Heilige Familie Panciatichi

Bronzino painted this in Florence in the late 1530s for Bartolomeo Panciatichi, a wealthy scholar and one of Cosimo de' Medici's trusted officials. You can find him in the picture without his face being in it at all: the black-and-silver banner on the left carries his family's coat of arms. Within a few years that same man fell under suspicion for leaning toward the new Protestant ideas coming out of the north, and the Inquisition made him recant in public. The painting itself gives none of that away. The Virgin, the sleeping Christ child and the young John the Baptist are worked to an enamel smoothness, in the cool, deliberate colour Bronzino favoured. Bronzino signed the work on the stone in the lower left corner.