PALM BEACH.-This February we shall be exhibiting for the first time at the Palm Beach International Fine Art Fair. There will be on show three Renaissance masterpieces by Jacopo Pontormo, Parmigianino and Andrea Del Sarto. All three works date from the first third of the Sixteenth century – the most celebrated period of the Italian Renaissance. The Pontormo portrait of Francesca Capponi is described by the famous biographer, Giorgio Vasari, as painted for Pontormo’s most important patron, Francesca’s father, Ludovico Capponi. It is a small intimate portrait of his favourite daughter, who was to die tragically a year afterwards during the Siege of Florence in 1530.

The Parmigianino will have just returned from being on show in Paris at the critically acclaimed Titian exhibition. It is a portrait of an unknown man whose velvet hat is an indication of his stature and mission to represent his family’s interests at the Papal court in Rome. It is dated 1526 shortly before the momentous Sack of Rome when the mutinous troops of Charles V rampaged through the town.

Andrea Del Sarto’s iconic Madonna and Child with St. John, painted around 1513 a year after Michelangelo had completed the Sistine Chapel ceiling in Rome, is of huge importance in the development of Florentine devotional imagery. It marks one of the first times Del Sarto portrayed the features of his lover, Lucrezia del Fede, in the role of the Madonna. They had met in that year and Del Sarto, infatuated, represented her as the Virgin in many of his works – most famously in Madonna delle Arpie of 1517 now in the Uffizi, Florence. They were later to marry around 1517 after the death of Lucrezia’s first husband a Florentine hat maker.