Madonna and Child with Saint John and Saint Catherine

Raffaellino del Garbo painted this Madonna and Child with Saint John and Saint Catherine around 1510, a Florentine devotional composition from a painter who was overshadowed by the brilliance of his contemporaries but served the city's private devotional market with refined, accomplished works. Raffaellino trained under Filippino Lippi and absorbed the older painter's decorative elegance, which he combined with the gentler devotional idiom of Perugino's Madonnas. His sacra conversazione panels have a quality of refined sweetness suited to private contemplation, the figures idealized without the dramatic tension of more innovative contemporaries. The pairing of the young Baptist with Catherine of Alexandria provided two of the most popular intercessors in Florentine devotional practice.

The panel demonstrates the artistic techniques characteristic of early sixteenth-century painting, with the careful rendering and color harmonies typical of the period's production.