Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John and two Angels

From the mid-fifteenth century tondos of the Madonna and Child became increasingly popular with secular patrons in Florence and were frequently placed in bedrooms. This handsome, hitherto unknown, example is by an as yet unidentified artist who was presumably trained in the studio of Domenico Bigordi, il Ghirlandaio, or in that of one of his several associates. As Christopher Daly points out, it is clearly by the same hand as two pictures of the Madonna and Child with the Infant Baptist, which Everett Fahy attributed to the Master of the Holden Tondo, but which Daly considers to be by a rather more gifted contemporary. Of these two panels, one, formerly at Dresden is in an American private collection; while another was with Colnaghi, London in 2010, when it was catalogued by Fahy for their exhibition, Old Master Paintings, no. 1, as by the Holden Master. In this tondo, as in the two other panels, the treatment of the Madonna’s hair and veil is derived from a type evolved by Perugino, who used it most aptly for the central compartment of the Pavia polyptych (London, National Gallery) of about 1499, which may well have been accessible when in the artist’s Florentine establishment, and with variations in a number of later compositions. The angel’s drapery and arm, as Daly observes, depend ultimately on that to the left of the Madonna in Fra Filippo Lippi’s revolutionary Barbadori Altarpiece (Paris, Louvre), which in turn reflects his interest in earlier Florentine sculptural responses to the antique.
We are indebted to Christopher Daly and Filippo Todini for their observations on the painting.