The Toothpuller

This crowded scene of a street dentist wrenching a tooth from a groaning man has spent decades at the centre of an argument. It hangs in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, and the question is whether Caravaggio really painted it. In 1992 the scholar Mina Gregori made the case that he did, pointing out that nearly every face in the crowd echoes a figure from his securely genuine works, in a style that fits his hard late years around 1608. Others are not convinced. Caravaggio is not known to have painted any everyday genre scene like this so late, and the early writer Bellori, usually thorough, never mentions it. So it stays labelled an attribution, a barber-surgeon's fingers jammed into the open mouth while a small crowd presses in to watch the man suffer.