The Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist

We are grateful to Dr. Florian Herb for confirming the attribution of this hitherto unpublished work to Vasari. As he points out, the composition is indebted to the artist's celebrated Holy Family with Saint Francis, painted in Venice in 1541 for the banker Francesco Leoni, and now in the County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (see L. Corti, Vasari - Catalogo completo dei dipinti, Florence, 1989, pp. 40-41, no. 23). In the present work the artist has chosen to omit both the Venetian inspired landscape and the figures of Saint Joseph and Francis who inhabit the Los Angeles picture, including instead the figure of the sleeping Infant Saint John the Baptist on the right side.