The Nativity

In 1933 this Nativity hung in London, in the entrance hall of the Italian embassy in Grosvenor Square, beside a bronze portrait of Mussolini and a 16th-century marble table from the Palazzo Barberini in Rome. It had been sent there on loan with 48 other works from Turin. Within a year it was back, judged unsuitable for the London residence along with ten other objects.

It had belonged to the state for only a few years. The Piedmontese industrialist Riccardo Gualino showed part of his collection at the Galleria Sabauda in 1928, and the welcome it received led him to give a large share of it to the gallery, a gift completed in 1930. Before Gualino, the picture belonged to the Tommasi family of Cortona, Signorelli's home town.

Most scholars date it to about 1497 or 1498, because it sits so close to his frescoes of those years at the abbey of Monte Oliveto Maggiore near Siena. The art historian Lionello Venturi, Gualino's adviser, placed it a little later, in the first years of the 1500s. It was painted on wood and later transferred to canvas. Far behind the Holy Family, an angel is bringing the news to the shepherds.