Attributed to Sandro Botticelli

Attributed to Sandro Botticelli is a museum's way of saying that a picture probably comes from Botticelli's own hand, short of certainty. Around him that line has always been hard to draw. His Florentine workshop turned out devotional panels of the Virgin and Child in quantity in the 1480s and 1490s, his pupils learned to imitate his figures closely, and when he came back into fashion in the 19th century, collectors wanted his name on as many pictures as possible.

In 1899 the American connoisseur Bernard Berenson tried to tidy the problem by inventing a painter. He called him Amico di Sandro, Sandro's friend, and gave him a group of pictures he judged too fine for the workshop and yet not quite Botticelli. Berenson himself later gave up the idea, and most of those pictures have since gone to the young Filippino Lippi, who had trained in Botticelli's studio.