This compelling tondo of the Virgin and Child is one of the few surviving frescoes by Raffaellino del Garbo, arguably the most eclectic painter of the Italian Renaissance. Raffaellino began his career as an assistant to Filippino Lippi, and his earliest known work is a frescoed vault adjacent to Filippino’s Carafa Chapel in Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, painted around 1493. Five years later, he is recorded as an independent painter in Florence and the following year he matriculated in the painter’s guild. Raffaellino’s style underwent several significant transformations throughout his career, revealing responses to the work of Filippino, Piero di Cosimo, and Perugino. Rather than following a linear development, Raffaellino’s style is also refreshingly inconsistent, so much so that art historians once separated his oeuvre into two groups. His early works were once associated with his nickname, Raffaellino del Garbo—derived from the street on which his workshop was located, the Via del Garbo in Florence—and his later works with his actual name, Raffaellino de’ Carli. This detached fresco, which was formerly in the celebrated collection of Giuseppe Toscanelli, dates from the height of Raffaellino’s career and portrays one of his most successful compositions.

This fresco presents a powerful, iconic image of the Virgin and Child isolated against a dark background. The Christ Child sits in his mother’s lap, wrapped in a soft pink veil and holding a small cross. He looks out of the painting towards the viewer, his resolute expression contrasted by the sadness and tenderness in the Virgin’s downcast gaze as she holds him protectively within her mantle. The figures are situated close to the pictorial plane and the Virgin’s great stature nearly fills the frame, creating a graceful and balanced depiction of the holy figures. The tondo format, which is likely original to the fresco, rose to prominence in the last quarter of the fifteenth century and was frequently employed for private devotional imagery. Raffaellino produced numerous works of this type throughout his career, and, given that most tondi were intended for domestic settings, it is no surprise that this fresco was detached from the interior wall of a home.

When this fresco was sold from the Toscanelli collection in 1883, it was considered a work by Filippino Lippi. It retained this attribution while in the collection at Chilston Park, and it was first offered by Viscountess Chilston at Sotheby’s London in 1955 as a work by Filippino before being reoffered in 1957 with the correct attribution to Raffaellino. Raffaellino’s authorship of the painting had by this point already been long established in the scholarly literature. Following the dispersal of the Toscanelli collection, all scholars from Carlo Gamba on have rightly recognized it as by Raffaellino. The composition of our Virgin and Child is related to that in Raffaellino del Garbo’s high altarpiece in the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Siena, signed and dated 1502. Executed in Raffaellino’s eccentric and highly personal style, our fresco successfully distills the central figures from his altarpiece into an intimate composition that brings the viewer into close proximity with the Virgin and Child. Rather than providing a window into their world, the work’s intense focus on the object of the viewer’s devotion gives the impression that the holy figures are physically present before us, sharing the same space. Raffaellino repeated his design for the Virgin and Child in a second tondo in the Museo Civico di Prato (Fig. 1), which is generally dated around 1511, the year of his Coronation of the Virgin in the Louvre. Each of these three works display slight variations in the positions and attributes of the principal figures. Whereas the Virgin’s hair is covered in the Siena altarpiece, her golden locks flow freely in the present painting and in the Prato tondo. There are also differences in the arrangement of her beautifully described hands between the three works. The Christ Child appears nearly identically in the Siena altarpiece and in this fresco—draped with a veil (referring to the shroud he would be wrapped in after his crucifixion) that wraps around his leg—whereas in the Prato tondo he is depicted with curly hair and dressed in a white cloak, holding a book. Our fresco dates after Raffaellino’s Siena altarpiece of 1502 and was likely executed around the same time as the Prato tondo of ca. 1511 given the compositional and stylistic similarities.

The existence of several variations on this composition of the Virgin and Child in Raffaellino’s oeuvre suggests that he was most likely working from a cartoon, or at the very least drawn designs, first executed for his Siena altarpiece that he retained after the completion of that project. Raffaellino was an expert draughtsman, and although no drawings that can be directly associated with the present work have survived, his studies of the head of the Virgin in Berlin and Stockholm, as well as his spirited studies of hands in various positions in Vienna and London, give us an indication of both the detailed planning that went into his works and the large stock of motifs kept in the workshop that he was able to draw from. The popularity of this composition and the probable former existence of a cartoon (or other preparatory drawings) for this figural group are furthermore attested by two tondi from the workshop of Raffaellino del Garbo, which are based on his designs: a damaged tondo in the Museo Civico di Montepulciano and an untraced tondo sold in the sale of the contents of the Villa Salviatino outside Florence in 1891.

The present painting formed part of the exceptional collection of medieval and Renaissance paintings assembled by the Pisan businessman and politician Giuseppe Toscanelli, which was sold in Florence in 1883. The importance of the collection was such that the sale catalogue was authored by the art historian Gaetano Milanesi and a lavish album containing photographic reproductions of the most significant paintings, including this one, was produced for the sale (Fig. 2). The entry on our fresco reports that it was detached from the wall of a house belonging to the Ulivi family on the Borgo la Croce in Florence that was demolished in order to widen the street, which runs between the Church of Sant’Ambrogio and the Piazza Beccaria. However, an alternative provenance for the painting should also be considered. Barbara Bertelli recently noted that one of Toscanelli’s earliest documented acquisitions was a Quattrocento fresco depicting the Virgin and Child, which he commissioned the Pisan restorer Guglielmo Botti to detach from a country house outside Siena in 1856. Given that the sale catalogue for the Toscanelli collection is known to have inaccurately reported the origins of several paintings, it is worthwhile to entertain the possibility that the present work may been acquired from outside Siena. The presence of this fresco in a home outside Siena would fit a pattern of patronage observed throughout the history of early Italian painting, and one especially common in Siena, in which a patron commissioned a smaller work based on a revered model.

Following the sale of the Toscanelli collection, the painting reappeared at Sotheby’s London in 1955 from the collection of Viscountess Chilston. According to an unpublished typewritten note sent by the English writer and Italophile Edward Hutton to Bernard Berenson in October 1955, this work was purchased in Italy around 1900 by Viscountess Chilston’s mother, Bertha Caroline Jennings-Bramly. The note further indicates that the conservator Mauro Pellicioli, perhaps best remembered for conserving Leonardo da Vinci’s fresco of the Last Supper in the 1950s, had treated the tondo for Mrs. Jennings-Bramly. While Hutton stated that the fresco had been transferred to canvas, it is in fact mounted on board, and it seems likely that it was Pellicioli who removed the passages of rather crude overpaint visible in the 1883 Toscanelli photograph.