A Natividade da Virgem

This little panel dates to about 1472, when Perugino was a young painter finding work in Florence, in the circle around the sculptor Verrocchio, the same busy workshop where Leonardo was then learning. It shows not the birth of Christ but the birth of Mary. Saint Anne rests after childbirth while women tend the newborn in a tidy domestic room, the kind of comfortable Florentine interior Perugino would have known. It is a small piece from the base of a larger altarpiece, a predella, cut up and scattered long ago, though a companion scene survives too. By 1804 this fragment had reached England, where a Liverpool collector bought it for nine guineas, which is roughly how it ended up in a museum in that city rather than a church in Florence.