The painting is a rare birth salver (in Italy known as desco da parto), almost perfectly intact. Depicted on the front, in the middle of a flat frame with elegant trim, is a child sitting on the ground atop a cushion set in a flower-dotted meadow. He is holding a crown in his hand, which is clearly a gesture of good auspices for the life of the new infant. Above and below the central image, in clipei along the outer band of the frame, are the faces in chiaroscuro of an older man at the top, in three-quarter profile facing to the right, and a young adult man at the bottom, looking in the other direction. It is a lovely description of the three ages of man - childhood, adulthood and old age -, which can be taken as good wishes for a long life. This salver is not painted on the back; there is instead a raised part in the center, also trimmed and decorated with a gold band, which held the wooden rim a few centimeters off the surface it rested on, like a real tray. Salvers were widely used objects in Tuscany during the Renaissance. At the edges of the plate framing the depiction of the baby are two crests in silver, which can easily be recognized as those of the Capponi (on the left) and Alamanni (on the right) families, two of the most important Florentine families of the Medieval and Renaissances periods. There is little documentation about them, but we do know that in 1486 one of brothers of Gino, an illustrious member of the Capponi family, father of the important banker Ludovico Capponi, married a woman from the Alamanni family, Maddalena. We can imagine, unless further documentation is discovered that indicates other ties between the two families, that the salver must refer to an heir born of this union. The style of the painting, in addition to the Florentine provenance ascertained from the two crests, leads to the same conclusion; in fact, it can immediately be recognized as an unusual but nonetheless fascinating work by Masaccio’s brother, Giovanni di ser Giovanni known as Scheggia, also known as Master of the cassoni Adimari. The painter’s catalogue, which is continuously growing thanks to the large number of objects for individual devotional use or other domestic contexts that often come onto the market, comprises painted and storiated chests, and other birth salvers. The most famous is one at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, painted for the birth of Lorenzo il Magnifico. The child’s face is particularly beautiful, sweet and expressive, and is quite reliably comparable with faces, for example, on the door panel of the organ at the Museo della Basilica di Santa Maria delle Grazie in San Giovanni Valdarno, although the painting of our work is more liquid and less sharply contoured, obviously due to the different chronology of the works. The same sort of comparison can also be proposed with the Baby Jesus in the Madonna’s arms in the lovely panel form the Musée du Petit Palais in Avignon. Our child’s blue eyes are a new element for the painter, but evidently must have depicted reality, perhaps copying the detail from one of the parents. Aside from this, interesting comparisons can be made with the birth salver from Palazzo Davanzati in Florence, not only in terms of the physiognomies of the figures, but also with regard to the flowered meadow at the bottom, which is substantially the same as the one that appears in our salver.