Madonna col Bambino, san Giovanni Battista e un angelo

In the 1490s Perugino ran one of the busiest workshops in Italy, and a boy from Urbino named Raphael passed through it to learn the trade, absorbing exactly the manner on show here. The Virgin sits with the Christ Child while the young John the Baptist and an angel lean in quietly, all of them soft-eyed and unhurried. There is no drama, only a gentle, deliberate calm in the way the figures are spaced. Behind them the land opens into the thin feathery trees and pale distance that Perugino painted over and over, in picture after picture, for the many patrons who wanted this kind of tender Madonna on their walls.