Madonna Northbrook

For a long time this tender Virgin and Child carried the greatest name in Italian art, Raphael's, and it takes its nickname from a later English owner, the Earl of Northbrook. When it reached the Worcester Art Museum in 1940 that grand attribution was already falling away. Scholars still argue over exactly whose hand it is. One name attached to it is Timoteo Viti, a painter from Urbino, the same small court city where Raphael grew up, and someone who moved in his circle. The style sits close to the young Raphael without quite being him, which is part of why the picture is so hard to pin down. In 2015 Worcester hung it beside a securely documented Raphael Madonna on loan, so visitors could weigh the two faces side by side.