The Alba Madonna by Raphael

The Alba Madonna by Raphael

A round picture

The tondo — a circular painting — was a Florentine fashion for domestic devotion, and Raphael's is the most perfectly composed of them all. Mary sits on the ground in the Roman campagna, one bare foot out, a book in her hand, her arm around the Child; the infant John kneels and offers a thin reed cross, and Jesus takes it. All three look at the cross. The circle closes around them without a wasted inch.

Rome, Madrid, St Petersburg, Washington

Raphael painted it in Rome around 1510, while working on the Vatican Stanze. It belonged to the Dukes of Alba in Spain, which gave it its name, went to the Hermitage in 1836, and was sold by Stalin's government in 1931 to Andrew Mellon, who gave it to the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

About this print

Made from the National Gallery of Art's open-access photograph, 12,090 pixels across. The painting is round; on the square canvases offered here it sits on the white ground the museum photographed it against.

Sources: National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1937.1.24 · Wikidata Q254923 · Wikimedia Commons