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Art historians have dated this unfinished work to between the late 1530's and the early 1540's on the basis of close stylistic correspondences between it and the Nativity of the Virgin (now in the Pinacoteca in Siena), one of Beccafumi's most famous paintings. The connections between this painting and the influence of Leonardo da Vinci have been pointed out. In the seventeenth-century Barberini art inventories it was listed as a Madonna Lactans alternately attributed to Leonardo or to one of his followers, an error that indicates the importance of Leonardo as an influence on Beccafumi. The correct attribution appears only in the nineteenth-century inventories (1817).
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