Madonna and Child

For about 30 years this panel belonged to a painter who never existed. In 1899 the connoisseur Bernard Berenson looked at a group of Florentine pictures that seemed too close to Botticelli to be by anyone else and too unlike him to be his, and handed them to an invented artist he called Amico di Sandro, the friend of Sandro Botticelli. Madonnas like this one, in Berlin, in London and in Washington, were in that group. Berenson took the invention back later, and in his lists of the 1930s most of the pictures went to Filippino Lippi, who had trained in Botticelli's shop, which is exactly why the two hands were so hard to separate. He was around 20 when he painted this, and within a few years he was called in to finish the frescoes Masaccio had left unfinished in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence.