Madonna and Child

By 1500 Perugino was close to the busiest painter in Italy. He kept workshops in both Florence and Perugia, had just finished the frescoes in Perugia's bankers' hall, the Collegio del Cambio, and turned out small devotional panels like this one for private rooms. Writing 50 years later, Vasari complained that he repeated the same figures over and over. That habit is exactly why panels like this are hard to sort. Detroit gives it to Perugino himself. Earlier scholars, back when it hung in Munich's Alte Pinakothek, listed it as workshop production, and the question has never entirely closed. There is no throne here and no cloth of honour, only two thin haloes and a gold star on the Virgin's blue cloak, the old sign of the Star of the Sea. Eleanor Clay Ford, of the Detroit car family, left it to the museum in 1977.