The Madonna and Child with the Young Saint John the Baptist

This is one of a number of variants of a popular design, of which the best known version is in the Cleveland Museum of Art (no. 70. 160; R. Lightbown, Sandro Botticelli, II, Complete Catalogue, London, 1978, pp. 124-5, no. C19, as a 'studio picture of very high quality, executed on a cartoon by Botticelli c. 1490'). This picture, which may have been based on the same cartoon as the panels differ in size by only a centimetre, differs from that at Cleveland by showing Christ in a shift, and in the detail of the landscape. The Child is also shown in a shift in the somewhat larger (75 cm. diam.) version from the Musée Fabre, Montpellier, now at Avignon (M. Laclotte and E. Moench, Peinture Italienne, Musée du Petit Palais, Avignon, Paris, 2007, p. 82, no. 52, as studio). Other versions recorded by Lightbown are in the Galleria Estense, Modena (no. 343; which places the Madonna and Child in an interior and the Baptist looking in through a window), in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence (in which the Madonna and Child are shown in a room with two windows), and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (no. M9, corresponding with the preceeding painting in Florence). The Madonna group also appears in a small panel last recorded with Duveen, and, with notable differences to the Christ Child, in a tondo formerly in the Chiaramonte-Bordonaro collection, Palermo.