The Madonna and Child seated beneath a green draped curtain

The master of the present panel earned his moniker from a Lamentation in the church of San Bartolomeo in Tuto, Scandicci, a small town south-west of Florence. It derives from Perugino’s treatment of the same subject for the convent of Santa Chiara (now Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence), and it has thus been suggested that the unnamed master began his training under Perugino, before travelling to Florence. Everett Fahy was the first to define the master’s oeuvre in 1968, before expanding on it further in 1972 (see E. Fahy, Some Followers of Domenico Ghirlandaio, New York, pp. 196-7). Fahy identified the master's hand in the present work prior to its appearance at auction in 2004. We are grateful to Christopher Daly for his assistance in cataloguing the painting and for endorsing the attribution on the basis of high-resolution photographs.

Although the master's corpus is still relatively small, it displays an assimilation of many key Florentine influences from the first quarter of the sixteenth century. His works display a marked similarity to the pupils of Domenico Ghirlandaio, in particular Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio and Francesco Granacci; here, however, the Madonna and Child are lifted directly from their counterparts in Raphael's Madonna del Baldacchino (Galleria Palatina, Pitti Palace, Florence). There are six known versions of the present composition by the master, of which this is perhaps the finest in quality, and he later reprised the figures in an altarpiece for San Pier di Sopra, in San Casciano in Val di Pesa, now at the town's Museo Giuliano Ghelli.

A note on provenance:
The painting once belonged to the notable English collector Edward Solly (1776-1844), in whose collection it was, optimistically but quite understandably, attributed to Raphael himself. In the 1810s, Solly amassed the largest private collection of pictures formed in the nineteenth century, comprising no fewer than 3,000 works. Having fallen into financial difficulties, he then offered the collection to the Prussian state, which purchased it in November 1821. A substantial part of the pictures went on public display when the Royal Gallery of Berlin opened in 1830. The paintings were then transferred to the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in 1904, and they form the basis of the Berlin collections today. Solly subsequently amassed in London a second, smaller collection, consisting almost exclusively of sixteenth-century Italian pictures. They were housed in his elegant townhouse in Mayfair’s Curzon Street, where the present painting hung alongside such works as Carlo Crivelli's Annunciation and Lorenzo Lotto's Portrait of a family, both of which are now in London’s National Gallery. The present work appeared in the posthumous catalogue of his collection (see Literature), but was not included in Solly's deceased sale in these Rooms on 18 May 1847. It may therefore have been inherited by his daughter, Miss Sarah Solly.