The Virgin and Child

In the 1480s Ghirlandaio ran one of the busiest workshops in Florence, painting whole chapels for rich families, and for a long time this devotional panel was put down to his assistants. Cleaning changed that. Its technique and quality matched his own pictures of those years so closely that the National Gallery now gives it to his hand. The Child looks up at his mother and raises one finger as if he were already preaching. Her cloak reads greenish today because the blue pigment, azurite, has changed with time, while the sky is ultramarine, made from lapis lazuli. The panel had been cut down to a rectangle at some point, and the arched top is a later addition. It once belonged to Sir Charles Eastlake, the Gallery's first director, and arrived in 1924 with the bequest of the chemist and collector Ludwig Mond.