The Holy Family with Saint John the Baptist and Saint Margaret

Filippino had spent five years in Rome painting a chapel for Oliviero Carafa, a Neapolitan cardinal, and he came back full of what he had drawn there. For Saint Margaret in this tondo he reused a sketch he had made of an antique Venus and turned the statue into a saint. The worn stone pier behind the group came out of the same habit of copying Roman ruins.

Carafa ordered the picture, and Filippino painted it around 1495 in Florence, in the months after the Medici had been thrown out and Savonarola had become the loudest voice in the city. Old pagan statues were not a comfortable enthusiasm there that year.

It is a circle 184 centimetres across, made for a grand house rather than a church, and the five figures are fitted into it very tightly. Mary holds Christ, Christ reaches for his cousin John, Margaret steadies them both, and Joseph watches from behind a low wall.