Virgin and Child by http://www.wikidata.org/.well-known/genid/f752e5bb51dd11d4faf85b86787ff894

This is Raphael's *Madonna dei Garofani* (Madonna of the Pinks), painted around 1507, now at the National Gallery in London. It is one of the most tender devotional paintings of the High Renaissance, and also one of the few Raphael paintings that caused serious connoisseurial turmoil: for decades it was dismissed as a copy and famously sold to the National Gallery in 2004 for £22 million, defended at the time as the last small Raphael Madonna left in private hands.

Look past the blue mantle and the sweet faces. The child holds something small and red. It is a pink flower, a carnation, but Renaissance viewers would have immediately recognized the coral-like shape and vivid color as an allusion to the crucifixion: a premonition of blood and sacrifice tucked into a baby's hand. The furrowed brow on the infant Christ is not playfulness; it is a weight.

The painting belonged to the Aldobrandini family in Rome by the 1600s, where it was described as showing the Virgin offering the Child a flower. The object's double identity (a domestic carnation, a coral-talisman, a hidden cross) walked a very fine line. By the 19th century the picture's reputation had slipped so far that it was sold as a copy for £9. Raphael's original preparatory drawings for it had been ignored. The rediscovery of those studies in the 1990s, showing he experimented with Mary's outstretched hand and the angle of the flower, reversed its fortunes completely.

So the scandal here is not a public dismissal on debut, but a 200-year muting: the thing that made the painting powerful was mistaken for sentimentality, and nearly lost. Look at the child's hands again.