Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John and Two Angels

Pietro Perugino built a career on calm. By around 1505, when he painted this quiet adoration, his soft-faced Madonnas and tidy, symmetrical arrangements were famous across Italy and much imitated. The Virgin kneels with the infant Saint John and two adoring angels in an open Umbrian landscape, the hills behind them fading into blue haze the way real distance does. Perugino had trained a great many assistants, and one of them, a boy from Urbino named Raphael, had recently left his workshop and was heading for Florence. There the young Leonardo and Michelangelo were about to change what painting could do. Perugino kept to the gentle, unhurried manner that had made his name, and this panel later travelled to France, where it hangs today in the museum at Nancy.