The Madonna and Saint Joseph adoring the Christ Child

The son of a wealthy apothecary, Mainardi is thought to have entered the studio of Domenico Ghirlandaio in the late 1470s when the Florentine was engaged in the fresco decoration of the chapel of Santa Fina in the Collegiata, San Gimignano. Due to the scarcity of documented, signed works, a reconstruction of Mainardi’s oeuvre is complex, not helped by the numerous disparate works from the Ghirlandaio studio that have been attributed to him. He presumably collaborated on Domenico’s celebrated frescoes (1486–90) in the choir of Santa Maria Novella, Florence, since his portrait is included in the scene of Joachim Driven from the Temple. In 1490, he painted frescoes for the ceiling of the Bargello and a fresco of the Assumption for the Baroncelli Chapel in Santa Croce. He continued to work with the Ghirlandaio family after Domenico’s death in 1494, when his younger brothers Davide and Benedetto took over the running of the studio, and the year in which Mainardi married their half-sister, Alessandra Bigordi. During the first years of the sixteenth century, Mainardi returned to his native San Gimignano where he received a number of prestigious commissions, including the frescoes for the Chapel of San Bartolo in the church of Sant’Agostino (1500), and other works that reveal the development of a more personal style. He later returned to Florence where, in 1513, he died of the plague that was ravaging the city.

This painting relates to the fresco Mainardi painted for a tabernacle niche in the Fattoria Orsini, in Brozzi, near Florence, and later repeated for the upright work in tempera on canvas, now in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. Although the city in the background has been traditionally identified as Florence, it seems more likely to be Pisa, where Mainardi was employed for the Ghirlandaio studio between the end of 1492 and the summer of 1494, and where he completed an independent commission for the now lost fresco of the Assumption of the Virgin for the Palazzo dei Priori.

The tondo format was evidently favoured by Mainardi, like many of those to emerge from the Ghirlandaio workshop, including Michelangelo, and employed with considerable success, judging by the number of surviving works of that format. This panel can be compared with another tondo by the artist, depicting the Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist, from the collection of Sir Thomas Merton (1888-1969), and sold in these Rooms, 5 July 2018, lot 30, for £392,750. The Merton tondo was first identified as a work by Mainardi by Captain Langton Douglas (1864-1951), an outstanding connoisseur of his day and the one-time owner of the present painting.