The Madonna and Child, the Youthful Saint John the Baptist and an Angel in a landscape beyond

As Everett Fahy confirmed (letters of 29 October and 12 November 1969), this is a characteristic work by Jacopo del Sellaio, so named because his father was a saddler. Influenced by, although not necessarily a pupil of, Fra Filippo Lippi, and, in his maturity, yet more strongly marked by the early phase of his son, Filippino Lippi, by Botticelli, and by Domenico Ghirlandaio, Sellaio was from the late 1470s until his death one of the most productive Florentine painters of his generation. This picture may be of circa 1480 and has been compared with the Rotterdam Death of Eurydice which has been assigned to that year. Sellaio supplied a number of panels of the Madonna Adoring the Christ Child, set in his characteristic rather loosely structured landscapes. As is observed by R.J.M. Olson (The Florentine Tondo, Oxford, 2000, p.146ff.) the iconography of the full-length kneeling Madonna owed much to the Franciscan cult of the Nativity which in turn was inspired by the Revelations of Saint Bridget of Sweden. Glazed terracotta reliefs by Luca della Robbia and from his workshop helped to popularise tondi of similar composition and these constitute a recognisable iconographical type: a comparable example by Sellaio is in the Palazzo Pitti, Florence (op. cit., fig. A.28). The tondo itself was a format that enjoyed a wide popularity in Florence in the late quattrocento.