The Holy Family with the Young Saint John the Baptist

The Virgin Mary holds the infant Christ while the young Saint John the Baptist looks on, the three figures arranged in a pyramidal composition against a soft Tuscan landscape. Andrea del Sarto — Vasari’s “faultless painter” — brings his characteristic warm colour and gentle modelling to this intimate devotional scene, the sfumato transitions and subtle expressions showing why he was the most admired painter in Florence before the rise of Michelangelo.