The Descent From the Cross

For most of its known life this small panel went under other painters' names. In 1839 the Pisan scholar Giovanni Rosini reproduced it in his history of Italian painting as a work by Gherardo Starnina, a Florentine who had died by about 1413, long before it could have been painted. In the 1860s or early 1870s the 3rd Earl Somers, an English collector, bought it in Florence and took it home to Eastnor Castle in Herefordshire, where a catalogue of 1889 gave it to Garofalo, a painter from Ferrara of the next generation. Only in 1909 was it published as the work of the Florentine Cosimo Rosselli, and the museum dates it, with caution, to possibly the mid-1480s. The subject is the moment after the Crucifixion when Christ's body is taken down from the cross, painted in oil and tempera together on a wooden panel about half a metre tall. In 1922 the earl's daughter, Lady Henry Somerset, sold it through the London dealer Robert Langton Douglas to Zoe Oliver Sherman of Boston, who gave it to the museum that same year.