Art News and Articles: FAR® Columnist
Truth In Art Series
Mistakes in Attribution - Experts, Let’s Get it Right!
Science and Connoisseurship
The "experts" don't always get it right. Consider the case of chemist Walter C. McCrone, a leading expert on art forgeries.
In 1978, McCrone dated the Shroud of Turin – thought to be the burial cloth of Jesus of Nazareth – and concluded the cloth wasn't old enough to be the real thing. His radiocarbon tests indicated that the cloth came out of medieval times. He was the only scientist who said this. He refused a peer review, but other scientists who have since inspected the cloth disagree with his findings.
Raymond Rogers, Science Fellow of the University of California, Los Alamos National Laboratory, dated the shroud to the 1st century. He said the material that McCrone carbon dated was not the original fabric, but rather a part of the shroud that had been rewoven in the Middle Ages.
This wasn't McCrone's only error. He got it wrong when it came to dating old paintings, too.
"When a painting comes to me for review, one of the first things I do is turn it over," he said in the January/February 2000 issue of The Sciences, the journal of the New York Academy of Sciences. "The canvas, parchment or wood panel may hold all the clues I need."
But it can be argued that the first thing to do in deciding who made a painting is to look at the painting. McCrone was known to forget this. In the early '90s, he dated two works that had surfaced in my town of Sarasota, Florida, one purported
to be by Renaissance master Raphael and the other by Leonardo da Vinci.
The Leonardo was intended as the feature work to herald the opening of a new exhibition hall in Sarasota. McCrone told me that the chances were "very, very good" that Leonardo had a hand in the painting. This, even though it didn't look a bit like a Leonardo. The composition was out of balance, the faces were out of proportion, the lighting was out of whack and the hand gestures were straight out of Art 101. I wrote in a local newspaper how inconceivable it was that an artist known for Vitruvian Man – the male figure with arms and legs outstretched in demonstration of classical grace and balance – would have painted such an ungraceful and unbalanced picture.
The exhibition hall closed before it opened and the painting was not heard of again.
McCrone conceded that art scholarship has a role in authenticating art, but his written words don't support that view. The only art scholar he cited in his six-page article was one whose authentications have proved groundless: "Bernard Berenson, the flamboyant American art critic and collector, was an authority on forgeries, but his evidence often consisted of nothing more than vague physical sensations."
The chemist McCrone might have gotten that impression from Thomas Hoving, former director of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, who called Berenson "a natural fakebuster," because he experienced visceral reaction to bogus art, like stomach aches.
Presumably, the lack of proportion, balance and grace in the supposed Leonardo fall into McCrone's "vague physical sensations" category.
Yet, the physical aspect of a painting is often a huge factor in determining attribution. For example, Raphael was known for effortless grace, most often noticeable in his paintings of the Madonna and Child. His painting of St. Catherine in London's National Gallery is one of rapture between a woman and her god. Goethe noticed it: "The divine genius of Raphael reached a height that no one else will surpass or equal."
But the face of the Madonna in the so-called Raphael in Sarasota showed a commonplace prettiness, pursed lips sucked into a rosette, and the pale-complexion of a porcelain doll – bloodless and slick. McCrone dated it at 1505, when Raphael was 22 years old. Odd. When Raphael was 21, his painting Marriage of the Virgin was considered so lucid and graceful, Pope Julius II summoned him to paint the papal rooms at the Vatican. Especially notable about Raphael's holy figures – early or late (he died at 37) – is their healthy glow, a far cry form the pallid look of the painting that McCrone presumed was a Raphael.
I don't question science when it comes to authenticating painting. I question why history and connoisseurship were ignored here.
"But even art historians and
connoisseurs make mistakes."
Errors In Knowledge and Judgment
But even art historians and connoisseurs make mistakes. Leading Leonardo scholar Carlo Pedretti proclaimed in Rome in 1999 that the Old Master based his work on sculpture. Pedretti said he learned this after reading Benvenuto Cellini, a Renaissance goldsmith and sculptor, who wrote that Leonardo made clay figures as models for his "many paintings."
First of all, Leonardo didn't make "many paintings." Except for a handful like The Last Supper, the Mona Lisa, and The Virgin of the Rocks, he didn't paint much. Given that he lived to about age 70, his painting output was meager. Being an architect, philosopher, poet, composer, athlete (broad jumping), physicist and mathematician, Leonardo seldom finished anything. He spent most of his days on mathematical calculations. He had little time for making paintings, let alone sculptures.
History shows that Leonardo began an equestrian statue and never finished it. History also shows that when the city of Florence gave him some marble to carve anything he liked, he didn't carve anything. Michelangelo ended up with the stone that became David.
It's surprising that Pedretti would base his conclusion on the words of Cellini, who was known to be unfaithful to historical fact and given to say what his patrons liked to hear. He also invented a lineage, certifying to his patrons, the Medicis, that his own family's ancestry was traceable to the son of Zeus and Danae. Investigation of his bloodline proved otherwise.
Given to making things up and favoring sculpture, Cellini – who called the art of sculpture "eight times as great as two-dimensional art because a statue has eight views and they must all be equally good" – likely made up the notion
that Leonardo's paintings couldn't have existed without sculpture. Leonardo's own words make the opposite argument when he opined on why painting was superior to sculpture:
"The lines of perspective of sculptures do not seem in any way true; those of painters may appear to extend a hundred miles beyond the work itself. The effects of aerial perspective are outside the scope of sculptors' work, which can represent neither transparent bodies, nor luminous bodies, nor angles of reflections, nor shining bodes, as in mirrors and things of glittering surface, nor mists, nor full weather, nor an infinite number of things which I forbear to mention lest they should
prove wearisome."
"Leonardo's Virgin of the Rocks... could
never have been based on sculpture."
It follows that, say, Leonardo's The Virgin of the Rocks, complete with breezes that billow her cloak, and the soft glow that gives her radiance, could never have been based on sculpture.
Another art historian who doesn't know his art history is Federico Zeri, Professor of Art History at the Catholic University in Milan. In his book, Behind the Image, he contends that Mona Lisa is not smiling. It looks like she is, owing to the unclean surface of the canvas, he said. "There is no mystery, no strangeness; there is merely the effect of innumerable coats of varnish and the dirt beneath the surface of the
painting. If the picture were stripped of its smoky film, the smile would vanish."
Vasari, the art historian in Leonardo's day, described the efforts the painter made to achieve the smile: "While he was painting Mona Lisa, who was a very beautiful woman, he employed singers and musicians or jesters to keep her full of merriment and so chase away the melancholy that painters usually give to portraits. As a result, in this painting of Leonardo's, there was a smile so pleasing that it seemed divine rather than human, and those
who saw it were amazed to find that it was as alive as the original... If one wanted to see how faithfully art can imitate nature, one could readily perceive it from this head; for here Leonardo subtly reproduced every living detail… The mouth, joined to the flesh-tints of the face by the red of the lips, appears to be living flesh rather than paint."
All of which makes mincemeat of yet another art historian's inexplicable beef about Mona Lisa. Hendrik Willem van Loon said in his early 20th-century tome The Arts that the smile can also be seen in numerous ancient sculptures and are the result of a problem that plagued Leonardo: the inability to render mouths. "That wistful smile of his eternal woman," he said, "is a piece of pictorial clumsiness."
Leonardo's own words, which he penned to artists working in his studio, make clear that he wouldn't have copied from the ancients: "Italian painters have been accused of a common fault, that is, bringing into their compositions the faces, even the whole figures, of Roman emperors which they have copied from antique art. This is an error: there should never be repetition, neither in part nor in the whole of a figure. Do not permit the same face to appear even in a different composition… Watch that your faces do not have all the same expression, but give them different expressions according to age, complexion, and bad or good character."
As for the notion that Leonardo didn't understand how to paint mouths, the advice he gave artists suggests otherwise: "Laughter and weeping are very similar in the movement of mouth and cheeks, the contractions of the eyebrows and the space between them – knowledge of such changes in the face are absolutely necessary to a painter, as well as in hands, fingers and all other parts of the body, for without it his figures may as well be twice dead."
Finally, there's Leonardo's admonition about rendering mouths that flies in the face of his so-called 'pictorial clumsiness': "It is far better to draw in company than alone for many reasons: the first is that you will be ashamed to be seen among the draftsmen if you are unskillful, and this shame will cause you to study well."
Given that Leonardo liked to have an audience when he painted, if he had trouble painting mouths, wouldn't someone have noticed and gotten the word out? And if he were given to 'pictorial clumsiness,' what accounts for this tribute from the historian Vasari at the time of Leonardo's death: "All who had known Leonardo were grieved beyond words by their loss, for no one had ever shed such luster on the art of painting…"?
Bad enough that scientists don't read art history, but must art historians overlook it, too?
— by Joan Altabe | June 26, 2007
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