Seeing Through the Fakes

Close Examination at the National Gallery looks at 40 problematic works from the Gallery’s collection – including outright forgeries, misattributions, pastiches, copies, altered or over-restored paintings, and works whose authenticity was beyond doubt. You couldn’t have been given a huger subject – the range of possibilities museum professionals take into consideration when they investigate a picture’s status is vast, and a variety of technical procedures conservation scientists use to establish authorship add to the case. The case histories they discuss have a single common denominator: in whatever direction and to whatever conclusion the combined disciplines of connoisseurship, science and art history lead, the study of any work of art begins with a question: by the work is by the artist to whom it is attributed?

A good example is an Italian painting on panel that the National Gallery acquired in 1923, as the work of an artist in the circle of the Italian fifteenth-century painter Melozzo da Forli. Today, we find it incredible that anyone was ever fooled by a picture that looks like it was painted by a Surrealist follower of Salvador Dalí. But this is to forget how little was known about Melozzo 90 years ago, and how little could be done in the conservation lab to determine the date of pigments in works of art. So from the moment the picture was acquired, sceptics called its status into question. Nothing could be proved until 1960 when a succession of historians pointed out the many anachronisms in the clothing. When technological advances enabled the test for the pigments, they were found to be from the nineteenth century.

Scientific evidence can be invaluable but it has to be used with caution and in tandem with historical research. For example, Corot’s ravishing sketch The Roman Campagna, with the Claudian Aqueduct has always been dated to about 1826, soon after the artist’s arrival in Rome. However, the green pigment called viridian that Corot used throughout the picture only became available to artists in the 1830s. The landscape wasn’t a fake and for stylistic reasons couldn’t have been painted later than the mid-1820s. But when historians and further research and discovered that the firm that sold artists’ supplies to Corot in Paris started making the newly developed colour available to selected customers in the 1820s, long before it came into widespread use.

The flipside of a fake, but capable of doing equal violence to an artist’s reputation, occurs when an authentic work is mistakenly labelled a forgery. Back in 1996, I well remember how distressing it was to read an article in which the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas Hoving, declared that Uccello’s lovely little canvas of St George and the Dragon was forged. The gallery, therefore, X-rayed the picture and tested paint samples, before concluding that it was a rare survival of a work ‘by Uccello dating from the early 1470s. Hoving was irresponsible not because he questioned the attribution of a much-loved work, but because he went public without first asking the gallery to carry out a thorough scientific analysis.

Anyone can label a picture a fake or a copy, but their opinions are worthless unless they can support them with tangible proof. One picture that’s been smeared in this way is Raphael’s Madonna of the Pinks. In this exhibition, we are shown infrared photographs that reveal the presence both of major corrections which a copyist would not need to make, and also of under drawing in a hand comparable to Raphael’s when he sketched on paper. The pigments and painting technique exactly match those that the artist used in other works of about the same date.

For all its pleasures, the show also has an unspoken agenda. It is a riposte to the mistaken belief that museums have anything to gain by hiding the true status of the art they own. As the downgrading in this show of Courbet’s Self-Portrait to the status of a posthumous copy of a picture in the Louvre shows, the opposite is the case: museums and galleries constantly question, revise, reattribute and re-date the works in their care. If they make a mistake, they acknowledge it.