Minerva (Fra Bartolomeo)

Minerva is a c.1490-1495 oil on panel painting by Fra Bartolomeo, now in the Louvre in Paris. It forms a pair with "Porcia" (Uffizi).
The work was first recorded in 1942 in an antiques shop in Toulouse, at which time it was attributed to Lorenzo Costa. Three years later it was acquired by France's Réunion des Musées Nationaux as a work by an anonymous French artist, reattributed to Perréal and assigned to the Musée de Moulins.
In 1963 Charles Sterling researched the work, removing the attribution to Perréal and instead assigned it to the Emilian Renaissance. He was also the first to link it back to "Porcia" (then thought to be a "Saint Agnes" or "Virgin of the Annunciation" from the circle of Lorenzo di Credi or of Franciabigio), which Sterling happened to have seen at the Istituto Centrale del Restauro in Rome. 
"Minerva" was reassigned yet again to a Florentine painter in 1967, the same year as it was moved to the Louvre's stores. It formed part of an exhibition in 1982, for which Sylvie Béguin reattributed it to Fra Bartolomeo's youth. However, it to took until its inclusion in the "Il Giardino di San Marco" exhibition in 1992 for this attribution to be definitively confirmed.