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Around 1508 Raphael was finishing his Florentine years and getting ready for the biggest break of his life, since Pope Julius the Second was calling him to Rome to paint the papal apartments, the work that would make him. This little panel belongs to exactly that hinge. A young Virgin sits in a landscape with the Christ child and the infant John the Baptist, the whole thing balanced with the effortless calm Raphael had spent Florence perfecting. And it was never finished. If you look closely the Virgin's face and the two children are still only underpainting, blocked in and left. Raphael packed up for Rome, and this quiet, half-made Madonna stayed behind, one of the last things he made in the years just before he became the most famous painter in Italy.