A number of paintings have been attributed from time to time to the Italian artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), but are no longer generally accepted as genuine. Immensely popular in his own lifetime, he fell into neglect almost immediately upon his death, with the result that now, four hundred years later, it's often extremely difficult to distinguish works by the master from copies or from original creations by his most gifted followers. The case in favour of recognising The Tooth Puller as was first advanced by the scholar Mina Gregori in 1992, and John Gash discussed the case in an article in Melita Historica in 1998. On the side of arguments for genuineness, almost every figure in the painting is based on figures in other, genuine, works by Caravaggio, and from such a variety of sources and cities that it's almost inconceivable that any Caravaggisti could have seen them all; the style is typical of Caravaggio's late style, specifically his Maltese stay in 1607/1608; and he had begun his career in Rome with broadly similar genre works. On the other hand, there is no other surviving example of a genre painting by Caravaggio after about 1600, and, of course, there is no mention of the painting - or of any late-period genre painting - in sources such as Giovanni Bellori, who otherwise seems to have been thorough in seeking out Caravaggio's works.