Finding Dandini: The Rediscovery of a Painting and a 17th-Century Artist

A university professor of fine art and art history walks into an empty church in New York, seeking peace and clarity, and makes an unexpected observation-an Italian Baroque masterpiece unassumingly hanging on the wall. His ensuing scholarship leads to the rediscovery of Cesare Dandini's previously missing "Holy Family with the Infant Saint John."

Dandini rose to prominence in the early 1630s, amid one of the darkest periods in the history of Florence. Despite the plague and Rome's oppressive...