Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist and an Angel

By the 1560s Titian was an old man, and his Venice workshop turned out versions of his compositions alongside pictures by his own hand. His son Orazio worked there. This canvas comes out of that world, though whose brush it shows is still argued over.

The Virgin sits under a dark canopy, palms pressed together, the Child asleep across her lap with his head on a white cushion. A curly-haired youth bends towards him and a small boy presses close from below. The title calls them the young Saint John and an angel.

An inventory of 1693 listed the picture as a Titian. In 1959 the scholar Paola della Pergola gave it to Orazio, comparing it with his altarpiece of 1566 at Calalzo, in the Cadore mountains, and the museum follows her. A later study finds it too far from the heart of the workshop. Two other versions survive, in Florence and in Bologna.