Madonna and Child with the Young Saint John the Baptist

The biographer Giorgio Vasari called this the most beautiful picture its painter had made up to that time. The museum identifies it with the Madonna that Vasari says was made for Giovanni Gaddi, a Florentine collector later employed at the papal treasury in Rome, and dates it to around 1517 or 1518. The Christ Child's pose comes from one of the bathing soldiers in Michelangelo's cartoon for the Battle of Cascina, a drawing the painters of his day studied closely. Young Saint John, his wooden cross behind him, repeats a putto painted above a fireplace in a small cloister of the church of the Annunziata in Florence. Even so, 19th-century connoisseurs dismissed the panel as a workshop piece or a copy, and only in 1928 was it restored to Andrea himself. Near the top, in the middle, you can find his monogram, two interlaced letters A.