Virgen del Palacio Medici-Riccardi

This panel spent part of its life lost. In 1907 the art historian Giuseppe Poggi found it hanging in the psychiatric hospital of San Salvi, on the edge of Florence, and recognised a late work by Fra Filippo Lippi that had dropped out of sight. Lippi painted it around 1466, near the end of a career spent largely in the service of the Medici. He sets the Madonna in a shallow niche crowned by a scallop shell, the Child standing on a marble ledge in front of her, close enough to reach the viewer's own space. Turn the panel over and you find sketches Lippi left on the back, a man's head and studies of eyes. It now hangs in the Medici family's old Florentine palace, the building that gives the picture its name.