Virgin and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Sebastian and Two Donors (The Casio Altarpiece)

When Giorgio Vasari wrote his Lives of the artists in the 16th century, he gave Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio only a few lines, tucked into the life of Leonardo, and spent them on this picture, which he called the best thing Boltraffio made. Vasari says it was painted in 1500 for the church of the Misericordia just outside Bologna, and that Boltraffio wrote his name on it, calling himself a disciple of Leonardo. A Milanese painter working in another city was putting his teacher's name forward as a credential.

The family who paid for it kneel at the edges. On the left is the father, Giacomo di Marchione de Pandolfi da Casio, and on the right his son Girolamo Casio, a poet, wearing a laurel wreath. Between them the Virgin sits on the grass with the Child on her lap. Saint John the Baptist stands behind the father and points, Saint Sebastian stands behind the son, almost naked, his hands behind his back against a tree, and above them a small angel plays a lute on a cloud.

The panel stayed in the family chapel until the end of the 18th century. In 1810 Napoleon's officials moved it to the Brera in Milan, and in 1812 it reached the Louvre in an exchange of pictures between the two museums.