La Vierge Terranuova

Raphael was about 22 when he painted this round panel, around 1505, newly arrived in Florence and studying everything Leonardo and Michelangelo were doing there. You can see him learning in real time. He arranges the Virgin and three children into a calm pyramid, the shape he would use for the rest of his life, and lets the low wall behind open onto a soft Umbrian valley. The infant Christ hands the young John the Baptist a little scroll reading Agnus Dei, Lamb of God, the words that name Christ's coming sacrifice. The painting takes its name from the Dukes of Terranuova, who owned it in Naples before it came to Berlin in 1854. It is the largest of the museum's several Raphael Madonnas and the only one shaped as a tondo.