Madonna di Manchester

This small panel is the earliest surviving painting we have from Michelangelo, begun in Florence around 1494 when he was still in his teens, before Rome and the Sistine ceiling, before he was Michelangelo. It was never finished, and that is exactly why it is so useful to look at. He left the Virgin's cloak as bare green underpaint, so you can watch him building form the way a sculptor would, hatching light and shadow onto the figures and scraping the surrounding paint away to make them stand out hard against nothing. Two of the four angels are barely started, drawn in outline and left. There is no landscape, no room, just bodies pressed close to fill the whole surface. He would leave Florence in 1496, and the picture stayed as it was. It earned its odd name much later, after it was shown in Manchester in 1857.