The Madonna and Child

This is one of a substantial number of devotional panels inspired by prototypes by Fra Filippo Lippi and Francesco Pesellino that are among the most characteristic Florentine productions of the later Quattrocento. In this case the figures depend on Lippi's celebrated Adoration in Berlin, which was in the chapel of the Palazzo Medici in Florence. Originally given to Pier Francesco Fiorentino, pictures of the type were recognised as being by a different hand by ........, and the conventional assignation of the artist, the pseudo-Pier Francesco Fiorentino, was first used by Berenson in 1932. Zeri assigns this 'large and homogenous group' of panels to the 'Lippi-Pesellino Imitators' and comments on the 'impeccable precision' of their technique. Certain derivations from the same prototype as this panel are considered in his entry on the related work at Baltimore (see F. Zeri, Italian Paintings in the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, 1976, I, no. 52).