Madonna della tenda

Raphael painted this around 1513, in the years he was running one of the busiest workshops in Rome and covering the pope's private apartments in the Vatican with frescoes. Alongside all that public grandeur he kept making small, warm pictures of the Virgin and Child for private homes, and this is one of them. The name comes from the tenda, the Italian word for the curtain drawn across behind the figures, which turns a holy scene into something like a glimpse into a private room. Mary pulls the infant Christ close while the little John the Baptist leans in to watch, and Christ twists round to look back at his young cousin. The drawn curtain closes the scene in tight, no landscape and no sky, just three figures pressed into a shallow, shadowed space the size of a room.