散歩の聖母

The title means the Madonna of the walk, and that is just what you see: Mary and the Christ Child meeting the infant John the Baptist as if they had crossed paths on a country stroll, a soft Roman landscape opening behind them. Raphael designed it around 1516, near the end of his short life, when he ran a large and busy workshop in Rome and could not paint every commission himself. The graceful poses and the gentle turning of the figures are unmistakably his invention. The actual brushwork, though, may belong to his gifted assistant Gianfrancesco Penni, who worked closely from the master's designs.