La Bella Jardinera

Raphael painted this Madonna in his mid-twenties, around 1507, near the end of his years in Florence and just before Rome called him away. The nickname came much later, the beautiful gardener, for the calm cultivated setting where Mary sits among low flowers with the young Christ leaning against her knee and the infant John the Baptist crouched at the side. The gentle pyramid the three figures form, and the soft light on the meadow, show how closely he had been studying Leonardo. When Raphael left for Rome in 1508 the panel was still unfinished, and another painter, Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio, completed parts of it, including the blue of Mary's mantle. A French king later acquired it in Siena and carried it back to Paris, which is how it reached the Louvre.