The Holy Family with the Infant Saint John the Baptist

This panel was never finished, and that is the most revealing thing about it. Rosso Fiorentino made it around 1521, still in his twenties, working in the Tuscan hill town of Volterra, and he was already one of the odd, inventive young Florentines pushing against the calm of the High Renaissance. His figures have long fingers, glassy eyes, a deliberate strangeness. The small boy beside the Holy Family is the infant John the Baptist, patron saint of Florence, the city Rosso had recently left. Because the picture was abandoned partway, the paint in places thins to nothing and the chalk underdrawing shows through, so you can still follow where he planned a hand or a fold before he stopped.