How do you turn a copy of a Leonardo into 'a Leonardo'?
December 1 2011
Picture: Sotheby's
By asking an American jury... Click your way over to Art History Today for a fascinating post on the so-called 'Hahn Leonardo', the painting at the centre of a fascinating court case in New York in 1929. The Hahn's had sued art dealer Joseph Duveen for calling their picture 'a copy' of the original in the Louvre - they contended it was the original. Despite Duveen being manifestly right, and despite him having the support of a whole host of art historians including Bernard Berenson, he lost the case, and had to pay $60,000 in damages.
The case effectively boiled down to whether a US court believed the plucky US owner, or a bunch of snooty (mostly European) art 'experts'. But it also highlighted the debate on connoisseurship, and the science of establishing attribution. Although Duveen et al said, entirely rightly, that the picture was too poor to be an original, they found it hard to prove that empirically in court. As David Packwood says in his post:
...the presiding magistrate, Judge William Harman Black, dismissed all the expertise of the connoisseurs as inadmissible; and Black demanded much more rigorous methods to prove the ability to determine the authorship of paintings. Enter science, particularly x-rays to make connoisseurship transparent to a lay public. [...]
[Connoisseurship] was seen as kind of “magic” by Judge Black. Berenson’s “magic”, which to use Brewer’s words was “a subjective technique dependant on the eye”, could not be verified objectively; a way of scientizing attributions was therefore demanded.
The Hahn picture sold at auction recently for $1.5m, a ridiculous price for a later copy. Compare it and the original for yourself. Which do you prefer? Check out the hard flesh tones, the slightly staring eyes, and especially the smooth and rounded folds in the drapery of the Hahn picture. Note also the unsubtle characterisation compared to the original. See what I mean? Then pass step 1 of the DIY Connoisseurship Course.
