Madonna Adoring the Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist and an Angel

This round panel was painted in Florence in the early 1490s for a household, not a church. Tondi of about this size, close to a metre across, hung in the main room of a prosperous Florentine house and were often given at a marriage or a birth. Within a few years the city those rooms belonged to had turned over. The Medici were driven out in 1494 and the friar Savonarola was preaching against luxuries. Lorenzo di Credi followed him, and Vasari says he gave up his own drawings and paintings of profane subjects to be burned. He had inherited Verrocchio's workshop in 1488, the shop where he had worked beside Leonardo, and he kept its slow, enamel-smooth finish to the end of his life. The Metropolitan bought the panel in 1909.