Madonna and Child with the Infant St. John

In February 1798 French troops entered Rome, declared a republic and sent Pope Pius VI away from the city. That year works were seized from the Palazzo Braschi, the palace built for the pope's nephew, Duke Luigi Braschi, and this small panel, not quite 30 centimetres high, was among them. It entered the Louvre in 1799. The museum dates it to around 1515 or 1516, when Giulio Romano was still a young assistant in Raphael's workshop in Rome. The Louvre's drawings department also holds a red chalk study for the Virgin and Child. It was once filed under Giovanni da Udine, another of Raphael's assistants, and later dismissed as a copy. In 1956 the scholar Philip Pouncey wrote on the back of the sheet that it was Giulio's preparation for this panel. Most specialists have followed him, though a few still argue for Raphael's own hand. In the painting, the small Saint John stands at the right in his camel skin, a thin reed cross rising over his shoulder against a green curtain.