Holy Family with St. Ambrose Presenting a Donor

In 1896 the director of Brera, Giuseppe Bertini, went to the archbishop's palace in Milan and took this panel away with him, along with some other pictures. It had hung there since 1650, when Cardinal Cesare Monti left his collection to the archbishopric. Further back the trail stops. Nobody knows who ordered the painting or where it first hung, and the man being presented in it, painted with obvious care from the life, has no name. The saint whose hand rests on him is Ambrose, the bishop who ran Milan in the fourth century and became its patron, which is the one clue to where the donor belonged. Bordon was about 25 when he painted it, and he gave the landscape as much of the panel as he gave the figures, in the manner of Giorgione.