Attributed to Raphael

Attributed to Raphael is the label a museum uses when it believes a picture is by Raphael himself without being able to prove it. With him the uncertainty is built into how he worked. In his last Roman years, from around 1514 until his death in 1520, he had more commissions than one painter could carry out, for the pope, the papal court and Roman bankers, and he ran a large workshop to meet them. Assistants such as Giulio Romano, his chief pupil, painted from his drawings, so Raphael's share in a single picture can range from nearly all of it to very little.

The judgements move. A small Madonna of the Pinks at Alnwick Castle in northern England was long taken for a copy, until the curator Nicholas Penny argued in 1991 that it was Raphael's original. The National Gallery in London bought it in 2004, though a few specialists still question it.