Donated to the museum in 1925, the Yale University Art Gallery’s Education of the Virgin—depicting Saint Anne teaching a young Virgin Mary to read—was long considered to be a work by an unknown Spanish artist. Considerably damaged, the painting was relegated to storage and never carefully studied until 2005, when John Marciari reattributed the work to Diego Velázquez (1599–1660), the most significant painter of the Spanish Golden Age. The extraordinary narrative of this painting and its reattribution is chronicled here, accompanied by a detailed description of the painting’s conservation campaign and thoughtful analysis of the artist’s technique.

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