Madonna and Child with a Lamb

In 1505 the accounts for Leonardo's battle mural in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence record a payment to one Ferrando Spagnolo, Ferdinand the Spaniard. Two Spanish painters of that name were in Italy in those years, Fernando Yáñez and Fernando Llanos, and this small panel is given to one of them, with nobody able to say which. Back home in Valencia the two worked side by side on the same altarpiece and painted so alike that their hands have never been told apart. The Florentine years stayed in this picture. Its composition goes back to Leonardo's studies for a Madonna with a cat, and the museum finds a cat painted first where the lamb now lies. In the landscape behind there is a small horseman, the kind of thing Raphael was working out in Florence at exactly that moment. The panel reached Brera in 1891 from a collector in Kassel, under a third name, Sodoma.