Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery

For a long time this was the pride of Glasgow as a Giorgione, that most elusive of Venetian painters. Scholars now give it instead to the young Titian, painted around 1509 when he still worked in Giorgione's manner and the two were hard to tell apart. The scene is the Gospel story where Christ, asked whether an adulterous woman should be stoned, says that whoever is without sin should cast the first stone. Something looks off at the left edge, and it should: the canvas was cut down at some point. The figure that went missing, the head of a bearded man, survives on its own in a gallery in Bergamo.