Attributed to Giovanni di Lorenzo Larciani

For almost four decades this painter was known only by a scholar's nickname. In 1962 the Italian connoisseur Federico Zeri grouped a set of Florentine pictures from the early 1500s around landscape panels in the Kress Collection at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and called their author the Master of the Kress Landscapes. In the late 1990s the historian Louis Waldman tied the group to archival documents, among them a contract of 1521 for an altarpiece of the Holy Family with saints, now in the museum at Fucecchio near Florence, and gave the painter his name, Giovanni di Lorenzo Larciani.

Attributed to Larciani carries a double uncertainty. The man behind the pictures was identified only recently, and a work placed with him still rests on a judgement of style. Some paintings now given to him once carried the names of better-known Florentines, among them Rosso Fiorentino, a painter of the next generation.