Master of the Manchester Madonna

This painter has no name of his own. He is called after a picture, the so-called Manchester Madonna, an unfinished panel of the Virgin and Child with the young John the Baptist and angels. It earned that nickname at the great art exhibition held in Manchester in 1857, and it belongs to the National Gallery in London.

In 1953 the art historian Federico Zeri gathered a handful of panels from around 1500, all deeply marked by the young Michelangelo, and gave them to a single anonymous hand, naming him after that Madonna. Not everyone has followed him. The National Gallery itself catalogues the Manchester Madonna as an early work by Michelangelo, painted in Florence around 1494. Others have tried to give the master a real name, among them Jacopo dell'Indaco, a Florentine painter who worked alongside Michelangelo, and Pere Nunyes, a painter later active in Barcelona.