Raffaellino del Garbo, 'The Virgin and Child with Saints', about 1510

The Virgin Mary is seated on a stone bench under a richly jewelled canopy, the infant Christ on her lap. He leans over to the left, his hand raised in a gesture of blessing, and faces a female saint. The jar she holds identifies her as Mary Magdalene: it contains the ointment with which she would embalm Christ’s body after his death. Opposite Mary Magdalene stands Saint Catherine of Alexandria, holding a palm branch in her left hand as a symbol of her martyrdom. The Roman Emperor Maxentius had her tortured on a spiked wheel like the one placed in front of her in this painting. The peaceful landscape that opens out behind the balustrade contrasts with the ordeals of both Christ and Saint Catherine.

Circular paintings, also known as tondi, were much sought after in Renaissance Florence. The city’s leading painters, among them Sandro Botticelli and Filippino Lippi, specialised in their production; in fact, scholars once believed this painting to be the work of either of these two artists. In most cases, tondi depict the Virgin and Christ Child, sometimes with angels, the young Saint John the Baptist or other saints. Made as a visual aid for prayer, these paintings often decorated the bedrooms of their original owners.

The National Gallery is home to a variety of tondi from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, such as The Virgin and Child with Saint John and an Angel and The Holy Family with Angels, but this one stands out for its sheer size (128 cm in diameter) and its vibrant colours. We do not know for whom this painting was originally made, but in the early nineteenth century it was in the collection of the Pucci family in Florence, who also commissioned Botticelli’s Adoration of the Kings and Antonio and Piero del Pollaiuolo’s celebrated altarpiece, The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian.

Raffaellino trained with Filippino Lippi, and assisted him in a celebrated fresco cycle in the Roman church of S. Maria sopra Minerva, for Cardinal Carafa. Following this, he quickly established himself as one of the major painters of altarpieces and devotional paintings in Florence of the first quarter of the sixteenth century. The biographer Giorgio Vasari especially praised Raffaellino’s early work, chief among which was his celebrated altarpiece, The Lamentation of Christ (Alte Pinakothek, Munich). Vasari also admired and owned several of Raffaellino’s drawings, among them two beautiful studies of hands drawn in silverpoint (British Museum, London). The hands in one of these drawings resemble those of the Virgin in this painting, suggesting that Raffaellino carefully planned his composition. Despite such preparation, he had to adjust several areas, and the changes he made to the position of the Virgin’s chin are now visible to the naked eye.