Virgin and Child and the Infant Saint John the Baptist

The museum's image of this panel is an old black-and-white photograph, and it shows a picture in very poor condition. Much of the paint has flaked away. The Virgin's face is almost entirely lost, and damage runs across the background and the lower part of her robes. What survives is the arrangement. Mary sits holding the Child on her lap, and he reaches across toward the small figure of John the Baptist standing at the right. A pattern of tiny dots and a decorated border can still be made out on her dark mantle.

It is a small panel, about 39 centimetres high, the size of a picture made for prayer at home. The Museum of Fine Arts dates it only to the 1510s, when Signorelli was in his sixties, and it came to the museum in 1919 as a gift from William de Forest Thomson and his wife.