Dei Altarpiece

The Dei family's chapel in Santo Spirito had waited a long time for its picture. Around 1508 they had commissioned Raphael, and when he left Florence for Rome they were left holding his unfinished Madonna del Baldacchino. The family came back to the problem 14 years later, when Ranieri di Carlo Dei turned to Rosso. He signed at the foot of the throne, Rubeus, 1522, and delivered a tight half circle of saints pressed around the Madonna, painted in sharp thin colour, the figures looking past one another. Late in the 17th century Grand Prince Ferdinando de' Medici wanted the panel for Palazzo Pitti and left the Augustinian friars a copy in its place. To make it fit a Baroque frame his court painter Niccolò Cassana enlarged it, adding wood on all four sides, a border of roughly 50 centimetres that was never part of what Rosso painted.