(Florence active 1460–1480)
Madonna and Child,
tempera and gold on panel, 52 x 37 cm, in a tabernacle frame

Provenance:
probably acquired by a member of the Fownes or Haythorne families in the 19th century;
thence by family descent to Mrs Winifred S Parsons (nee Haythorne);
her sale, Christie’s, London, 12 October 1979, lot 50, withdrawn prior to sale (as Follower of Pesellino);
and by descent to her son, Sir Richard Edmund Clement Fownes Parsons (1928–2016), King’s Lynn, Norfolk;
art market, England;
where acquired by the present owner

The present painting was previously attributed to a Follower of Francesco di Stefano, called il Pesellino (Florence, circa 1422–1457) but was given to Lorenzo di Giovanni, the Master of San Miniato by Everett Fahy (private communication 2015) on the basis of a photograph. The Master of San Miniato, a Tuscan painter of the late Quattrocento has recently been possibly identified as Lorenzo di Giovanni.

The Madonna and Child is a predominant subject of the Master of San Miniato’s paintings. Usually he represented the Madonna, either standing or seated, according to compositional types frequently used in fifteenth century Florence, while the Christ is usually shown seated in her lap, often on a cushion. The landscape opening out behind them is characterised by gently rolling hills, trees with slender trunks, bushes and reflecting pools. The present painting conforms fully to these representational criteria.

The artist was first isolated in 1913 by Bernard Berenson during the cataloguing of the collection of John G. Johnson in Philadelphia. The initial nucleus of works gathered together by Berenson consisted of eight paintings that were all stylistically consistent with the Sacra Conversazione in the church of San Domenico at San Miniato. At the end of the 1960s Everett Fahy began to define the painter’s corpus.