抱书圣母子

Raphael was about 20 when he painted this small Madonna around 1503, still absorbing everything from his teacher Perugino and from the Florentine art he was starting to study. Mary holds the sturdy Christ child with one hand and steadies an open book with the other. The book is a real detail worth pausing on: it is a breviary, opened to the prayers said at the ninth hour, the hour that recalls Christ's death. So the mother reading with her baby is quietly turned toward the son's future. Behind them a soft Umbrian landscape recedes into pale hills and water. It is the only painting by Raphael in any public collection in the western United States, which is part of why Pasadena keeps it close.