Madonna delle rose

By about 1530 Titian was the most sought-after painter in Europe, courted by popes and emperors, yet this is a quiet, small devotional picture. The Virgin sits with the Child while a young John the Baptist offers him a handful of roses, watched by the old hermit Anthony the Great, and it is those roses that gave the painting its name. It carries the signature Ticianus, though that may have been added later. For a long time it hung not in Italy but in Vienna, part of the great collection of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm. It reached Florence only in 1793, in an exchange of paintings between the two courts.