Sacra Famiglia Canigiani

By the time Raphael painted this, around 1507, he was in his early twenties and had just arrived in Florence, watching Leonardo and Michelangelo work and quietly absorbing everything he could. A Florentine merchant named Domenico Canigiani likely ordered it for his wedding, and Raphael arranged the two mothers and their children, Mary and Elizabeth with the infant Jesus and John, into a calm pyramid, the kind of stable geometry he had picked up from Leonardo. For a long time the top of the picture looked oddly empty. A clumsy restoration in the 18th century had painted over the sky. Only in 1983, cleaning the panel for the 500th anniversary of Raphael's birth, did conservators uncover what had been hidden: eight small angels floating in the clouds above the family, looking down.