La Vierge à l’Enfant avec des chérubins

Rosso Fiorentino was barely into his twenties when he painted this in Florence, around 1517. Leonardo and Raphael had set the standard for calm, balanced sacred pictures, and Rosso's generation was already restless with all that serenity. He builds the group as a tight pyramid, the way Michelangelo had taught, but crowds it with sharp-faced little cherubs and a nervous, cooler light. Centuries later the painting made an unlikely journey. In 1810 it was bought in Paris with the help of Vivant Denon, the man Napoleon had put in charge of filling the Louvre, and sent east to the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, where it hangs today.