São João Batista no deserto

By around 1516 Raphael was the most sought-after painter in Rome, running a workshop so busy that his own hand and his assistants' had grown hard to separate. This Saint John shows it. The design is Raphael's, but much of the painted surface is now given to pupils such as Giulio Romano. The way the young Baptist sits and twists his athletic body is drawn straight from the nude youths Michelangelo had painted on the Sistine ceiling a few years earlier, just across the Vatican. Raphael died in 1520, only 37, and pictures like this, made by many hands, are part of why his late work is still argued over. The panel was later thinned and its paint moved onto canvas in 1777.