The Adoration of the Child

Around 1495 the painter we call Fra Bartolomeo was still a young layman in Florence, not long out of his apprenticeship, and this panel shows how freely Florentine workshops shared their drawings. The museum explains that he built the composition on a cartoon by his colleague Lorenzo di Credi, the full-size drawing Credi had made for a round painting of the same subject, now in New York. For a time the younger man probably worked in Credi's shop as an independent master, with access to its sketches. One motif came from further afield. The angel holding the infant John the Baptist is most likely borrowed from Leonardo da Vinci's Virgin of the Rocks. The adoration of the Christ Child was a favourite subject for private devotion in Florence, often painted as a tondo. This panel, almost a metre square, was bought in Florence in 1815 and brought to Munich.