Madonna of Loreto

Raphael painted this small panel around 1511, of the Virgin lifting a thin veil over a laughing, wriggling Christ child. The veil is not just tenderness. In the period it read as the shroud, a quiet nod to the burial still to come. The work was such a success that something like a hundred copies were circulating within the century, and for a long time nobody was sure which panel, if any, was the hand of Raphael himself. The version here at Chantilly had actually been filed under a pupil's name, Gianfrancesco Penni. Then in 1979 it was cleaned and studied, and the museum concluded this was the lost original. The name Loreto, by the way, comes from one of those copies kept at the shrine at Loreto that people once took for the real thing.