Andrea del Sarto and workshop

Around 1513 Andrea del Sarto ran one of the busiest painting shops in Florence, and according to the biographer Giorgio Vasari the young Jacopo Pontormo, later a leading Florentine painter in his own right, worked in it for a time. That is the world behind the wording Andrea del Sarto and workshop. It tells you the design and much of the painting are the master's own, with some passages left to the assistants around him.

A panel at the Galleria Borghese in Rome carries this name. The Virgin sits in a Tuscan landscape with the infant John the Baptist and the Christ Child, who holds a goldfinch, a bird traditionally read as a sign of the Passion. Scholars accept the panel as Andrea's, and the museum points to the two children as the place where a second hand shows, possibly Pontormo's. It measures 80 by 60 centimetres, and the Borghese keeps six more versions of related compositions by other painters and workshops.