The present article explores both the difficulty that already existed in the Renaissance of being certain who painted what, and also the practice of artistic emulation, above all – but not exclusively – again during the Renaissance. Both subjects are vast ones, and often at least part of the motivation behind individual borrowings was the illustrious authorship of the prototypes. However, in the specific case studies considered here, for all that the borrowers must have been entirely confident of the authorship of their models, the verdict of posterity has been a very different one, and their sources of inspiration turn out not to be by the greatest artists of the period. This in turn may well explain previous failures to recognise most of these ‘Homages to Misattribution’.