Guided Pathway

Panel 47 is, at first glance, a schematic and uncomplicated entry in this sequence. It may be neatly divided into four quadrants, each of which takes up a single iconographic theme. Two themes from the Christian gospels populate the panel’s top half, while its lower half introduces two themes from the so-called “deuterocanonical” books of the Old Testament. The images at left depict the protection of children by parents and angels, while those at right display severed heads and scenes of decapitation. The panel is thus literally split between care and slaughter, an ambivalence which the caption locates in the figure of the ninfa, here cast “as guardian angel and as headhunter.”

The panel begins innocently, with seven images at upper left depicting the young Jesus in the care of his parents. The caption invokes “the ‘Return from the Temple’ as protection of the child in foreign lands.” The monuments depicted are among the oldest on the panel, including a sketch of a Byzantine miniature (#2) and three works of the Italian trecento (#3, #4, and #6). Only the relief at the quadrant’s lower right corner (#9) is by a contemporary of Ghirlandaio.