Madonna col Bambino tra i santi Girolamo e Dorotea

This quiet holy gathering has had a restless life on paper. When it was catalogued in a Glasgow collector's inventory in 1855 it was written down as a mere copy after Titian. By 1869 opinion had swung the other way and it was being shown as an original by Titian himself. Today scholars have settled somewhere in between, crediting Titian's workshop, with his younger brother Francesco Vecellio the likeliest hand. The picture gathers the Virgin and Child with Saint Jerome and Saint Dorothy in the intimate, conversational grouping Venetian painters favoured, set against open countryside. The pose of the Madonna is lifted almost directly from a Raphael. It was made in Venice around 1516, when the young Titian's manner was already so admired that his studio could turn out work good enough to be mistaken, for a while, for the master.