(Finarte, Milan, 13 May 1993, lot 148);

Private collection.

Presented in a sale at Finarte, Milan, on 13 May 1993 with an attribution to Filippino Lippi, the present panels have been more recently and convincingly attributed to Agnolo di Domenico del Mazziere by Nicoletta Pons (written communication, 25 May 2017). As Pons suggests, the two panels may be directly compared with an altarpiece by the artist preserved in the collection of the Earl of Halifax, in which the figure of the Baptist is virtually identical to the same saint in the present pair.

Mentioned by Vasari in his life of Cosimo Rosselli and later the subject of a life by Baldinucci, Agnolo di Domenico was the head of the workshop to which his brother Donnino also belonged. More recent studies, particularly the contributions of Anna Padoa Rizzo (“Agnolo di Donnino: New Documents, Sources and the Possible Identification with the 'Master of Santo Spirito”, Rassegna d'Arte 1988, pp. 125-168) have led to the identification with Agnolo di Domenico of the so-called "Master of Santo Spirito," an identification with which Everett Fahy, perhaps the most authoritative scholar of this period, also agrees (“Review: Florence. Palazzo Strozzi. Late Fifteenth-Century Florentine Painting” Burlington Magazine, 1993, pp. 169-171, reproduced in E. Fahy, Studies in Tuscan Renaissance Painting, Bologna, 2020, pp. 239-242). This “noble Master”, as Fahy called him, was most notably responsible for a series of altarpieces in the church of Santo Spirito in Florence, where he expresses himself in a visual language marked by the examples of Cosimo Rosselli.