Saint John the Baptist

This is a variant of a panel in the Museu d'Art de Catalunya, Barcelona (Cambó bequest), which originally formed a diptych with a bust-length Youthful Christ Contemplating the Symbols of the Passion, last recorded in the collection of Ante Topic Mimara (formerly Dresden Gemäldegalerie) and reproduced in the catalogue of the exhibition Colección Cambó, Museo del Prado, 1990, pp. 251-2, where attributed by Massimo Ferretti to Raffaelino del Garbo). Ferretti also reproduced this panel as an anonymous sixteenth-century derivation of the Cambó picture, unaware that its pendant now belongs to the Chigi Saracini collection. Everett Fahy considers these pictures to be by the Master of the Holden Tondo, whose oeuvre he began to assemble in Some Followers, (E. Fahy, Some followers of Domenico Ghirlandajo, 1976, p. 171). In 2001, Fahy confirmed the attribution on the basis of transparencies. The artist appears to have been active in the late 1490s in Florence and then in Bologna.