Sacred conversation with musical angels

In 1518 the young Florentine known as Rosso Fiorentino, barely 23, was asked to paint this altarpiece for a hospital rector, in memory of a Catalan widow who had left money for it. What he delivered unsettled his patron. Vasari later wrote that the rector was frightened by the saints, who in their early, dark state looked to him like devils. Rosso had crowded gaunt, sharp-featured figures into a shallow space with no architecture at all, the Madonna set no higher than the saints around her, everything lit in strange, shifting colour. It is one of the founding pictures of what we now call Mannerism, the generation after Raphael deliberately bending the calm rules they had inherited. The angels at the Virgin's feet still play their instruments in the middle of it.