The Alba Madonna is a tondo (circular) oil on wood transferred to canvas painting by the Italian High Renaissance artist Raphael, created c. 1511, depicting Mary, Jesus, and John the Baptist in a typical Italian countryside. After a century and a half in Italy, it was in the collection of the Dukes of Alba in Spain until 1836, when it was sold to Nicholas I of Russia, and it became one of the highlights of the Imperial Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg. Clandestinely sold to Andrew W. Mellon by the government of the Soviet Union in 1931, it has been held by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. since 1937. Description John the Baptist is holding up a cross to Jesus, which the baby Jesus is grasping. All three figures are contemplating the cross, which is being accepted by Jesus as a token of the Crucifixion. The three figures are grouped to the left in the round design, but the image is balanced by the outstretched left arm of the Madonna holding a book, and the billowing material of her cloak, with the figures arranged in a pyramidal composition. Arranged about the figures are symbolic flowers: lady's bedstraw for childbirth, cyclamen for love and sorrow, violets for humility, dandelions and red-centred anemones for the Passion of Jesus. The tondo painting, on a round wood panel with diameter , was commissioned by Paolo Giovio, after Raphael had left Florence in 1508 to live in Rome. The painting show development from his earlier work, perhaps inspired by the Sistine Chapel ceiling then being painted by Michelangelo. Art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon has described the painting as "a breathtakingly beautiful work of art", linking her position on the ground to the iconography of the Madonna of Humility, but "her statuesque grandeur calls to mind earlier Renaissance images of the Madonna della Misericordia – images of the Virgin as Queen of Heaven and protectress of all humanity." Provenance Giovio became Bishop of Nocera de' Pagani in 1528, and he donated the painting to the in Nocera Inferiore. The painting was bought in 1686 by the Viceroy of Naples, Gaspar Méndez de Haro, 7th Marquis of Carpio, who took the painting to Spain. On his death the following year, it was inherited by his daughter; she married , who became the 10th Duke of Alba in 1711, and during the 18th century the painting