«un puttino a fresco cavato di Roma di mano di Raffaele Urbino». Novità sul frammento dell'Accademia di San Luca

The Putto holding a garland, a fragment of a fresco, since 1834 in the collections of the Academy of San Luca in Rome, has always been the subject of doubts relating to the autography, mainly due to the precarious state of conservation. The divergent positions, expressed simultaneously in 1960 by the art historian Luigi Salerno, convinced that it was a fake made by the painter Jean-Baptiste Wicar, and by the restorer Pico Cellini, who supported the Raphael autography, polarized scholars’ opinions up to the present. This essay takes into account the novelties that have emerged so far in the context of the interdisciplinary study started in 2020 around the painting, which led to new historical-artistic research, new diagnostic and geometric investigations and a new restoration that gave back legibility to the artwork.