Le Mariage de la Vierge

Raphael was about 21 when he finished this in 1504, and he was still working in the long shadow of his teacher, Pietro Perugino. The two pictures can be compared directly, because Perugino had painted almost the same subject, the same betrothal of Mary and Joseph in front of a temple. Raphael takes the master's design and quietly outdoes it. He opens up the square, sets a graceful domed temple at the back, and lets the paving stones run away from you so cleanly that the whole space feels built by a real architect. Up on the frieze of that temple he wrote his own name and the year, Raphael of Urbino, 1504, as if it were carved into the stone. The painting was made for a Franciscan church in Città di Castello, a small Umbrian town, and passed through several hands before reaching the Brera gallery in Milan in 1806. The slim young man in the foreground snapping his rod, the rejected suitor, is often taken for a figure Raphael studied from life.