Leonardo da Vinci

This scene was standard issue in Florence then — workshops turned them out constantly for churches and chapels that wanted one. It came out of his apprentice years in someone else's studio, which is apparently why people still argue about how much of it is his hand at all.

Story goes this was a two-person job - an older workshop master and one of his apprentices - and the apprentice's angel on the left came out so much better that the older one supposedly quit painting for good after that.

The juniper behind her is supposedly a pun — 'ginepro' is Italian for juniper, so it doubles as a nod to her name. It's also, they say, the only Leonardo painting on public display anywhere in the Americas, part of why it made headlines when a museum bought it for a record sum in the 1960s.

Apparently not everyone who studies Leonardo's other work is convinced this one is fully his — some think it's more workshop than master.

Apparently he wrote in mirror script his whole life, which is why the note wrapped around this looks backwards rather than just badly handwritten. This was a private study of human proportion, not made for anyone else to see — and it's said to be so fragile now that it rarely leaves storage.

Someone apparently kept coming back to this same grouping - grandmother, mother, child - for something like twenty years without ever quite finishing it. An earlier version reportedly pulled crowds for two days straight when it first went on public show.

This one only really got talked about after it was stolen from the Louvre in 1911 — apparently investigators even brought Picasso in for questioning during the search.

According to Wikipedia, nobody's fully sure who this is — it's the only male portrait he's known to have painted, and historians still argue over the sitter's identity.

Some historians think this one might not really be by the name the museum credits — more likely finished by a student, going by how stiffly the baby is posed. It's named for the family who owned it in Milan for most of the 1800s, which has nothing to do with who's actually pictured.

The original is a wall painting in Milan that started flaking almost as soon as it was finished, so painted copies are how a lot of people ever got a look at it. Who made this particular one, I couldn't find out.

Apparently the ermine isn't just a pet — it was Duke Ludovico Sforza's personal emblem, and its Greek name is close enough to Cecilia Gallerani's own surname that people read it as a pun on both of them.