Madonna and Child

Around 1508 two young Florentine painters, Andrea del Sarto and his friend Franciabigio, set up a workshop together on the Piazza del Grano, a small square behind the Palazzo Vecchio. Each painted his own pictures, but they often shared sites and patrons, and their work of those years can look much alike. This panel sits right inside that closeness.

The Virgin stands behind a stone parapet holding a book, and the Child sits on the very edge, smiling, one knee drawn up to his chest. On the edge of the book's pages runs a gold inscription, A.S. MDIX, split in two by her hand. For centuries the letters were read as Andrea Sarto with the date 1509, and in 1759 Cardinal Neri Maria Corsini bought the picture as Andrea's for 80 scudi.

Doubts began in 1896, when the critic Bernard Berenson proposed Franciabigio. The connoisseur Giovanni Morelli then called the inscription a false signature and named another Florentine, Giuliano Bugiardini. In 1927 Roberto Longhi gave it back to Andrea, arguing that no forger could have fitted a date so exactly to the style, and a restoration in 1952 and 1953 showed the inscription to be genuine. In 1963 the American scholar Sydney Freedberg read A.S. as anno salvationis, in the year of salvation, a formula Franciabigio sometimes used, and pointed out that Andrea signed with a monogram of two letters A. The gallery still lists the panel under Andrea, while its recent catalogue entry finds the style closer to Franciabigio.

That restoration also removed old repaint, among it the long loose hair that had once fallen over the Virgin's shoulders.