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A family portrait of the Mozarts from 1780 or 1781 by Johann Nepomuk della Croce. Wolfgang, center, with his sister Maria Anna (known as Nannerl), and father, Leopold. The painting at center depicts the children's mother, Anna Maria, who died in 1778.

One portrait long thought to be of Mozart turned out to be someone else. A suspect image was confirmed to be of him. And a third portrait, deemed incomplete, was actually found to consist of a finished piece grafted onto a larger canvas.

The International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg, Mozart's birthplace, announced the findings last month in conjunction with an exhibition of Mozart portraits that opened on Jan. 26 and runs through April 14. One goal, the foundation said, was to burn away idealized conceptions of Mozart — a white-wigged, red-jacketed, romanticized figure — and focus attention on what he might really have looked like.

Fourteen images created in Mozart's lifetime are known to exist, sometimes reproduced in different mediums, like oil paintings, engravings or medallions. The Mozarteum holds examples of nine and has borrowed three others for the show. The remaining lifetime portraits were not available, said Gabriele Ramsauer, director of the foundation's museums and of the Mozart birthplace.

The exhibition speaks to a yearning within the living to know the past, by knowing the face of someone whose work lives on so powerfully in our own time.

"It's an emotional question," Ms. Ramsauer said. "Mozart is such a universal genius. Everybody knows him. Everybody takes part of his life."

Research done before the show altered assumptions held for decades.

In 1924 a British art dealer sold the Mozarteum a portrait of a boy in a long brown jacket holding a bird's nest, standing in front of a round table with an open book on it. When the foundation bought the painting, "W. A. Mozart 1764" was inscribed on a page of the book. An engraving of the portrait commissioned by the art dealer and now in the Vienna Museum included the name. The initials stand for Wolfgang Amadeus.

Mozarteum Foundation

Curators determined that this portrait does not depict Mozart.

But doubts lingered about the authenticity of the identification, Ms. Ramsauer said, in part because Mozart rarely used"Amadeus"in his lifetime; "Gottlieb," the German form, was his preferred usage.

"We always wrote 'Mozart' with a little question mark," Ms. Ramsauer said.

When curators examined the painting recently, the name was missing from the book page. A search of the Mozarteum archives found a 1928 restoration report that said all overpainting had been removed, including the "W. A. Mozart inscription."

"Now we are sure that one of the former owners had made these overpaintings, and had published this engraving in 1906, to sell this portrait," Ms. Ramsauer said. "We were always wondering why Mozart should be painted with a bird's nest in his hand."

Mozarteum Foundation

An image of Mozart painted about 1783 by Joseph Maria Grassi.

An opposite conclusion was reached regarding a miniature painting on ivory set on a tortoise shell snuffbox. It shows a cherubic face surrounded by curly hair, with dark, serious eyes. The Mozarteum acquired the snuffbox in 1956. An inscription inside said, "Johann Mozart, 1783," using the composer's first given name. Was it really Mozart? "We always doubted it a little bit," Ms. Ramsauer said.

A rummage through the archives found a document showing the object's provenance, she added.

The document said Mozart had owned the snuffbox for 10 years and gave it as a gift to Anton Grassi, a sculptor friend in Vienna. Letters from Mozart indicate that Grassi's brother Joseph, also an artist, painted a miniature of Mozart. Joseph acquired the snuffbox from his brother and attached the miniature, Ms. Ramsauer said.

"For us now the time has come to say there is no doubt," she said. The find is considered important, because no other head-on portraits of Mozart exist after 1781.

One of the most famous portraits — and the one Mozart's wife, Constanze, considered the most true to life — has long been considered unfinished. It is by Joseph Lange, Mozart's brother-in-law, and shows him in profile, looking down, his face emerging from a dark background, with a triangle of torso surrounded by scratched white space. The painting, dating from 1789, without doubt looks unfinished, like a classical symphony of two movements.

Mozarteum Foundation

A portrait by Joseph Lange, Mozart's brother-in-law.

X-ray and infrared analysis performed at the Doerner Institute in Munich, an art research institution, last December showed that a small completed painting of Mozart's head and shoulder had been trimmed and mounted at some point on a larger canvas, with paint added around the edges to smooth out the surface.

The enlargement was unfinished, not the original.