Attributed to Filippino Lippi

In 1899 the American connoisseur Bernard Berenson gathered a group of Florentine pictures that looked close to Botticelli without quite matching his hand, and he invented a painter to hold them. He called him Amico di Sandro, Sandro's friend, after Botticelli's first name. About 30 years later Berenson himself had given most of those pictures to the young Filippino Lippi, who had trained in Botticelli's workshop.

Attributed to is the label a museum uses when it believes Filippino painted a work but cannot prove it, and his early years are where the doubt runs deepest. Six panels with the story of Queen Esther, painted in the 1470s for a pair of wedding chests and now divided among five museums in Europe and Canada, show the problem. A technical study in 2010 concluded that two of them are entirely by Botticelli and one perhaps entirely by Filippino, with the others shared between the two and perhaps a third painter.