Still enigmatic.

The article discusses how artistic works were freshly attributed to painter Fra Carnevale by an exhibition at the Brera gallery in Milan, which transfers to New York's Metropolitan Museum on February 1st. Two of the finest works of the 15th century, panels from the so-called Barberini altarpiece, have long lacked firm attribution. Now, the exhibition catalogue publishes documents that show fairly conclusively that the panels are by the hand of Bartolomeo di Giovanni Corradini, a painter who became Fra Carnevale when he entered the Dominican order in the 1440s. Carnevale is known to have helped Filippo Lippi in Florence. For centuries, almost the only trace of Carnevale's existence was a reference in Giorgio Vasari's "The Lives of the Artists". As early as 1893, it was suggested that two panels depicting scenes from the life of the Virgin, then in the palace of the Barberini family in Rome, might be from the missing altarpiece. Recently that suspicion has grown, and it has now been put beyond doubt. Papers that emerged only last June chronicle how in 1632 the altarpiece was dismantled and taken by mule to Rome, on the orders of Antonio Barberini, then papal legate in Urbino. The Milan show includes every work confidently attributed to Fra Carnevale. There are only nine. To stimulate discussion that might lead to more attributions, the curators have hung several other disputed works.