The Madonna and Child

This delicate image of the Madonna lactans is a fine example of Florentine devotional painting of the mid-fourteenth century. According to an inscription on a photograph preserved in the Berenson archive at Villa I Tatti, Bernard Berenson associated the picture with Allegretto Nuzi, an artist from Fabriano who also painted in Florence in the workshops of Bernardo Daddi and Puccio di Simone. Federico Zeri later assigned it to the Maestro dell'Infanzia, an anonymous Florentine master later identified with Jacopo di Cione, brother of Nardo and Andrea di Cione, better known as Orcagna. In 1975, Miklós Boskovits attributed the painting to the Master of San Lucchese (according to Fondazione Federico Zeri photo archive). This artist, whose precise identity remains unknown, takes his name from an altarpiece commissioned for the Church of San Lucchese at Poggibonsi, near Siena, which was destroyed during the Second World War in 1944. Angelo Tartuferi suggests that the present painting was executed around 1350-55, and thus belongs to the artist's middle period, reflecting the influence of the sensitive and poetic paintings of Nardo di Cione, before the anonymous painter became closely associated with the Orcagna workshop, and particularly with Jacopo di Cione (private communication, October 2026). The painting has undergone extensive restoration in the past; a photograph preserved in the Fondazione Federico Zeri archive, probably dating from the mid-twentieth century, records its appearance in a prior state.

We are grateful to Angelo Tartuferi for confirming the attribution to the Master of San Lucchese, and for proposing a date of c. 1350-55, from photographs.