Date: 04-07-2010
Owning Institution: National Gallery
Publication:         Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2011  
Subject:   Renaissance  Now  20th Century    

''Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries” at the National Gallery.

When Nicholas Penny became Director of the National Gallery he pledged to put the permanent collections of the museum centre stage, even if that meant diverting energies away from the lucrative blockbusting loan exhibitions – “Late Caravaggio”, “Velazquez”, “Picasso and the Masters”, and the like – that have become synonymous with the institution in recent years. True to his word, the summer’s main show in the Sainsbury Wing galleries focusses on paintings which the museum already owns. The absence of expensive overseas loans means that the exhibition is free of charge – a distinct plus, in these straitened times – although it remains to be seen whether it can draw in the public in sufficient quantities to justify further experiments of the same kind.

Arousing fresh interest in Old Master paintings which, in some cases, have been part of the National Gallery’s collection for a century and more is inevitably a challenge. “Close Examination: Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries” does not seek to put such pictures in the spotlight so much as under the microscope. The whole of this essentially science-and-scholarship-driven show might be seen as something of a public accountability exercise, in that its principal purpose is to make as visible as possible the museum’s own procedures of attribution and reattribution – and indeed, in some cases, its occasional history of rank misattribution.

The sorriest example of an outright fake purchased by the museum, dredged up from the remotest corner of its most obscure “study gallery” in the Orange Street wing, is a work curtly labelled “Unknown Italian Artist, Portrait Group, early twentieth century”. Three bone-jawed figures, a woman and two children, stand silhouetted by the open window of some imaginary Florentine palazzo. The style is pastiche Giorgio de Chirico, iced with Christmas card sugar. Just how anyone at the National Gallery ever managed to persuade themselves that this terminal botch might have been created by a contemporary of Fra Filippo Lippi, or Piero della Francesca, is as much of a mystery as the identity of the forger who half-baked it in the first place. The woman, bizarrely, is evidently a man in drag. (S)he wears a type of hat all the rage among Twenties flappers but quite unknown to the inhabitants of quattrocento Florence. Scientific analysis has finally despatched the picture to the rubbish-tip of history by showing that a number of its pigments could only have been produced by the metallurgical advances of the Industrial Revolution. Not only is the style of the painting blatantly modern, but so too are the very materials from which it was made.

Fakes and forgeries are by no means always so easy to detect. Close to that screamingly false Florentine family group hangs a sober little devotional painting of The Virgin and Child with an Angel which until very recently was thought to have been painted in Italy in the fifteenth century. Part of the great Ludwig Mond Bequest, source of such unquestioned masterpieces as Raphael’s so-called Mond Crucifixion, the picture was long believed to have been created by the Bolognese artist Francesco Francia. When an identical version of the composition surfaced in 1955, questions were asked about the National Gallery’s painting, which was subsequently downgraded to the status of a copy produced by Francia’s workshop. But it took the gaze of the so-called Osiris camera – one of the newest toys in the museum’s Science Department – to prove that the picture was, as the art historian’s euphemism has it, “wrong”. The Osiris produces so-called infrared reflectographs, unsettlingly sharp photographic images of a picture’s underdrawing. In the late 1990s, a routine Osiris logging of the “school of Francesco Francia” Virgin and Child revealed something that instantly and shockingly pulled the painting out of the Renaissance and into a much later period of history, namely a complex underdrawing executed in graphite pencil – very beautiful, but done in a medium unavailable to artists until the early eighteenth century. Hackles of suspicion thoroughly roused, the National Gallery’s scientific team took a closer look at the skin of the painting itself, and discovered – with the use of a stereo binocular microscope – that what had seemed to be a fine network of cracks in the surface had actually been applied with the thinnest of brushes. The picture had been painted to deceive, probably sometime in the mid-nineteenth century. It was quietly removed from the Renaissance galleries shortly afterwards and will never be hung there again.

Despite the impression given by much of the advance publicity for the show, “Close Examination” is not principally about forgeries, of which very few are to be found in the National Gallery’s collections. Its real, broader subject is the museum’s own methodology, both scientific and curatorial, revealed through a succession of case studies which illuminate all kinds of different processes and outcomes: attempts to establish which parts of Andrea del Verrochio’s Virgin and Child with Two Angels were painted by the master, and which by his workshop; the reattribution of a painting once thought to be by Holbein to another, slightly later artist; or the startlingly exact procedures that have led the museum to stick to its original attribution of The Madonna of the Pinks to Raphael; and so on.

The display, perhaps inevitably, is rather cumbersome. Some thirty paintings in all are included in the show, accompanied in every case by numerous photographs and long, didactic wall-texts explaining both the questions at issue and the answers arrived at by the National Gallery’s collective of scientific and curatorial teams. The pictures are treated less like works of art than potential crime scenes, teeming with evidence. But that is exactly what they must always remain, at a certain level, to curators, conservators and art historians alike. “Close Examination” may not be the most elegant of exhibitions, but it does the job that it set out to do and does it very well – taking the public behind the scenes of its own intellectual disciplines and revealing, with disarming honesty, just how the National Gallery’s own formidable array of experts go about separating the art historical wheat from the chaff.