Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist

This devotional panel comes out of Florence in the 1470s, the decade the young Leonardo da Vinci was finishing his training in Verrocchio's busy workshop. Scholars place it in Leonardo's circle rather than on his own hand, and the painter's name is lost. The pairing it shows was a Florentine favourite, the Christ Child with the infant John the Baptist, who was the city's own patron saint, the two babies set close together as playmates and as a quiet foreshadowing of what is to come. Panels like this were made in numbers for private prayer at home. Where it once hung, and where it is now, is not recorded.