Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John

The first record that certainly describes this panel dates from 1817. The painter Vincenzo Camuccini, listing the pictures the Barberini family held in trust in Rome, entered a Madonna and Child on panel, unfinished, by Micherino. That was the nickname Beccafumi went by in Siena, more often spelled Mecherino. Older Barberini inventories describe a small panel of the Madonna nursing the Child, given in 1671 to Leonardo da Vinci and in 1686 to Bernardino Luini, one of Leonardo's followers in Milan, and a scholar once proposed that it was this picture. The museum doubts it, because that panel had no young John the Baptist and was a different size. The guess still says something about how the painting looks. The Virgin bares her breast for a sturdy, restless Child who turns to face us, and the infant John peers out from behind them, half lost in a murky, livid light. The family kept the panel until the Italian state bought it in 1959.