Cecco Bravo was one of the most eccentric and original figures in seventeenth-century Florentine painting. His highly individual style is marked by loose brushwork, a refined, muted palette and a handling of paint that produces sudden flashes of light, qualities that give his work an almost pre-Romantic modernity.

Recently rediscovered and subsequently included in the catalogue raisonné, this small canvas is, as Francesca Baldassarri has proposed, the only surviving painted record of the lunette depicting the Presentation of the Virgin at the Temple, frescoed by Cecco Bravo around 1653 for one of the entrances to the church of Santa Maria Novella.