Madonna and Child with St. Julian and St. Nicholas

This altarpiece was set up in a Florentine chapel in February 1494, in a year the city would not forget. Within months a French army under Charles VIII marched south, the ruling Medici were driven out, and the friar Savonarola began his campaign against worldly art and luxury. None of that turbulence shows here. Lorenzo di Credi had trained in the workshop of Verrocchio beside the young Leonardo da Vinci, and he paints with that shop's careful polish, the Virgin calm between Saint Julian and Saint Nicholas. The main panel was taken to Paris in 1812, in the Napoleonic years, while its small predella scenes stayed behind in the chapel, where they still are.