The Madonna of the Roses

This canvas has been filed under three different painters. It turns up in a catalogue of Anthony van Dyck's paintings, and again in the catalogue raisonné of Erasmus Quellinus the Younger, a Rubens assistant who ran a busy Antwerp workshop. The Prado's own line today is Jan Thomas, a painter from Ypres who trained in Antwerp and ended his career working for the emperor in Vienna. Nobody has closed the question.

What is actually there is quiet enough. The Virgin holds the Child, the young John the Baptist leans in beside them, and the Child is holding a rose out to his mother. John has two more in his right hand. That description is not modern. It comes from a royal inventory drawn up at Aranjuez in 1818, when the picture hung among the king's own rooms. The museum still puts no year on the canvas beyond the 17th century.