Madone Colonna

This is Raphael near the start, still close to his teacher Perugino, whose gentle Umbrian world of rounded hills and slender trees shows plainly behind the Virgin and Child. It belongs to his early years, before Rome and the great papal rooms made him the most famous painter in Europe. The half-length Madonna set against a soft landscape is a formula he took from Perugino and would keep refining. Berlin's gallery holds a whole group of his Madonnas, and this one shows how much of the older master's calm the young Raphael carried with him before he outgrew it.