Le Christ

Around 1500 Florence was still settling after Savonarola, the friar who had run the city on bonfires of vanities and was burned in its main square in 1498. Small devotional pictures for private prayer were what a chastened Florentine household wanted, and this one is tiny, about 22 centimetres high, a bust of Christ meant to be looked at close up and alone. Besancon files it under a second title as well, the Latin motto sustine et abstine, bear and forbear. The name on it has moved. For some 40 years it was given to Filippino Lippi, and several scholars now read the softer, more sentimental handling as the hand of his pupil Raffaellino del Garbo, with no verdict settled either way. It came to the city in 1894, in the bequest of the painter Jean Gigoux.