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Distinguished by the paradigm of singularity, European art history has long been the fruit of an alliance between connoisseurship and the Vasarian model of artist monographs as a method of attribution. However, this model is in friction with the complexity of artistic production methods during the Renaissance and early modern period. Recent studies in the fields of social history, art philosophy and “new connoisseurship”, in close proximity with the museum world, explore this relationship between the autograph painting and works created by several hands, between attribution and artistic enterprise, with Rembrandt being a case in point. The concept of a painting as an “autograph” is not universal: its history was shaped in the seventeenth-century literature of connoisseurship, through new discourses on the master’s “touch”. These studies also reveal the importance of multiples and repetitions in the history of modern art, up to now sidelined in the writing of art history, which has been dominated by the cult of uniqueness. Paying close attention to the material history of the works, such as the social and intellectual history of the art, they illuminate the role of collaboration and “multiple originals” in the creation of artistic singularity at the very heart of the canvas. Some fundamental concepts of paintings in the West are challenged, such as the cult of the original and the status of autograph works, and new perspectives are opened on the cultural history of art.