The view that four different painters worked on the canvas is, he says, consistent with the view of some art historians that Perugino's apprentices did much of the work, although there is no clear consensus among art historians.
Through the mastery of double negatives, dodging and burning, and other darkroom deceits, talented photographers including Wanda Wulz and Bill Brandt (whose work is the subject of an upcoming MoMA retrospective) made the medium as unreliably personal as the most fantastical painters had ever achieved on canvas.
They are not painters in the conventional sense for they do not aim to take paint to a blank canvas, ask you to see the perfect version of an imperfect thing, offer you a snapshot of something beautiful.