Master of the Borghese Tondo

This painter has no name of his own. Master of the Borghese Tondo is a label built on one picture, the round Adoration of the Child in the Galleria Borghese, about 78 centimetres across, painted in tempera in Florence at the end of the 1400s. Around it scholars have grouped other versions of the same composition, which goes back to a design by the Florentine Cosimo Rosselli that this painter repeated many times.

In the Borghese panel the Holy Family and the young John the Baptist gather in a hut before the Child, two shepherds come in from the right, one carrying a lamb, and a mountain landscape full of small figures opens behind. The faces of Mary and the Child recall Domenico Ghirlandaio. The 1693 inventory called it Antonio del Pollaiolo, the American connoisseur Bernard Berenson proposed Girolamo di Benvenuto, and others identified the painter with Jacopo del Tedesco, a pupil of Ghirlandaio, an idea the specialist Everett Fahy rejected. The museum also records a recent proposal naming the Florentine Michele di Giovanni Scheggini, called il Graffione.