The Lord's Supper with the Apostles

On paper this canvas has changed hands more often than most pictures. A Milan inventory of 1650 called it a Veronese, and Milanese guidebooks repeated that into the 1730s. Later catalogues made it a Titian outright. From 1908 onward specialists settled on Titian's workshop and read it as a small copy of the Last Supper he painted for Philip II of Spain between about 1557 and 1564, the canvas that went to the Escorial. In 1981 Carlo Bertelli examined it after a restoration, with radiographs showing changes made while it was being painted, and argued that it is Titian's own working model for that commission. The question has not been closed, which is why the picture stands here with no maker's name on it. One use for it is not in dispute. The Escorial painting is now hard to read, and this small version is what scholars hold it up against.