Holy Family with St. John the Baptist

Michelangelo had just uncovered the Sistine ceiling in Rome in 1512, and its heavy, sculptural bodies were the thing every ambitious young painter wanted to answer. Beccafumi painted this round panel, a tondo about 84 centimetres across, around 1514, and you can see him reaching for that new muscular language. The Christ child twists in his mother's arms, holding a small book and raising one arm far more sculpted and grown-up than a baby's should be. Behind them, out of the dark, the elderly Joseph and the young John the Baptist lean in. The tondo, the round format Florentines favoured for a family's private devotion, was still fairly new to a Sienese painter. Scholars date it by comparing it to a fresco he made for Santa Maria della Scala, the great hospital in Siena. The panel first turns up by name in a Medici inventory of 1624, already set in a frame ringed with little cherub heads.