Rediscovered in 2023, this intimate oil on copper represents the Virgin preparing to breastfeed the Christ Child in the presence of the young Saint John the Baptist, while Saint Joseph ascends a staircase in the background. Long obscured by later overpaint and only recently revealed through careful conservation, the work constitutes a remarkable addition to the small group of paintings on copper associated with Orazio Gentileschi, a refined but exceptionally rare aspect of his production.

The attribution has been independently endorsed in writing by Keith Christiansen and Gianni Papi, both of whom date the painting to the opening years of the seventeenth century, around 1600-1602. Papi has described it as a beautiful and highly significant autograph work, stressing its importance for the reconstruction of a still poorly documented phase in Gentileschi's career. Christiansen likewise recognises the hand of Orazio and places the painting before the artist's more fully developed Caravaggesque period.

The copper is especially valuable as evidence of Gentileschi's transition from a late Mannerist idiom, still indebted to Florentine sixteenth-century painting, towards the more direct and observant naturalism that would become a defining feature of his art. The practical gesture of the Virgin, the wide-eyed expression and awkwardly opened limbs of the Christ Child, and the shy deference of the young Baptist all reveal an increasingly acute attention to natural behaviour. At the same time, certain discrepancies of scale, including the diminutive lamb, preserve traces of the artist's earlier manner, comparable to works executed at Farfa in 1598-99.

Both scholars have emphasised the painting's close relationship with Gentileschi's early Roman production. The modelling and foreshortening of the Christ Child find analogies in works around 1600, while the type of the Virgin anticipates the Madonna and Child in Bucharest of 1609, particularly in the handling of the Madonna's hand and in the intimate conception of motherhood. Christiansen also notes that the architectural and landscape setting belongs to a moment before Orazio's mature embrace of Caravaggism, when such elements would become far less prominent. He further places the work before the Holy Family with the Infant Saint John the Baptist, also painted on copper and now in Karlsruhe, dated by him to 1607-8.

Of particular significance is the figure of Saint Joseph climbing the steps, a motif that evokes Pontormo and Andrea del Sarto. As Papi has observed, this explicit homage to sixteenth-century Florentine culture is without known parallel in Gentileschi's surviving oeuvre and makes the painting a uniquely revealing document of his artistic formation.

The reverse of the copper bears a bold early seventeenth-century inscription reading "Di mano di Oratio Gentileschi". Its early date lends exceptional weight to the traditional attribution, and the possibility that it may be autograph cannot be excluded. The number "256", written in the same hand, remains unidentified, but may refer to an early collection or inventory. This rare inscription, together with the painting's refined execution, unusual support and distinguished scholarly endorsements, confirms the work as an important and singular rediscovery within Gentileschi's oeuvre.