Madonna, Rafael Sanzio.

Mario Scalini, state supervisor of fine arts for Modena and Reggio Emilia, was doing inventory of the tens of thousands of art pieces in storage in his area when he found a small portrait of a lady framed by a beautifully elaborate gilded 17th century frame in the vault of the ducal palace of the Este family in Sassuolo, outside of Modena.
He immediately noted the high quality of the painting. The piece was thought to be an 18th century copy of the head of the Madonna in Rafael’s famous Holy Family of the Pearl now in the Prado museum, so Scalini found its exceptional quality incongruous. Also, why would a mere 12 by 16-inch copy be put in such a large, sumptuous frame?
He followed up on his hunch that this might be an actual Raphael by digging through the ducal archives for any reference to the portrait. He found nothing about a copy, but he did find an inventory reference from 1663 to a “portrait of a woman” by Raphael. There is no record of the Raphael portrait currently in the collection, nor was there any trace of it having been ceded to the Elector of Saxony in 1746 when Francesco III d’Este had to sell many of the most valuable pictures after he was bankrupted by the Wars of the Spanish, Polish, and Austrian Successions. There was no record of it being loaned or dispersed at any other time either, so it seems the Rafael was squirreled away somewhere and forgotten, maybe to be mistaken for a copy decades later