This year’s Christmas picture is the so-called Botti Madonna, a beautifully delicate and humane depiction of Mary with the infant Jesus. It was painted in the late 1520s by the Italian Renaissance master Andrea del Sarto, shortly before his death, at the age of just forty-four, from the plague. Formerly owned by, among others, Grand Duke Cosimo II of Florence and King Charles I of England, this once celebrated work was long presumed lost. Almost the only surviving trace of its existence was a tiny laudatory mention in a Florentine guidebook of the late fifteenth century, Le Bellezze della Citta di Firenze, which listed among other don’t-miss objets d’art “a painting of our Lady with the Child by the hand of Andrea del Sarto, in the house of Matteo and Giovanni Battista Botti, done with extreme diligence, admired by connoisseurs and artists, with that softness of handling and strength of modelling for which this singular artist is superior to all others.”

It was only recently discovered that the painting had been missing, not lost, all along – hidden away in a North American family collection for roughly three and a half centuries, the identity of its creator long forgotten, and further obscured by the clumsy overpainting of a nineteenth-century picture restorer. By a lucky chance, the work was brought to the attention of the distinguished Renaissance scholar, John Shearman, whose intuition that a painting of genuine merit might be lurking under the botched repair job was thrillingly confirmed when the reverse of the panel was examined. An ancient, faded label was affixed to it, indecipherable in parts but still sufficiently legible to establish that it was indeed one of the lost treasures of the Florentine High Renaissance: “Madonna con banbino Gesu di Andr… a del Sarto proveni…...

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