東方三博士の礼拝

The date sits right in the picture, 1487, cut into the marble block in the foreground. A round panel like this, a tondo, was a Florentine thing, made for a family's rooms rather than an altar, and often to mark a birth. This one is tied to the Tornabuoni, one of the city's great banking families, and may date from the year Giovanni Tornabuoni was born. Ghirlandaio ran the busiest workshop in Florence, so busy that a boy named Michelangelo would be apprenticed there a couple of years later. He liked to fill sacred scenes with the faces and clothes of his own city, so the figures gathered around the Christ child wear the fashions of the 1480s and several are likely portraits of people the family knew.