The Madonna and Child in a niche, with the Annunciation in the spandrels

The style and format of the present work may be compared with the detached fresco of the Madonna and Child in the Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome, which Bernard Berenson believed to be an early work by Bernardo Pinturicchio, and also with the painting attributed to Pastura depicting The Madonna and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Jerome, in the J.G. Johnson Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art. A drawing of the Madonna and sleeping Christ Child, also given to Pintoricchio, is in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, Inv. no. I.12.

A version of the present lot, formerly in the New Orleans Museum of Art was sold in these Rooms on 12 January 1996, lot 312 ($26,450).