The Small Cowper Madonna

The Small Cowper Madonna takes its name from the Cowper family of English collectors who long owned it, and it belongs to the group of serene Madonna panels Raphael painted during his Florentine years. From about 1505, the Virgin and Child sit quietly before a luminous Umbrian landscape with a river and distant town, bathed in the soft, unified atmosphere that Raphael absorbed from Leonardo and his contemporaries. Named to distinguish it from the larger Niccolini-Cowper Madonna in the same collection, the small panel shows why Raphael became the supreme painter of the gentle, perfected Holy Family.