Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist

A few steps away in the same room hangs a larger Madonna with the same three figures, painted by Andrea del Sarto himself a few years later. This smaller panel, from around 1513, carries a more cautious label from the museum, Andrea del Sarto and workshop. Scholars keep the design under his name. The doubts gather around the two children, whose handling suggests an assistant, and one name proposed is the young Jacopo Pontormo, who, Vasari writes, spent time in the master's studio. Seen side by side, the two pictures show how a Florentine master and his workshop could share a job. Here the Christ Child clutches a goldfinch, a bird painters used as a sign of his future Passion, while the Virgin sits in an open Tuscan landscape. The panel has been in the Borghese collection since at least 1693.