According to the biographer Giorgio Vasari, Sellaio was a pupil of Filippo Lippi, and several features of the present painting, such as the rays surrounding the Christ Child, are also common to Lippi"s paintings of the same subject. The tree stumps in the landscape are a reference to Matthew 3:10 ("And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees: therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire."). The painting dates from the late 1480s.