From Duccio to Raphael. Connoisseurship in Crisis

In 2004, two paintings, a little aspiring Raphael Madonna and an equally little aspiring Duccio Madonna were sold for prices totalling over 100 million dollars . The first, known as the Madonna of the Pinks, was bought by London's National Gallery and the second, sometimes called the Stoclet Duccio, by New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The way in which the attributions to their famous authors was achieved, graphically demonstrate the crisis facing modern connoisseurship in today's billion dollar art world. The two objects represent an expenditure of public money for pictures the size of a sheet of paper.
The book explains where and why the Connoisseurship went wrong, and seeks to establish guide lines for correcting the process. In the exercise, the author rigorously studies the two pictures and determines that both are fakes created in the 19th century.