Santa Praxedes

This picture has spent decades at the center of an argument. It is a near-exact copy of a saint painted by the Florentine artist Felice Ficherelli, showing Praxedis, an early Roman woman who gathered up the blood of martyrs with a sponge and wrung it into a well. If it really is by Johannes Vermeer, painted around 1655, it would be one of his earliest surviving works, made when he was barely out of his teens and long before the quiet Delft interiors he became known for. A signature and a date sit in the corner, and paint analysis has pointed toward Dutch origins. Yet many scholars remain unconvinced, and the museum in Tokyo still labels it cautiously as attributed to him rather than certainly his.