Madonna and Child (study for the Madonna del Granduca)

This is a working drawing rather than a finished picture, and that is what makes it worth stopping at. It is one of the sheets on which Raphael felt his way toward the painting now called the Madonna del Granduca, the Grand Duke's Madonna, made in Florence around 1506. On paper he was still trying things out. He set the Virgin and Child in a landscape and tested the group inside a round frame, then an oval, before he settled on the plain upright rectangle of the final panel. The finished painting is famous for its bare dark background, which lets the figures glow, yet the drawings show he first imagined them out of doors. Held in the Uffizi's cabinet of prints and drawings, sheets like this let you watch a composition being decided rather than admired, with lines left in where he changed his mind.