MASP

Roberto Longhi attributed this work to the anonymous painter (letter to P. M. Bardi, October 2, 1946), as did G. Sandberg-Vavalà (letter to P. M. Bardi, undated but known to be from 1947). Both rightly emphasize the exceptional integrity of the work – Virgin and Child, Infant St. John the Baptist, and an Angel –, enhancing the beauty of the calligraphy of the inscription and of the original frame, ornamented with owers that “give the work an uncommon perfume and enchantment” (Longhi). Although the tondo shape is not oen found among the group of works attributed to this Florentine disciple of Lippi’s, there are at least three other works assuredly his in London’s National Gallery, in the Galleria Comunale di Sinalunga, and (formerly) in the Palazzo Strozzi, in Florence. e work has every evidence of being an inverted copy of Filippo Lippi’s Virgin and Child, conserved in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich and is usually dated between 1455 and 1465. As Sandberg-Vavalà observed, our painter once again used this same work of Lippi’s to paint the Liverpool Museum’s Saint Catherine. e Infant St. John, in turn, is precisely replicated in the tondo in the National Gallery, in London, by the same Pseudo-Pier Francesco.

— Unknown authorship, 1998

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