Met acquires Rosso Fiorentino
The Metropolitan Museum announced the acquisition of a long‑lost Rosso Fiorentino, 'Madonna and Child with Saint John the Evangelist,' rediscovered after conservation and bolstering the Met’s Mannerist holdings (news.artnet.com) (surfacemag.com). The find arrives amid a busy spring schedule of Caravaggio loans and modernist highlights at the museum (nytimes.com).
The Met’s press release for the acquisition is dated March 19, 2026 and describes the picture as Rosso Fiorentino’s Madonna and Child with Saint John the Evangelist, executed on canvas and preserved in remarkably good condition. (metmuseum.org) Conservators removed a later layer of overpaint that revealed a half‑length Saint John in the lower‑right of the composition, a discovery that directly prompted the painting’s reidentification. (artnews.com) After the conservation, specialists assigned a production date of about 1512–1513 to the work; several earlier accounts had dated the picture to around 1520 and referred to it simply as Madonna and Child. (artnews.com) The Met’s curatorial statement calls the panel the artist’s earliest recorded painting to survive, and notes that extant works by Rosso total only about two dozen—making the find particularly significant for scholarship. (metmuseum.org) The painting entered the museum from a private collection and has been placed on view in the European painting galleries with the credit line indicating Private Collection/Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum. (artnews.com) Max Hollein described the picture as “a rare and pivotal early work,” while Stephan Wolohojian, John Pope‑Hennessy Curator in Charge of European Paintings, said the rediscovery reshapes understanding of Rosso’s early oeuvre and early‑sixteenth‑century Florentine composition. (metmuseum.org)
