Attributed to Leonardo da Vinci

Fewer than 20 paintings are generally accepted as Leonardo da Vinci's own, and in Milan he ran a workshop whose pupils painted versions of his designs. So nearly every newly proposed Leonardo arrives with a debate attached, and Attributed to is the label a museum uses when it believes a work is his but cannot prove it.

The most famous case is the Salvator Mundi, a half-length Christ as Saviour of the World. It turned up at a New Orleans auction in 2005, heavily overpainted, and after restoration it was shown as Leonardo's at the National Gallery in London in 2011. In 2017 it sold at Christie's in New York for 450.3 million dollars. Specialists remain divided over how much of it he painted, and some, among them the Oxford scholar Matthew Landrus, give much of it to Bernardino Luini, a Milanese painter who followed his style.