Workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio

Giorgio Vasari, the 16th-century painter who wrote the lives of the Italian artists, tells a story about Domenico Ghirlandaio's shop in Florence. The master told his assistants to accept any job that came through the door, even painting the hoops of women's baskets, and if they refused, he would do it himself, because no customer was to leave unhappy.

The shop ran as a family business. Domenico worked with his brothers Davide and Benedetto and with his brother-in-law Sebastiano Mainardi, a painter from San Gimignano, and later his son Ridolfo joined them. Next to the big fresco cycles they produced smaller devotional pictures for Florentine homes, reusing figures and landscapes from the master's designs, and today it is often impossible to say whose hand painted what. Workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio is the label museums use for that shared work.

In the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, a small panel from the late 1480s or early 1490s shows the Virgin kneeling in prayer before the Child, and it was once credited to Mainardi alone. At Wawel Castle in Kraków, a round Adoration of the Child from about 1490 repeats details from Ghirlandaio's Adoration of the Shepherds in the Sassetti Chapel of Santa Trinita in Florence.