Attributed to Andrea Solari
The story
Attributed to Andrea Solari is the label a museum gives a painting that specialists think is probably by Solari, the Milanese painter of the years around 1500, without being able to prove it is his own hand.
The caution has its roots in Milan. In the years after Leonardo da Vinci worked there, Milanese painters such as Bernardino Luini and Giampietrino adopted the same soft shadows and the same faces, and Solari's most successful compositions were taken up and repeated by others. Telling his own panels apart from copies and variants is still debated. In 2025 an exhibition at the Museo Poldi Pezzoli in Milan, with loans from the Louvre, brought his pictures together and was prepared with new technical studies of them.
