Madonna and Child

Between 1815 and 1834 the Marchese Tancredi Falletti di Barolo, a Piedmontese nobleman, and his French-born wife Giulia, born Juliette Colbert, travelled through Italy visiting churches and collections and buying works of art. On the Florentine market Tancredi managed to secure this small panel of the Virgin and Child, even though, as the Galleria Sabauda notes, the National Gallery in London had shown interest in it.

The couple had no children. When Giulia died in 1864, her will left 45 works of old art to the royal picture gallery in Turin, the institution that is now the Galleria Sabauda, and this Madonna came with them. Lorenzo di Credi had painted it in Florence in the later 1480s, around 1485 to 1490 by the museum's dating.

It was not the first panel by Credi to reach the gallery. A second Madonna and Child had been bought in 1839 from Hector de Garriod, a baron from Savoy. In 2024 the two hung side by side in an exhibition at the gallery, and the curators described them as two Madonnas not so very different from each other.