Virgin and Child with an Angel

The Museum of Fine Arts bought this panel in 1922 as a work by Piero della Francesca. It came from the Galleria Lino Pesaro in Milan for just under 38,000 dollars, and the Italian scholar Adolfo Venturi had lately published it under Piero's name. Its calm monumentality and light colour are close to Piero's late pictures.

In 1926 the American connoisseur Bernard Berenson proposed another name, the young Luca Signorelli, who had trained under Piero, and placed the panel in the early to mid-1470s. He gave Signorelli two similar Madonnas as well, one at Christ Church in Oxford and one at the Cini Foundation in Venice. All three share Piero's stillness, while their figures are less robust and strangely elongated. The idea has never won general acceptance. The complete catalogue of Signorelli's paintings published in 2002 puts the Boston panel in its appendix rather than in the main catalogue, and the museum labels it attributed to Signorelli, keeping Piero on record as the former attribution.