The work, signed and dated 1611 on the back, is a rare work by Bernardino Monaldi, an artist whose place and date of death are not known, commissioned for the Company of Santissimo Rosario, which was based at the church of Santa Maria in Bagnano. According to Baldinucci, Monaldi was a pupil of Santi di Tito and close to Girolamo Macchietti, with whom he apparently began working in 1587. Certainly, in 1585 the artist worked for Bernardino Poccetti on the decoration of the cloister of San Pierino, frescoing three lunettes with the Martyrdom of St. Philip, St. James the Greater and St. John the Evangelist.

Signed and dated 1589 is the panel painting of the Madonna Enthroned with Child, Saints, Devotees and the Mysteries of the Rosary, painted for the church of Sant’Angelo a Lecore, near Signa (Florence), in the scenic setting close to the Certaldo example, but more crowded with sacred figures rendered through that uneasy line that characterizes the painter’s early works and fully in line with the decorum of Santi di Tito’s counter-reformation painting culture.

Enrolled in the Accademia delle Arti e del Disegno in the very early 1590s, after a sojourn in Abruzzo, Monaldi turns out to be active again in Florence in 1600, alongside Poccetti in the decoration of the cloister of the sacristy of the convent of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Florence, a relationship between the two painters very close which ended suddenly after the death of the the master in 1612. Poccetto had the honor to complete the large painting of the Esequies of Sant’Alberto, in the Basilica of Santa Maria del Carmine, according to sources designed by Poccetti for the altar of the chapel where he would be buried.

The iconography of the Certaldo painting became very popular after the establishment in 1572 of the Feast of Nostra Signora della Vittoria, later the Feast of Santo Rosario, to celebrate the triumph of the Christians over the fleet of the Ottoman Empire at the Battle of Lepanto on Oct. 7, 1571, attributed to the intercession of the Virgin Mary, invoked in a Rosary procession held in St. Peter’s Square.