The Ecstasy of Saint Francis

Grand Prince Ferdinando de' Medici, heir to Tuscany and the sharpest collector his family produced in its last century, gathered pictures in the closing years of the 17th century with an eye for the Flemish and the modern. This Saint Francis came in among them, and it came in as a Rubens. The Medici inventories say so, and the name stayed on the painting for roughly 300 years.

Rubens scholars took it seriously. One placed it in the years Rubens spent in Italy, another dated it to about 1615. Then connoisseurship turned against it, and by the early 1970s the cataloguers of Rubens's saints had struck it off. The proof came off the canvas itself. Cleaning for an exhibition brought up a signature in capitals at the lower left, P VMOL, and the picture became a Pieter van Mol, an Antwerp painter who grew up inside Rubens's manner and spent his later career in Paris.

The museum still gives it no date. Its record brackets the painting to the 17th century and nothing narrower, and argues only that it came after the altarpieces van Mol painted for the Carmelites at Vaugirard, outside Paris.