Adoration of the Magi

Around 1523 a Florentine named Giovan Maria Benintendi was having the antechamber of his house fitted out, and this long low panel was made to sit inside the wooden panelling there. It had company. A Bathsheba by Franciabigio, two pictures by Bacchiacca, and above them a young Baptist by Andrea del Sarto, all ordered at much the same time from the best painters working in the city. That room is gone and its contents are now divided between Dresden, Berlin and Florence, which is why this Adoration is nearly two metres across and only 85 centimetres tall. Pontormo put Saint Anne in behind the Virgin, which is unusual in this subject. The gallery's own record notes that the man standing at the far left has long been read as a portrait of Michelangelo, or of Pontormo himself.