Mary sits on the ground in a wide landscape with the infant Jesus and the young John the Baptist, who offers a small cross. Raphael painted it in Rome around 1510 as a tondo, a round picture, which made the composition a puzzle he solved with curves.

It is named after the Dukes of Alba, who once owned it. In 1931 the Soviet government quietly sold it from the Hermitage to Andrew Mellon, and it became one of the founding works of the National Gallery of Art.