The Virgin and Child with the Infant St John, c.1505 (metalpoint (much faded) and white...

The composition is circular, with the head of the Madonna close to the upper edge of the circle. The infant Christ stands on her lap, reaching down to hold a banderole, the other end of which is held by the infant Baptist. A rudimentary landscape is also indicated, with lightly sketched hills on either side of the Madonna. The original metalpoint of this drawing has faded almost to invisibility, and the thick white heightening renders the forms quite crudely on such a small scale. Perhaps for this reason the traditional attribution to Raphael lapsed for much of the twentieth century (Fischel in 1898, no. 457, was the first to doubt it, proposing Franciabigio; Popham, and later Berenson (1961, no. 1009G), catalogued it as Granacci). But photography in ultraviolet light recovers the strength of the metalpoint and confirms the drawing as a typical work by Raphael in his early Florentine years. Raphael worked on many Madonna and Child compositions between 1504 and 1508. These should not be viewed as a sequence of isolated projects, with each painting the result of a discrete group of studies, for although many of the drawings can be associated with a particular painting it is more fruitful to see the whole series of drawings and paintings as an ongoing formal investigation. The painting that relates most closely to the present sheet is the Terranuova Madonna in Berlin, probably of 1505, with which it shares the circular format, the iconography of the Ecce Agnus Dei scroll, the landscape background and the figure types, though in that painting the Child is sprawled across the Madonna's lap. The pose of the standing Child in the present sheet, his rear supported by the Madonna's left hand and his raised left leg by her right, in found the closely contemporary Uffizi sketch for the Madonna del Granduca and in the Washington Small Cowper Madonna.