Holy Family with the Infant Saint John the Baptist

This is a round painting inside a square one. Beccafumi painted the tondo in Siena around 1522, 88 centimetres across, with the Virgin seated among stone parapets, the infant John kneeling behind her and an elderly Joseph at the back. The design leans on Raphael, dead two years by then, whose compositions everyone in Tuscany was still working through.

The four corners came later. Somebody squared the panel off by adding a seraph's head in each one, and the critics have never agreed on who did it. Judey saw a painter formed on Correggio. Sanminiatelli read them as Sienese work from late in the 16th century, made by someone looking at Barocci. Either way there is a gap of 50 years or more between the middle of this picture and its edges.

Medici inventories list two Beccafumi tondi with angel heads, and this is probably the one recorded in the Tribuna of the Uffizi.