Collection Details
Marchese Conti, Florence; H L Puxley, Dunboy Castle, Co. Cork; his sale, Christie’s, 24 March 1888, lot 182 (as by Luini); Lord and Lady Wantage (A G Temple, The Wantage Collection, 1902, No. 151, repd, and Catalogue of the Lockinge Collection, 1922, No. 151); Wantage sale, Sotheby’s, 28 November 1945, lot 92, as Milanese School: bt by Agnew for Lord Faringdon.

Literature
R H Cust, Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, 1906, p. 358; A Segard, Sodoma, 1910, p. 229; Berenson, Italian Pictures (Central and North Italian), 1968, I, p. 405.

Exhibition Details
Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, Loan Exhibition from Lockinge House, 1934, No. 2.

Background
Described in the Wantage catalogue as Milanese School, with the suggestion in the 1922 publication that it may be by Sodoma or Soggi, and listed by Cust, Segard and Berenson (who is presumably referring to the present picture, although not describing it as a roundel) as by Sodoma. Despite its pronounced Milanese characteristics, the figures and landscape both point to Tuscany as its place of origin. The composition is clearly dependent on a design of Leonardo’s, such as for example appears on a sheet of studies in the Metropolitan Museum, New York (No. 37134: repd by Langton Douglas, Burlington Magazine, lvi, 1930, p. 146, who associated two paintings, in the Uffizi and in the collection of Henry Harris, with this composition).
  
Restorations visible in the 1902 reproduction have subsequently been reversed.

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