Although now fully considered part of the canon of textbook medieval sculptures, the 'Presepe' sculpted by Arnolfo di Cambio for the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome during the papacy of Nicholas IV (1288-1292) became the subject of modern critical debate only in 1905, thanks to art historian Adolfo Venturi. Mention of the sculpture as a work by Arnolfo in the Giuntina edition of Vasari's Lives had not been enough to rescue the 13th-century marbles from near-oblivion after they were moved in 1585 to a hypogeal space, difficult to access, during construction of the grandiose funerary chapel of Pope Sixtus V (1585-1590). Starting from a comprehensive reconsideration of the two pivotal moments in the history of the Nativity Chapel – its late-13th-century installation and its radical reconfiguration in the late 16th century – the present study aims, on the one hand, to demonstrate that the 'Madonna and Child' originally sculpted in Arnolfo's workshop was by no means destroyed during its replacement in the modern era, as is generally believed. When a new image was created in the 16th century, the original Madonna was indeed removed from public view but was evidently preserved. By the early 20th century, it had ended up on the Roman art market and in 1910 was purchased by Wilhelm Bode for what was then the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in Berlin, where it is still housed today. As for the sculpture that replaced it, contrary to common belief, documentary and literary sources suggest that it was not carved during the construction of Sixtus V's funerary chapel, begun in 1585 under architect Domenico Fontana, but rather some time earlier, probably on the occasion of the Jubilee of 1575, by Leonardo Sormani.