Madonna and Child with Angels

In Florence around 1510, the round format, the tondo, was the usual shape for a devotional picture made for a private home. Michelangelo had painted one for the merchant Agnolo Doni only a few years before. This panel, 86 centimetres across, with the Virgin, the Child and two angels, comes from a much younger hand. Giovanni Antonio Sogliani was born in Florence in 1492, so if the museum's date is right he was about 18.

In those years he was in the workshop of Lorenzo di Credi, a painter who had trained beside Leonardo under Verrocchio, and the tondo is counted among Sogliani's earliest works because it keeps so close to Credi's manner. It reached the Capitol in 1748, when Pope Benedict XIV bought the pictures of the Sacchetti family. That purchase, and a second one two years later, founded this gallery.