La Vierge aux œillets

For a century and a half this little picture hung in an English castle, taken for one of many copies of a lost Raphael. Then, in 1991, a curator looked harder and grew convinced it was the real thing. Modern infrared imaging settled it by revealing the free, searching underdrawing beneath the paint, the kind of loose first thought no copyist would invent. It is an early, intimate Raphael, made around 1506, showing the Virgin and the Christ child playing together with small pink flowers called pinks, an old symbol of marriage and of love. When the National Gallery moved to buy it from the Duke of Northumberland in 2004, the price was nearly 35 million pounds, met only after a nationwide public appeal.