Portrait of Maffeo Barberini (Pope Urban VIII)

The young man in clerical black had a long way to rise. This is Maffeo Barberini around 1593, a Florentine churchman in his twenties. 30 years on he would be Pope Urban VIII, the patron who set Bernini loose on Rome and the pope under whom Galileo was put on trial. But the portrait's own identity is as unsettled as his future once was. It has long been given to Scipione Pulzone, a Roman painter prized for the cool precision of his likenesses. Early in the last century some scholars reassigned it to a young Caravaggio. In 1963 Roberto Longhi handed it firmly back to Pulzone. Then, after a restoration and a Florence exhibition around 2010, other specialists argued for Caravaggio once more. The experts remain split, and the canvas at Palazzo Corsini still carries Pulzone's name with a question hanging over it.