For many of those witnessing the flurry of claims and counter claims during the week over which is the real Caravaggio, the one in Dublin or the one in Rome, the most surprising thing was the way in which even an acclaimed, carefully-authenticated masterpiece might be dramatically dislodged from its pedestal by the words of remote experts. Aidan Dunne reports
But the seemingly placid world of fine art museums, notionally a haven of truth and beauty removed from the harsher side of life, is by its nature prone to seismic shifts and upheavals.
When you put together the vast number of professionals now operating in the field, the myriad technological advances allowing for rigorous tests of authenticity, and the enormous monetary value and cultural prestige associated with works of art, you have a volatile mixture. In fact, the experts have a hard time of it. For one thing - and it's the thing that usually grabs the headlines - they have to cope with deliberate fakes. The work of virtually every well-known artist is shadowed by a mass of fakes designed to outwit the art establishment.
Sometimes it can be remarkably easy to do so. The draughtsman Eric Hebborn, who died in 1996, was an outed forger who wrote a not-entirely-reliable autobiography. He single-handedly caused a panic in the market for Old Master drawings when it became clear that during the 1960s and 1970s, perhaps hundreds of his works had found their way into the auction rooms and hence to private and public collections, fooling most along the transaction chain but not, in the end, a few sharp-eyed professionals. Hebborn exemplifies what might be called the forger's paradox: success depends on no one knowing what you're doing but, not untypically, he desperately craved recognition.
The best-known instance of art forgery is still probably van Meegeren's technically painstaking but stylistically inept Vermeer fakes, which focused on the artist's hypothesised lost Italiante period, when he was off studying Caravaggio's work in Italy. For a time - for various reasons - sections of the Dutch art establishment embraced van Meegeren's dubious works.
But forgery is by no means a modern invention; it's almost as old as art itself. Within a few decades of Caravaggio's death, Luca Giordano, appropriately nicknamed Luca fa presto, a Naples-based painter of great stylistic facility, and renowned in his own right, was turning out fake Caravaggios.
Yet the motivation for copying a great painting need not be nefarious. Making a copy was - and remains - a legitimate and effective way of learning. Copies of highly-regarded works were routinely commissioned by owners - as in the case of the Taking of Christ - and others. Many painters happily made copies and subsequent versions of their own work for clients, as Sir Denis Mahon suggests was the case with the Taking of Christ. Caravaggio was renowned in his time and became one of the most influential, widely imitated painters in history, so it's hardly surprising that numerous copies of his relatively few works exist. Nor is it surprising that many of these, often attributed to him, found their way onto the market as recently as during the 1990s.
It's good manners to make clear that a copy is a copy, but over time the evidence can become degraded and distorted, and distinctions blurred, particularly in the case of a "lost" work like the Taking of Christ, where there is no authoritative, clearly-identified original. A letter to the Daily Telegraph during the week pointed out that a picture in London's National Gallery falls into this category and bears odd echoes of the Caravaggio. Samson and Delilah, attributed to Rubens, is, like the Dublin Caravaggio, a cut-down version of other examples of the composition, and was likewise upgraded from being attributed to the Dutch painter Honthorst.
The appeal of the challenge for scholars is obvious.
Everyone would love to be credited with discovering a lost masterpiece. Reputations and fortunes can be made on the strength of attributions. In the past, museums could afford to be casually optimistic about attribution. But it's a long time since that was tolerated; it's now a much tougher arena. Over the last few decades, specially-established commissions have set about assessing works attributed to Rembrandt and Vermeer in the world's galleries. Predictably, numbers have tended to shrink, but the process can work both ways, upgrading as well as downgrading.
As recently as 1996, following on research by Denise Ferran for a William Leech retrospective, one of the most popular paintings in the National Gallery of Ireland, The Goose Girl was reattributed from Leech to Stanley Royle. This reattribution doesn't have any great impact on the value, significance or popularity of the picture, but it's interesting that so relatively recent a work could be mistakenly credited for so long.
When it comes to attribution, though, there is no guarantee of neat conclusions. There's the celebrated case of the New York Metropolitan Museum's Georges de La Tour, The Fortune Teller, acquired in 1960 from the well-known dealer Georges Wildenstein. Thomas Hoving, an ex-director of the Met, has provided an exceptionally frank account of how this painting went through some dramatic reversals of fortune. The nub of the issue is that, when it was subjected to an intensive historical study by scholars, a mass of internal evidence suggested that it is not the real thing.
Except that there is a further, perhaps even more compelling body of evidence that it very likely is the real thing. Hoving - in an admirably unpartisan spirit, incidentally - tends to the view that it is indeed what it appears to be, and draws the philosophical conclusion that artists do not necessarily provide scholars with neat parcels of evidence that will unequivocally confirm the authenticity of their works. They do crazy things, they make mistakes, they make things up, they take flights of fancy - so that, paradoxically, sometimes what is odd or erratic can be a guide to genuine authorship.
The issue is no more clear-cut much closer to our own time. A huge question mark hangs over vast numbers of prints by Salvador Dali, or Avida Dollars as André Breton scathingly anagrammatised his name. The problem lies in Dali's practice of pre-signing blank sheets of paper which, it is suspected, were sold on to unscrupulous dealers to be filled in later as they saw fit. But, in a way, what the purchasers of such prints are buying is Dali's signature. They don't really know or care much about the quality of the work.
Dali is a prototypical celebrity artist in that he managed to commodify his own identity: the signature is more important than the work; it is the product. The same is true of Andy Warhol, the pre-eminent Pop Artist. The question of what constitutes a genuine Warhol is particularly vexed because often his works were produced by others, in his studio, called, appropriately enough, the Factory. He was not even there when much of his work was made. This was possible because his basic medium of expression was the photographic silkscreen print.
Are they any less his for that? By its nature his work made use of mass production methods and chance flaws. It explicitly undermined the idea of the individual, authentic original and a great deal of it is not that difficult to imitate. But the Warhol estate is worth a lot of money and its value is inevitably tied to the art market, which means there must be a way of deciding which works are "real" Warhols.
Hence the establishment of the Kafkaesque-sounding Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board, modelled on high-profile international bodies established for Vermeer and Rembrandt.
But the board has, inevitably, irked several possessors of Warhols - or of works they reasonably presumed to be by Warhol. If every work not personally made by Warhol was dismissed from his oeuvre, there would not be much left. If every work made without his supervision were dismissed, there wouldn't be much more. But the board seems to have decided - it does not publicise its criteria - that direct supervision and contact are pivotal.
It's not an issue that seems to bother the many people who have purchased colour dot paintings by Damien Hirst, who also employs assistants to make them, but it might in the future. Not all contemporary artists are temperamentally inclined to such practices. Hirst's compatriot Gary Hume, whose paintings have a hands-off look about them, remarked last year that on the one occasion when he did enlist the help of assistants to cope with a big commission, he was extremely unhappy with the results and decided he would never do it again. That doesn't, of course, solve the problem of potential fake Gary Humes.