This is Laurence Kanter. I'm Chief Curator and Lionel Goldfrank III Curator of European Art at the Yale University Art Gallery.

This is a fragment of a painting, although it's large, and it looks more or less complete. It's a fragment of a famous painting by Jacopo Pontormo, who was the greatest of the Florentine painters in the generation following Michelangelo and Leonardo. In fact, he was a very close friend of Michelangelo, who entrusted his drawings to Pontormo to render into paintings.

This painting is known in at least twenty-five, if not thirty, contemporary copies. It is the most copied painting of the entire sixteenth century. Scholars have always been puzzled why one picture should have been copied so often when no others that we know exist in more than three or four replicas. Scholars were also puzzled about which of those many known versions might be the original. No one had ever agreed on it until this one appeared and is now clearly what remains of the original from which the other copies were made.

It's a painting that was left in Pontormo's studio at his death and was discovered there when he died, incomplete. And it became the subject of a lawsuit, ultimately won by his pupil Bronzino, a famous painter in his own right. Bronzino, it appears, used this painting as a teaching piece. All of his pupils had to execute copies of it, and this is why so many copies survive. All of the known copies complete the incomplete parts of this picture—that crumbled brown area to the left of the Virgin's headdress, for example, or what looks now like a building above her. In all the copies, those areas are finished in some different imaginative way by each of the pupils.

It's very exciting to have a picture like this here, not only as a remarkably rare and wonderful thing to have found, but also, because it's incomplete, you can see without the aid of high technology how the artist made his pictures. You can actually see with your naked eye the drawing of, for example, the Christ Child's arm and shoulder. You can see the earliest layers of paint just blocking in the shadowy area on his ribcage or the lights on the front. The Virgin's dress is fully painted but does not have its final layers of glaze on it. Whereas her headscarf is totally complete, her head, you see, is also in various different stages of being worked up or left raw.

Alongside the label, you'll see we've put an image of one of the full-scale copies. What's missing is the rest of the Virgin, her knees tucked up so improbably in front of her. And in the background at the right, now cut off, were two or three other figures climbing a set of steps into a city gate. We have no idea who those figures are. We don't know if there's a story behind the picture. Pontormo was a very eccentric artist, and we don't know if this picture had a patron or if it was just made by the artist, as it were, for his own pleasure. All we know is that, when it was found in his studio, it was described by contemporaries as a Virgin and Child with other figures. And it's the only painting known by Pontormo that has other figures alongside the Virgin and Child.

For art students, this work is a gold mine to study. For those of us who are not art students but just lovers of art, it's also a gold mine.