La Virgen del jilguero

Raphael painted this around 1505, in his early twenties, not long after arriving in Florence and falling under the spell of Leonardo. He gave it as a wedding present to a friend, a Florentine merchant named Lorenzo Nasi. The Virgin sits outdoors while the child John the Baptist offers a small goldfinch to the infant Christ, who strokes it. The bird was long tied to the coming Passion, a gentle shadow across an otherwise tender scene, and Raphael arranges the three figures in the calm pyramid he had just learned from Leonardo. The painting has survived a disaster. In 1548 an earthquake brought down the Nasi house, and this panel was pulled from the rubble in seventeen pieces. It was patched back together with nails and the seams stayed visible for centuries. A restoration finished in 2008, after about ten years of work, finally cleared away the worst of the old scars. It hangs now in the Uffizi in Florence.