$45 Million Connoisseurship Catfight
Is it an ethereal 14th-century masterpiece or a clumsy 19th-century fake? Pull up a ringside seat, folks. They’re duking it out over a Duccio.
Art world Cassandra James Beck was back up on his bully pulpit this week. As you might remember, the Columbia University professor gained notoriety a few years back as the most vociferous critic of the Sistine Chapel restoration. (His argument? That conservators were doing irreparable damage and making the ceiling a garish, candy-colored travesty by cleaning centuries’ worth of grime from its surface.) He later took potshots at the way Michelangelo’s David was being cleaned. In 2004, he declared Raphael’s Madonna of the Pinks, for which Britain’s National Gallery paid over $40 million, a fake. This time, he’s being a major pain in the patootie to Philippe de Montebello and the gang at New York’s venerable Metropolitan Museum, by questioning the authenticity of the museum’s big-ticket 2005 acquisition, a Duccio Madonna and Child altarpiece that came with a whopping $45 million pricetag.
Give the guy credit. He doesn’t shy away from controversy. Especially when he’s got a book to promote, which is the case right now. It’s due out in September, and—surprise!—it’s called The Crisis of Connoisseurship: from Duccio to Raphael.
But hey, when you’re a publicly funded institution spending $45 million of your donors’ money, you’d better be damn sure you know what you’re buying. (Even if it’s real, it’s a piece for which some art world insiders think the museum significantly overpaid.)
Beck’s beef boils down to three essential points. First, connoisseurship. The Renaissance art history professor contends that certain pictorial elements, like the baby Jesus’s stumpy arm and “gourd-like” head, are far too clumsily rendered to be by the hand of this master. To follow his argument, you have to compare this baby to others certifiably known to be painted by Duccio. The second, and more contentious, point? That the artist here uses conventions, like an illusionistic, space-defining parapet, that were not invented until the Renaissance, some 100 years after the supposed date of this picture. Met curator Keith Christiansen defends the piece as ahead of its time. Beck says it could only have been painted by a forger who inherited such spatial conventions after the fact. Third, the provenance of the piece apparently falls off a cliff once you get back to the 19th century. Not uncommon for such an old piece, but not good either. At that price, you want rock-solid ownership history.
The Met counters that a whole slew of experts, both connoisseurs of Duccio’s style and conservators who look at the scientific evidence (the age of the panel and paint, for instance), verified this piece unequivocally. But the art and science of attribution have always been imprecise, at best. And mistakes do happen. Indeed, while I was in graduate school at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, I remember sitting in the conservation lab at the Met and listening as a conservator explained how a handful of the museum’s most famous pieces had been ultimately discovered to be forgeries: the Etruscan warriors, the Fonthill ewer. And the one in front of us that day? The famed Rospigliosi Cup, an exquisite gold-and-enamel chalice believed to have been created by the famed Renaissance goldsmith Benevuto Cellini. It had taken pride of place in the Met galleries before a conservator discovered, in taking the cup apart, that the soldering technique used in its manufacture had not been invented in Cellini’s lifetime. Ooops. As it turned out, preliminary sketches for the cup were found relating it to Reinhold Vasters, a late 19th-century goldsmith.
Not to pick on the Met—because all museums fall prey to these issues, and it, of all institutions, has been particularly forthcoming in recognizing its mistakes and turning them into connoisseurship opportunities. One of the most fascinating, and instructive, exhibitions ever mounted there was one in 1996 called “Rembrandt, Not Rembrandt,” which included every work in the museum thought to be by the master, alongside those that had been discredited since entering its collection. Indeed, there has been fear and loathing in museumland worldwide as the Rembrandt Research Project has run around for the past few decades, discrediting many accepted museum masterpieces, including the Frick’s famed Polish Rider). As scholarship continues to advance, attribution debates will always rage.
There is a lesson in all this for wannabe connoisseurs. Collectors can easily get caught up in the beauty and stardust and prestige of a piece, and wish it to be right. Even museums, with all of their expertise, can fall prey to this. No matter what you’re paying for a piece, the only way to safeguard yourself from the worst mistake is to start from the assumption that the piece is wrong and try and prove it right. If you presume it’s good and get attached, then you’re more likely to want to defend its honor as evidence piles up against it.
Whether or not Beck is correct, this is an important, hard-nosed lesson for collectors to learn. And hey, it’s important to remember that it’s the process of inquiry—of unlocking the truth inside a mute object—that is the most fascinating, and I think satisfying, part of connoisseurship.
