성부 하느님과 성모 마리아

These two heads, God the Father above and the Virgin below, are survivors of a wreck. Around 1500 Raphael, still only 17, took his first documented commission, an altarpiece of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino for a chapel in Città di Castello, in Umbria. It was the job that let a teenager sign himself a master in his own right. Nearly three centuries later, in 1789, an earthquake brought the church down and broke the panel apart, and its pieces were cut up and scattered. What survives is now split between Naples and a gallery in Brescia, with further fragments and preparatory studies in other collections. So you are not looking at a picture so much as at fragments of one, rescued faces from an altarpiece almost no one alive has seen whole.