Madonna and Child with Angels and John the Baptist

The Master of the Borghese Tondo's Madonna and Child with Angels and John the Baptist, painted around 1495 and now in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, is attributed to an anonymous Florentine master named after a circular painting (tondo) in the Borghese Gallery in Rome. The tondo format — the round panel — was a Florentine innovation of the mid-fifteenth century that gave an unconventional challenge to painters who had to compose figures within a circular rather than rectangular format, and became closely associated with domestic devotional images and birth gifts (deschi da parto).

Tempera or oil on panel. The composition places the Madonna and Child at center with the infant John the Baptist as the tertiary figure in the devotional trinity most popular for domestic Florentine paintings of this period.