For the BIAF 2026, Flavio Gianassi presents a carefully selected group of Italian Renaissance works distinguished by their quality and exceptional provenance.

At the heart of the presentation is Domenico Puligo’s newly rediscovered Cleopatra, formerly in the collection of Prince Tommaso Corsini and subsequently inherited through the Corsini Pandolfini family. Documented in nineteenth-century Florentine guides and historic inventories, the painting now returns to Palazzo Corsini, where it was kept for generations.

Provenance is equally central to Maso da San Friano’s Annunciation dated 1560. The panel originally formed the central section of the predella of his celebrated Visitation for the Church of San Pier Maggiore in Florence, in a chapel under the patronage of the de’ Pesci family. Following the suppression of the church in 1784 and the dispersal of its contents, the painting passed to the de’ Pesci family. Its original context has been reconstructed through scholarship and two remarkable preparatory drawings, today in the Corsini Library in Rome and the Musée du Louvre.

From the fifteenth century, Neri di Bicci’s Madonna and Child with Two Adoring Angels has an exceptionally precise early history: it was commissioned in Florence by Antonio di Jacopo in 1464 and recorded in Neri’s own Ricordanze, the surviving diary of his workshop. Probably intended for private devotion, the panel provides a rare documented link between a Renaissance painting, its original patron and the daily activity of a Florentine workshop.  

The selection also includes the rare Announcing Angel and Virgin Annunciate by the Master of 1416, formerly part to a polyptych now in the Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan, and the monumental glazed terracotta Penitent Magdalene by the Master of the Maddalena di Cascio, from the hermitage of Santa Maria Maddalena in Cascio, near Luccca.