Madonna with Child and Saints

This little panel, not much larger than a sheet of paper, shows the Virgin seated on the lap of her mother, Saint Anne, with the Christ Child between them. Watch Saint Anne's hand: she is offering the boy a few cherries. In the symbolism of the time the cherry stood for the blood Christ would shed at the Passion, so a small domestic gesture quietly carries the whole coming story. Saint John the Evangelist stands to one side with his eagle and a heavy book, and Mary's father, Saint Joachim, to the other in eastern dress. Behind them Mazzolino builds up the elaborate carved architecture he loved to invent. It was painted around 1522 for the kind of Ferrarese collector who enjoyed studying a small thing closely. The picture nearly lost its author along the way, credited in an 18th-century inventory to another painter, Gaudenzio Ferrari, before scholars returned it to Mazzolino. When Ferrara passed to the Pope in 1598 and the Este collections were broken up, panels like this one drifted south and eventually into Medici hands, which is how a Ferrara cabinet picture came to hang in Florence.