Virgin and Child

The paint on this panel is badly worn, worn enough that Dürer's authorship of it has been challenged more than once. What came through the rubbing is the monogram and the year 1516, and both sit inside the original paint layers rather than on top of them, so they were put there when the picture was made. Preparing its catalogue of early German paintings, published in 2013, the Metropolitan put the panel through X-ray and infrared examination and kept it under Dürer's own name. It is a small thing, about 28 centimetres high, painted on spruce. The detail that still reads clearly is Mary's right hand. She pulls the cloth tight under the child squirming on her lap, the same grip Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus use on the shroud when they take the body of Christ down from the cross.