Virgin and Child; Coronation of the Virgin

This is a whole altarpiece in miniature, a little tabernacle for prayer at home. Below are the Virgin and Child, and in the arched top she is crowned as Queen of Heaven. The museum gives its size as about 17 by 12 centimetres, small enough for a Florentine family to keep a church-shaped object in a bedroom. It dates from the early 1480s, the years when Ghirlandaio went to Rome with other Florentine painters to fresco the walls of Pope Sixtus the Fourth's new chapel, the Sistine, returning to Florence in 1482. The Museum of Fine Arts catalogues the panel as attributed to him, which means it is probably by his own hand, though not certainly. It is painted in tempera with some oil, and it came to Boston in 1922 as a gift of Mrs Thomas O. Richardson.