Madonna col Bambino e la melagrana

Cardinal Joseph Fesch was Napoleon's uncle, and while his nephew rearranged Europe he was buying pictures in Rome by the thousand. When he died in 1839 he left part of that hoard to Ajaccio, the Corsican town where Napoleon was born, and this small panel travelled with it. It had been painted in Florence around 1480 by Lorenzo di Credi, who trained in Andrea del Verrocchio's workshop and later inherited it, and who repeated his best compositions for private houses. The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford holds the version scholars take as the first, and there is a second one in Ajaccio as well. The pomegranate the Child holds carried a meaning any Florentine would have caught, since seeds splitting open under a red skin stood for the Passion. The town only secured the bequest in 1842, after a settlement with the Cardinal's heir, Napoleon's brother Joseph, and the panel has been in Ajaccio ever since.