The Holy Family with a Lamb

In a small, luminous panel the Christ Child sits astride a lamb as his mother steadies him and Joseph leans on his staff to watch, the three locked into one gentle pyramid in a soft Italian valley. The lamb is the Agnus Dei, and the child's embrace of it quietly foretells the sacrifice to come. Raphael builds the interlocking group straight out of Leonardo's experiments with the Virgin, Child, and lamb, but warms the design with the Umbrian sweetness of his teacher Perugino, whose own Madonna is also in this collection. Painted in his Florentine years, it shows him absorbing two masters at once.