A Virgem com o Menino (a Virgem Mackintosh)

Raphael painted this Madonna and Child around 1509, in the years he had just arrived in Rome to work for the pope and was turning out his tender, carefully balanced Virgins. What survives is a ghost of it. In the 18th century the paint was lifted off its wooden panel and laid onto canvas, a drastic operation that stripped away much of the original surface. Large areas are now loss and later repainting, the colours dulled under old varnish. The name is an accident of ownership: it is called the Mackintosh Madonna after Eva Mackintosh, who gave it to the National Gallery in 1906. A surviving full-size drawing for the composition, now in the British Museum, hints at how fresh and fine the finished picture once was.