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For most of the last century, connoisseurs treated the workshop copy as the poor relation of the altarpiece. When a successful painter in the Flemish towns finished an important commission, his assistants often produced replicas for patrons who could not afford the master's own hand. These replicas, now dispersed among parish churches and minor collections, were catalogued chiefly so that they could be set aside. Their drawing was slacker, their colors thinner, and their sheer number seemed to cheapen the works they imitated.

The art historian Mirela Voss proposed a rehabilitation. Originals, she observed, were the paintings most often cleaned, varnished, and retouched, because they hung where appearances mattered. Copies, sent to lesser chapels, were frequently left alone for centuries. A copy might therefore preserve an original's first state better than the original itself now does. Voss's best-known application of the idea concerned Joos Verlinde's Lamentation, whose sky is now a clear blue. Seven of the nine surviving copies show a greenish sky, and Voss concluded that Verlinde's sky had been green until a restorer repainted it.

I accept Voss's premise and reject her inference. Voss reasoned as editors of ancient texts do: when several copies agree against the surviving original, the agreement probably preserves something old. The reasoning assumes that copyists erred independently. Verlinde's copyists did not. They bought pigment from the same suppliers, worked to the same modest prices, and knew the same shortcuts. A sky laid in with a cheap green-blue mixture rather than a costly blue would look much the same to a chapel congregation, and seven painters facing the same price could easily make the same economy. Their agreement tells us about the market they shared; it tells us almost nothing about Verlinde's sky.

Where the copies disagree, by contrast, they become eloquent. In the original Lamentation a small dog sleeps beneath the bier. It survives in only two copies, both commissioned by a single widow for two chapels in her town; in the other seven its place is taken by a stone or by nothing. Admittedly, a copyist working from a drawing rather than from the panel might drop a detail through mere oversight. But oversight does not explain why the omissions cluster by destination, or why the dog vanishes while the far smaller jar of ointment beside it survives in every copy. Somebody, in most places, did not want the dog, and the copyist, who was paid by that somebody, obliged.

The connoisseurs were therefore right to distrust the copies as evidence of how the originals looked, though not for the reason they gave. The trouble with copies is not their slack drawing, which is easy to discount, but the fact that their departures are deliberate and often shared. A copy is first a record of the person who paid for it and only secondarily a record of its model. Read that way, the replicas the catalogues set aside are among the few documents we have of what ordinary buyers of devotional painting wanted, a question the originals, made to please a single wealthy patron, cannot answer. Every painter of the period understood this better than his modern cataloguers have.

Passage written for this test; the scholars, persons, places, and works discussed are hypothetical.