Virgem com o Menino (A Madona Conestabile)

This is tiny, barely the size of a book, and Raphael made it around 1504 when he was about 21 and still finding his way. A young mother holds her child in a cold, clear landscape, thin bare trees and snow still on the far hills. It stayed with one Italian family, the Conestabile, for centuries. Then in 1870 the Russian imperial court bought it for the empress and carried it to the Hermitage, which is why a small early Raphael now lives in Saint Petersburg. There is a hidden earlier idea underneath. When the paint was moved from its original wood panel onto canvas, restorers found that the child had at first been holding not a book but a pomegranate, an old symbol of Christ's coming suffering, which Raphael painted out.