L'Éducation de la Vierge

For decades this painting sat in storage at Yale, damaged and dismissed as the work of some unknown Spanish hand. Then in 2005 a curator, John Marciari, looked again and argued it was an early Velázquez, made in Seville around 1617 when the painter was still in his teens finishing his apprenticeship. If he is right, it may be the earliest large work Velázquez ever completed, painted before he left for Madrid and the king's court. A ten-year cleaning and study followed, and the attribution has held up through exhibitions in Seville and Paris, though not every scholar is convinced. It shows Saint Anne teaching her daughter Mary to read, a quiet domestic subject that Sevillian painters came back to again and again.