Although science can tell you who didn't paint a certain picture, it can never definitively tell you who did: there is still room for the "probably". This is the case with The Virgin and Child with Two Angels (1476-8) from Andrea del Verrocchio's workshop. Verrocchio was the master of, among others, Leonardo but because he taught his pupils a uniform refined technique and because they used the same materials science alone can't put a name to the different hands that contributed to the picture. It is stylistic study, old-fashioned connoisseurship, that has attributed the picture to Verrocchio (the Virgin and angel on the left) and Lorenzo di Credi (the Christ child and angel on the right).
Something this intriguing exhibition doesn't examine, however, is the fact that technical analysis has financial repercussions as well as scholarly ones. While a small painting of the Madonna and Child hung forgotten for a century in a rear corridor of Alnwick Castle, it was worth a few thousand pounds. When, courtesy of the National's scientific department, it was proved to be a once celebrated work by Raphael, the Madonna of the Pinks, it was suddenly worth £22 million. There remains no scientific explanation for the irrational allure of a name.
Sargent and the Sea at the Royal Academy (July 10-September 26) is also intended to reveal the unexpected. Sargent's celebrity as a portraitist has obscured his lifelong interest in the ocean; indeed he was a virtuoso painter of water as well as fabric and physiognomies. This show concentrates on the years 1874-80 when the artist was aged 18-24 and living in Paris. Many in the French avant-garde (the Impressionists, Gauguin and the Pont-Aven painters, Boudin) were drawn to the scenery of the Normandy and Brittany coasts and in 1877 Sargent spent two months in the port of Cancale preparing Setting out to Fish, a large Salon picture of fisherwomen on their way to the town's oyster beds. With touches of Impressionism in the handling and figures echoing the peasant monumentality of Millet, it shows Sargent's art situated somewhere between the consciously modern and the traditional.
The most striking images, however, are those he painted in 1876 of huge seas towering behind the stern of the liner on which he made his first crossing to America. These show the sea not as benign and picturesque but as primal and threatening. They demonstrate his debt to Turner in tonality and drama and are genuinely daring works in both subject and composition. Certainly, they overshadow the uncomfortably homoerotic pictures of boys on the beach he painted on a trip to Naples and Capri in 1878-9.
What this exhibition of 70 largely unfamiliar oils, watercolours and drawings shows is the direction Sargent was heading before he was seduced by faces and the fame and riches they brought.
