Virgin and Child

This panel comes from Sant'Eugenio, a Benedictine abbey church about three kilometres outside the Porta San Marco of Siena. The church was closed in the second half of the 18th century, and in 1812 the Griccioli family bought the abbey and made it into a country villa, with the painting still there. At some point it went through the hands of Icilio Federico Joni, a Sienese painter and restorer who also turned out convincing fake primitives for the art market. His restoration was radical, and he gave the picture a steep pointed gable it never had. In 1904 the Griccioli sold it to Dan Fellows Platt, a New Jersey collector of early Italian painting, and in 1939 his widow sold it to the Museum of Fine Arts for 15,000 dollars. The gable has since come off and the panel is back to its original shape. The Virgin holds the Child by his feet and thighs and presses him to her so that their cheeks touch, a design close to the centre panel of Lorenzetti's altarpiece for Santa Petronilla in Siena. The museum dates it to the late 1330s or the early 1340s.