A Virgem com o Menino entronizados com santos

Raphael was barely 21 when he took this on, around 1504, and you can watch him learning in it. The nuns of the convent of Sant'Antonio in Perugia wanted an altarpiece, and they wanted it their way, which is why the Christ child sits fully clothed rather than nude, a conservative touch the sisters are thought to have asked for. The Madonna sits enthroned with saints gathered around her, and the heavier, more solid men on either side show Raphael reaching for the grand manner he had just been studying in Florence, the weightier bodies of Leonardo and Fra Bartolomeo. This is the only altarpiece by Raphael in the United States. Its later life reads like a tour of great collectors, Queen Christina of Sweden, then the Orléans family in France, then the Colonna in Rome, whose name it still carries. In 1901 the banker Pierpont Morgan bought it for two million francs, and his son left it to the Metropolitan in 1916. The main panel is close to six feet on each side, so in the museum it still holds the wall the way it once held the nuns' choir.