Whoever painted the work, the picture is clearly too ugly to bother including a decent photo of it in the article. No-one cares what it looks like, and everyone cares about what name they can attach to it.
[edit: I might be too harsh, I'm reading through the archive.ph link and maybe that is dropping some of the images?]
Here's another source with better quality image, WSJ did fancy stuff putting it in the vault which doesn't give you a great look at the artwork itself.
I met somebody irl who works in the space (detecting, authenticating, restoring, repairing, at a world class institution you've heard of) who made their initial reputation and living being a forger. You might even say their art intelligence is artificial :)
Relying too much on ML models seems risky. If an AI model is established as authoritative in the field, a forger who gets access to the model data could create adversarial fakes that look absolutely genuine to the AI. Bribe the right person and nobody knows that the ML data has leaked, so the fake’s credibility isn’t easily challenged.
This is so not a Raphael it is painful. Raphael was particularly known for his convincingly realistic babies (and for breaking with the tradition of making the child Christ look like a tiny, dignified adult). These babies look nothing like Raphael's babies in any of his many Madonnas, and are expressly tiny dignified adults.
Not an art person at all, but after looking at a bunch of his babies, I think you are right. These babies have significantly larger and stronger features than any of the others I saw.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 38.2 ms ] thread[edit: I might be too harsh, I'm reading through the archive.ph link and maybe that is dropping some of the images?]
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/a-cabinetmaker-spent-30-ye...
https://images.wsj.net/im-687788
is how it looked 30 years ago. With this or Salvator Mundi, it seems like a Ship of Theseus to me.
Direct links to images from the original article:
https://images.wsj.net/im-687788
https://images.wsj.net/im-725753
https://images.wsj.net/im-725755
https://images.wsj.net/im-719540
https://images.wsj.net/im-719542
https://images.wsj.net/im-721673
https://images.wsj.net/im-719532
https://images.wsj.net/im-719537
https://images.wsj.net/im-722308