Résurrection du Christ

When Raphael painted this, he was barely 17 and still working out of Urbino, years before Rome and the papal apartments made him famous. It is one of the earliest things we have from his hand, and for a while nobody was even sure it was his. The panel sat quietly in a Scottish house, the home of the Kinnaird family, until a German connoisseur spotted it in 1880 and started the argument. What settled it were the preparatory drawings, now in Oxford, that match these figures closely. You can see the young painter already thinking in the round: the soldiers around the tomb twist and recoil in different directions, each one caught mid-stumble as the risen Christ rises calmly above them. It is the only painting by Raphael anywhere in the southern hemisphere, which is how a teenage work from 1500 ended up in São Paulo.