The Madonna and Child with Saint John the Baptist

Raphael

National Gallery of Art

Drawn with gray chalk lines and smudges against dark tan paper, a woman sits facing to our left on a low wall, with two toddler-aged babies at her feet, filling this vertical drawing. Their bodies are outlined with smoke-gray lines and filled in with paler gray areas, giving the drawing an almost ghostly look against the dark paper. Both children have short hair and rounded, pudgy bodies.  The woman has a subtly rounded figure, a straight nose, and smooth cheeks; her bow lips are closed. Her wavy hair is loosely pulled back and tied at the nape of her neck. Her dress, with a scooped neckline, is cinched at the waist before flaring into a voluminous skirt. She smiles down at the nude baby who stands to our left, looking up at her and leaning against her knees with his weight mostly on his right foot. Her left hand holds his left arm, which reaches across her lap toward a book she presses against her side with her left forearm. His right hand touches her left knee, nearest us, and her right hand passes behind him to caress his shoulders. The second child kneels in a crouch near the woman’s legs, to our right. Leaning on a slender staff like a walking stick, he wears a garland of leaves in his hair and looks up toward the other boy. Chalk strokes and white highlights around his torso suggest he is wrapped in drapery. Some details are difficult to make out because some of the charcoal-gray lines are loosely sketched and retraced. The corners and edges of the paper are chipped, revealing an underlying surface to which it is attached,  and there are crease lines that suggest that the paper was likely folded in the past.