The Swan Society will enjoy a close-looking experience involving questions of attribution and authenticity as we contemplate the Visiting Masterpiece, Piero della Francesca’s Senigallia Madonna. Beyond the fascinating story of the painting’s theft from a museum in Urbino in 1975 and its recovery the subsequent year, it is instructive to juxtapose this masterpiece with two little-known works in the Museum’s storerooms. In 1922, the Museum acquired a painting of the Virgin and Child as a painting by Piero. It now is thought to be by his pupil Luca Signorelli. By contrast, the MFA also owns an uncontested forgery, a portrait of a woman in profile executed in the style of the fifteenth-century portrait of Battista Sforza in the Uffizi. Examine all three paintings up close with Frederick Ilchman, Mrs. Russell W. Baker Curator of Paintings and Rhona MacBeth, Eijk and Rose-Marie van Otterloo Conservator of Paintings. The event will begin with a reception.