Pala Baronci

This is Raphael's first documented commission. In December 1500, not yet 18, he took on a large altarpiece of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino for a chapel in Città di Castello, and finished it the next year. It no longer exists as one work. In 1789 an earthquake wrecked the church and cracked the panel so badly that it was sawn apart, and only the sound pieces were kept. They are now scattered. God the Father and the Virgin are in Naples, an angel with a scroll is in the Louvre, and the fragment here in Brescia is a single small angel, a young face turned upward. So what you are looking at is not a painting cut down but a surviving splinter of one, a corner of the earliest thing Raphael is known to have painted.