Christ and the Adulteress

For most of its Florentine life this panel carried somebody else's name. In the inventories drawn up under Grand Duke Cosimo III, late in the 1600s, it is listed as a work of Ercole da Ferrara, and the gallery's 2003 catalogue identified it with an entry in the collection of Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici, an old small thing where the Adulteress is painted. Leopoldo was the great Medici buyer of his century and took in drawings and cabinet pictures by the crateful.

Mazzolino painted it around 1526 in Ferrara, on a wooden panel with an arched top, about 64 centimetres high and 42 wide. The scene comes from John's gospel, where a woman is brought before Christ to be stoned and he answers that whoever is without sin should throw the first stone. The carved gilt frame it hangs in now carries a cartouche with the corrected name and the number 129.