Tempi Madonna

Raphael painted this around 1508, near the end of his years in Florence, for the Tempi family whose name it still carries. It is a quiet, close image: Mary pressing the infant Christ against her cheek, holding him high and tight the way any mother lifts a small child, his face turned out toward us. There is no throne, no gold, no saints lined up beside her, just the two of them and a low strip of landscape behind. Centuries later it took a king to get it out of Florence. Ludwig the First of Bavaria negotiated with the Tempi for some twenty years and paid a great deal to bring it north to Munich, where it hangs in the Alte Pinakothek.