Previous Posts: articles 2018
Rubens lecture at the National Gallery
December 20 2015
Picture: National Gallery
The director of the Rubenshuis museum in Antwerp, Ben van Beneden, will be giving a lecture at the National Gallery in London on Rubens' portraits of his family. The lecture follows the excellent exhibition at the Rubenshuis, 'Rubens in Private', and is on Monday 18th January 1/1.45pm. Admission is free. More here.
New 'Civilisation' presenters
December 20 2015
Picture: BBC
The presenting line up for the BBC's new 'Civilisation' series has been announced; David Olusaga, Mary Beard and Simon Schama. More here.
Beanbags?! (ctd.)
December 20 2015
Picture: tabulousdesign.com
I learnt recently that beanbags are available for use in the Banqueting House in Whitehall, so people can gaze up at the wonderful Rubens ceiling. What a good idea. And because it doesn't involve taking out any original furniture (as the National Trust did at Ickworth), there'll be no ranting from me.
Incidentally, I hear of low morale in the National Trust. Strange things are afoot.
I wonder, by the way, if the Rubens ceiling in the Banqueting House is the most valuable painting in the UK's public collection. Anyone know?
UK regional museums
December 20 2015
Picture: Museums Association
As discussed here on AHN before, the UK's national museums are faring pretty well these days, despite 'the cuts'. Most of them are better off than ever before, thanks to more energetic tin-shaking and rising visitor numbers.
But the UK's regional museums are in real danger, as local councils seek to reduce funding across the board. I read recently of bad news for Derby museum, which has a pre-eminent collection of paintings by Joseph Wright of Derby; it is facing the loss of its entire council grant in 2018/19. Obviously, this would be disastrous. More here.
Let's hope there's enough of a campaign to force the council to re-think. While it's true that these council cuts are in response to central government reductions to the block grant, part of the wider problem is that councils know they can get away with cutting museum budgets. Museum cuts won't cause nearly as much uproar as closing a school facility, or even a football club. It's up to all of us to try and change that.
Roll up! Lecture at Dulwich on Van Dyck
December 16 2015
Picture: NPG London
The National Portrait Gallery's recently acquired Van Dyck 'Self-Portrait' will soon be going on loan to Dulwich Picture Gallery, as part of its Art Fund national tour of the UK. (More dates here).
Dulwich have asked me to give a talk on the picture, which will be on 21st January, from 7.30pm-8.30pm. Doors open at 7pm, and wine is included, along with a special viewing of the famous 'Selfie'. The title of the talk is "Sir Anthony Van Dyck – discovering a life through his self-portraits", and tickets are available here. The picture will be at Dulwich from 12th January.
Hope to see some of you there. I'm afraid I may plug this event a few more times between now and then.
New European galleries at the V&A
December 16 2015
Pictures: Neil Jeffares
The new Europe 1600-1850 galleries at the V&A have opened. Neil Jeffares gives us his view here.
Update - Perhaps inevitably, the V&A couldn't just put European works from 1600-1850 in the European 1600-1850 galleries: no, there's a contemporary installation (below). Neil was not impressed:
I don’t know why it was felt necessary to do anything other than a conventional display of excellent Enlightenment material. I had hoped that this would be an opportunity to present some of the pastels which the V&A keeps in Blythe House: the extraordinary Liotard of Sir Everard Fawkener which you can see in the Royal Academy for another few weeks would surely (if suitably reframed) have told a significant part of the story, and the two Nattier pastels will probably never get a better opportunity to see the light of day (or as close as the V&A will allow). But no. Instead we get a few good portrait busts scattered around the corners of the gallery to leave room for an INSTALLATION.
What were they thinking when they commissioned this? Its dominance in a small room makes it impossible to photograph in its full meaningless invasiveness. It is not so much a spacecraft from another planet as a giant pumpkin built by Ikea – but not just for November. To compound the intellectual vacuum it creates, a wall text has an inevitable reference to the Panopticon. Appropriately the equally inevitable bust by Messerschmidt that oversees all this is supposed to represent “strong odour”, an expression of profound disgust. I’ll leave you with that.
On Twitter, Josh Spero, editor of Spears Magazine, calls the installation 'desperate b*llshit'.
In Apollo, Katy Barrett is more approving, and tells us what the structure is:
Here an installation by Cuban art collective Los Carpinteros creates a space for debate and discussion, while evoking in its structure a library, architectural model, gridded globe, or even panopticon.
So basically it's just a bench. I wonder whether any visitors will ever spontaneously sit down there for a 'debate and discussion'.
Are we heading into Guffwatch territory? Here's what the V&A have to say about the thing:
This installation by the Cuban art collective Los Carpinteros (The Carpenters) is a response to the theme of the Enlightenment.
The structure refers to several images from the Age of Reason. It can be viewed variously as a hemispherical map of the world, a bookcase, an interior from a great library classifying all human knowledge, a symbol of the universe, or an architectural model. It can equally be interpreted as a cage – an important reference for Los Carpinteros being the late 18th-century ‘panopticon’, a circular jail in which a single guard located at the centre could keep watch over hundreds of prisoners.
Like the salons of the 18th-century, where the ideas of the Enlightenment were debated and where music was performed, The Globe provides a space for conversation and special events.
I haven't seen this installation in person. But it seems on the surface to be another example of the forced imposition of contemporary ideals onto the exhibitions about the past. Surely part of the point of going to see an exhibition focusing on the period 1650-1800 is to get some sense of what it was like back then, which requires an element of immersion in the objects on display. Dragging us into the 21st century with, as Neil Jeffares says, something from the posher end of an IKEA catalogue seems unnecessary.
The V&A say they wanted to recreate the idea of an '18th Century salon'. So why didn't they? The V&A are masters at the actual recreation of period interiors. To have come up with such unsuitable installation represents nothing more than a failure of imagination.
There's a video of the installation here.
Research seminar on Cornelius Johnson
December 16 2015
Picture: Yale Center for British Art
There's a research seminar on Cornelius Johnson tonight in London (6pm-8pm) at the Paul Mellon Centre, with Prof. Karen Hearn, who recently curated the lovely exhibition on Johnson at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Book a place here if interested. Prof. Hearn's book on Johnson is available here.
'Recovering Charles I's art collection'
December 16 2015
Picture: Royal Collection
Although the sale of Charles I's collection after his execution in 1649 is well documented, less is known about how Charles II managed to get so much art back. A fascinating new article by Dr Andrew Barclay of the History or Parliament Trust - title 'Recovering Charles I's art collection' - answers many questions, and is well worth a look. You have to pay I'm afraid, but institutions will have free access already. Details here.
Sleeper Alert
December 16 2015
Picture: the-saleroom.com
Judging by the emails, a number of you were onto this study of an old man, which made £56,000 in an English regional auction last week against a £600-£800 estimate. The names Wright of Derby and William Tate (his less well known collaborator) have been mentioned to me. I had a look before the sale, but couldn't figure it out.
What's in a name?
December 16 2015
Picture: Rijksmuseum
The Rijksmuseum in Holland has decided to rename any potentially controversial paintings. So, for example, the above picture (detail) by Simon Maris used to be called 'Young Negro Girl' - but now will be called 'Young Girl with a Fan'.
I was asked to comment on this by a UK newspaper - though it seemed that their angle on the story was to say that it was a politically correct outrage. Actually, I think it's pretty sensible. Changing a title to remove any offensive words is very different from censoring the artwork itself, which nobody is proposing to do. Much of the time titles are stuck to pictures by later observers/owners. So, I agree with Jonathan Jones that the Rijksmuseum is doing a worthwhile thing. Nick Serota of Tate has apparently said he wouldn't do it.
Mr Fingerprint loses defamation case
December 16 2015
Picture: New Yorker Magazine
In July 2010, David Grann published an important investigative article in the New Yorker magazine highlighting the work of Peter Paul Biro (above), a restorer and art investigator who claimed to be able to authenticate pictures by finding fingerprints on them and matching them with the artist in question. The article claimed, essentially, that Biro was making things up, and found that he had an awkward history involving court cases and suspect paintings. In the most damaging passage, the New Yorker deduced that in one case - an alleged Jackson Pollock - Biro had taken real fingerprints from Pollock's studio, and then applied copies of them onto the painting in question. Very quickly, Biro's reputation collapsed.
Biro sued the magazine, and others, but this week finally lost his case. It's a shame it dragged on for so long.
Before the New Yorker article, Biro was involved in a lot of important art investigations. He was asked, for example, to analyse a fingerprint apparently found on the 'Bella Principessa' drawing attributed by Prof. Martin Kemp to Leonardo. Here's a passage from the New Yorker article which sets out how Biro apparently 'found' a finger-print on the Bella Principessa, with the aid of our old friend the 'multi-spectral camera' (the one invented by Pascal Cotte):
Even in a high-resolution photograph, the fingerprint was unreadable; Biro called it “complete visual confusion.” Many fingerprint examiners, he said, would have been stymied. Then, as if he were lining up a row of mug shots, he called up a series of photographs from a multispectral-imaging camera. Because the images had been made with different wavelengths of light, none of them looked exactly the same. In some photographs, the texture of the parchment—the background “noise,” as Biro put it—was pronounced. In others, the ridge patterns in the fingerprint were accentuated and the parchment all but faded away. From one photograph to the next, Biro said, “the smudge becomes clearer.” Still, it was not clear enough. His next step, he said, was “proprietary.” Using advanced image-processing software, he subtracted the background noise from each image, until only the clearest parts of the fingerprint remained. Finally, he said, clicking on another icon, “You get this.”
The smudge had been transformed into a more legible print: now, at least, there were the outlines of ridges and bumps. When I asked Biro if he worried that his method might be flawed, he said that during nearly two decades of fingerprint examinations he had “not made one mistake.” He added, “I take a long time and I don’t allow myself to be rushed.”
In other words, if you look at enough multi-spectral images in the right way, there's a danger you can end up seeing what you want to see. Regrettably, Biro's results made it into the book heralding the 'Bella Principessa' as a Leonardo, somewhat undermining the whole project. The book was published in March 2010. I remember reading the fingerprint chapter, and thinking it was all extremely speculative, and very far from anything like a convincing match. But it was greeted at the time as a great discovery, mainly because Biro was a 'forensic' investigator, and the fingerprint was found using whizzy new scientific imagery. I'm afraid the whole saga is just more evidence of the tendency (as discussed below with the recent Mona Lisa story) for us to believe any art historican pronouncements if they're made by scientists, or even pseudo-scientists.
I have have a fear that if it hadn't been for the New Yorker's excellent article, Biro's methodology and questionable results would have proceeded almost unchallenged. I remember discussing his techniques with people at the time the Bella Principessa book was launched, and being surprised by their conviction that such 'forensic' methods would become a mainstay of 'modern connoisseurship'. I can sort of understand why - for fingerprinting is infallible in the criminal justice world, and its translation into art authentication seemed difficult to challenge. Biro was being hired and consulted by people's whose opinions count in the art world, and the 'Turners' and 'Picassos' were all beginning to enter the system. So - thank goodness for David Grann.
Fakes, fakes everywhere (ctd.)
December 16 2015
Picture: the-saleroom.com
Here's a sad tale - an artist and lecturer was busted for selling fake prints by the likes of Leonard Beaumont, after experts noticed they still smelt of turpentine. Sheridan Tandy did, however, manage to sell some of his fakes at regional auction house Lawrences (and I think the image above was one of them). Tandy was found guilty, but spared jail. One of the reasons I don't buy 20th Century prints. More here.
Venice art sell-off?
December 16 2015
Picture: TAN
The Mayor of Venice is threatening to sell off 'non-local' art - like the above Klimt - to plug a budget gap. More here from Gareth Harris in The Art Newspaper. Let's hope he doesn't, if only because it'll be the thin end of a very dangerous wedge.
More angels at the National Gallery
December 16 2015
Video: National Gallery
You can see the other NG 'Angels' videos here.
Cleaning Millais
December 16 2015
Picture: Tate/BG
The Tate website tells us how they've cleaned Millais' The Northwest Passage. More here.
Art history, but not as we know it
December 14 2015
Picture: The Louvre
Poor ‘Mona Lisa’. We can't stop talking about her. Or speculating, theorising, investigating, filming, researching, and arguing about her. We seldom look at her. We're too busy trying to work out what we think ‘lies beneath’. But if we were to just stop and look at the picture, objectively and without pre-conceptions, we might then begin to accept that this mesmeric creation is simply a portrait of a Florentine lady who, as the old sources tell us, was born Lisa Gherardini, and Lisa del Giocondo - hence 'La Joconde'. True, it is one of the best portraits ever painted, by one of the greatest artist who ever lived, Leonardo da Vinci. But it’s still a portrait.
It is, of course, too late to just ‘look’ at the Mona Lisa. The picture has acquired too much history and legend. So all we can do is tackle each new theory as it comes along, and either bat it away as the latest in a long line of optimistic fantasies, or say, ‘well there may be something to this’.
I watched the latest theory, ‘The Secrets of the Mona Lisa’, on BBC2 last week. Regular readers might appreciate that, as an occasional BBC arts presenter myself, I’m loath to critique other BBC arts programmes (though this one was made by independent production company). But the programme said it would not just rewrite art history, but reveal ‘one of the stories of the century’. And that's a big claim. So - here goes.
As a piece of telly, I thought it was excellent. Enjoyable, well made, and, as ever with Andrew Graham-Dixon, well presented. It was ‘Grade A’ telly. As art history, however, it scored a ‘C minus’. A number of basic art historical errors were made early on, and these set the programme onto the pursuit of a flawed - but sensational - thesis.
Actually, the programme started well. We were presented with Prof. Martin Kemp of Oxford University, who might know more about Leonardo da Vinci than anyone else on the planet. He was asked some general questions about the Mona Lisa, but wasn't given a great opportunity to say anything in any detail. He merely set the scene - a Professor to tell us that we were indeed about to look into a Very Important Painting.
Then we headed to Italy, and on the way unveiled some of the key evidence behind the Mona Lisa. ‘Exhibit A’ as Andrew Graham-Dixon called it, was the art historian Georgio Vasari’s description of the painting. He selected a few sentences, but it’s worth quoting a larger excerpt here:
Leonardo undertook to paint for Francesco del Giocondo a portrait of his wife, Mona Lisa. He lingered over it four years and left it unfinished. It is at present in the possession of the French King Francis, at Fontainebleau. In this head anyone who wished to see how closely art could come to imitating nature could easily do so; since here were rendered all those minute niceties which can only be painted with the most delicate means; the eyes had that lustre and liquid effulgence which are always to be observed in real life, and around them were all those rosy and pearly tints together with the eyelashes which could not have been depicted except by the greatest subtlety. The eyebrows, likewise, were rendered in so nature a manner that one saw how the hairs issued from the flesh, thick in one place, scanty and scarce in another. The nose with its beautiful nostrils, rose and tender, seemed to be alive. The open mouth and its corners, united by the red of the lips and the flesh tints of the face, appeared to be not painted but real flesh. By intently observing the pit of the throat the spectator would be convinced that he could see the pulse beating in it, and could but feel that this was a picture to make even the boldest artist tremble and lose courage. Leonardo made use, also, of this device: Mona Lisa being very beautiful, he employed people to play and sing, and continually jested while working at the picture in order to keep the lady merry and thus banish the air of melancholy which is so often seen in painted portraits. In this picture of Leonardo’s there was a smile of such charm that it seemed more divine than human and was esteemed a miracle since it was nothing less than alive.
Vasari (1511-1574) was first writing in 1550; a second edition was published in 1568. As Andrew Graham-Dixon finished reading from Vasari, he wondered whether the history of the Mona Lisa was really as ‘open and shut’ as Vasari implied. And with that we were off.
First, however, everything seemed to reinforce Vasari’s basic points. Graham-Dixon told us about the extraordinary discovery in 2005 by Dr. Armin Schlechter at the University of Heidelberg, who found a marginal note written by the Florentine official Agostino Vespucci on a text about the Greek painter Apelles, which said:
"Apelles the painter. That is the way Leonardo da Vinci does it with all of his paintings, like, for example, with the countenance [or, ‘head’] of Lisa del Giocondo and that of the holy Anne, the mother of the Virgin. We will see how he is going to do it regarding the great council chamber, the thing which he has just come to terms about with the gonfaloniere. October 1503.
In other words, the Mona Lisa was Lisa del Giocondo, wife of Francesco del Giocondo, a Florentine Merchant. Her maiden name was Lisa Gherardini.
The programme then gave us an interview with the Italian art historian Giuseppe Pallanti, who has done much extraordinary research on the Mona Lisa. He showed us, for example, that Francesco del Giocondo’s house was very close to the house of Leonardo’s father, and, furthermore, that del Giocondo had been a client of Leonardo’s father. Pallanti has also found a record of Lisa’s death. So far, so conventional. Was it case closed?
No - for Andrew Graham-Dixon then set out the theory, held by many people (and for various reasons, as we’ll see below) that there were two versions of the Mona Lisa. Certain things in the evidence so far, said Graham-Dixon, ‘don’t add up’. These included, first, that the Mona Lisa in Paris has ‘no eyebrows’ - whereas Vasari describes eyebrows. Second, Vasari says the Mona Lisa was painted for Francesco del Giocondo - but he never owned the Mona Lisa now in the Louvre, for Leonardo kept that painting with him, and after his death it was sold to the French royal collection.
Finally, Graham-Dixon introduced us to a third key piece of evidence about the Mona Lisa, a diary entry written by Antonio de Beatis. He was acting as secretary for a Cardinal making a tour of France, and wrote of visiting Leonardo in October 1517, where he saw;
[...] three pictures, one of a certain Florentine lady, done from life, at the instance of the late Magnificent Giuliano de Medici [...].
This, said Graham-Dixon, was puzzling, for Vasari (in 1550) tells us the Mona Lisa was painted for her husband, Francesco del Giocondo - but Beatis in 1517 tells us, from Leonardo himself, that the picture was commissioned by Giuliano de Medici. All of these points added together convinced Graham-Dixon that we were dealing with two separate paintings.
And so we began our search for the missing picture. About which more in a moment - for here I want to unpack a little further the evidence cited so far to claim that there were two Mona Lisas. Because it seems to me that the programme has fundamentally misunderstood how we should be assessing the evidence mentioned above.
First, those eyebrows. Are we really sure there weren't any on the Louvre Mona Lisa? The picture is over 500 years old. Thinly painted eyebrows, made with a dark glaze as used by Leonardo (and thus of very soft pigments) could easily have been removed by some overzealous restorer. Such damage is the work of a moment, with the wrong cleaning solution, or too rough a sponge. Or, there could still be faint traces of eyebrow left - but we cannot clearly see them through the many layers of dirt and old varnish that now cover the painting. It is simply impossible to say in any objective way; ‘the Mona Lisa in the Louvre has no eyebrows, therefore Vasari must have been talking about a different painting’.
Furthermore, Vasari almost certainly did not see the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. The picture was in France, which he is not known to have visited. He must have been basing his description on either a copy or someone else’s account. In any case, we can already see how inaccurate his remarks are anyway when he talks about the Mona Lisa’s ‘open mouth’ - when her mouth is in fact closed. And we ought to note here that the lavish praise Vasari gives the painting was no doubt ammunition in his broader campaign to convince the world of the benefits of his preferred school of Italian art; that is, of ‘disegno’ (where the design or drawing of a painting was the most important part) as practiced in Florence and Rome by the likes of Leonardo and Michelangelo, as opposed to ‘colore’ (where the colour and application of paint was the best feature of a painting) as practiced in Venice by the likes of Titian and Tintoretto.
So I think that’s the eyebrows taken care of. Next we have the evidence of the different owners, or commissioners of the painting. We have Vasari saying in 1550 that Leonardo ‘undertook to paint for Francesco del Giocondo’ a portrait of his wife. But apparently in 1517 Leonardo tells us (via de Beatis) that it was painted for Giuliano de Medici. Does this discrepancy point to two different paintings? I don't think so.
Let us look at the evidence, and how reliable it is. First, we know Vasari hasn’t seen the painting, and that his descriptions of it are not entirely reliable. Can we believe beyond doubt Vasari when he says that Francesco del Giocondo commissioned the portrait from Leonardo? In fact, Vasari says only that Francesco commissioned the painting, not that he ever owned it. Secondly, de Beatis talks of a portrait ‘of a certain Florentine lady, done from life’. In other words, he does not say that it is Lisa del Giocondo. It could be another sitter, another portrait. The two other pictures de Beatis mentions seeing on that day are a St John the Baptist, and a Madonna and Child, which are now both in the Louvre, and because the Mona Lisa is now in the Louvre, most people assume that de Beatis’ ‘Florentine lady’ is the Mona Lisa. But it’s far from certain - that is, it is not certain enough for us to say ‘there must be another painting’. Indeed, de Beatis makes another note the next day in his diary which confuses matters, for he describes seeing a different painting at Leonardo’s residence;
there was also a picture in which a certain lady from Lombardy is painted in oil from life, quite beautiful, but in my opinion not as much as the lady Gulanda, the lady Isabella Gulanda’.
Was one of these pictures the ‘Florentine lady’ de Beatis saw? Or is he (as is more likely) in a bit of a muddle about names and pictures and who commissioned what? For how many of us really can recall with clarity all the details of conversations we've had the day before, on all topics? De Beatis, unfortunately, reveals himself to be a somewhat unreliable witness when he says that Leonardo was then in his seventies, when he was actually 65, and that a paralysis on the right side of Leonardo’s body meant he couldn’t reach such artistic heights again - when of course Leonardo was left-handed.
In other words, there really isn’t much in the way of reliable evidence, in the good old-fashioned historical sense, for us to say ‘there were two Mona Lisas’. Maybe both Francesco del Giocondo and Giuliano de Medici were involved in somehow pressing Leonardo (who was famously loath to take commissions at that time in Florence) to paint Lisa. The point is, we just don’t know.
Nevertheless, Andrew Graham-Dixon next went to Singapore to see contender number one for the ‘other’ Mona Lisa - the so-called ‘Isleworth Mona Lisa’ (above, it once belonged to a collector who lived in Isleworth). Regular readers will know my views about this picture, which is (perhaps rather too glibly) referred to in these parts as the ‘Isleworthless Mona Lisa’. It's most likely a later copy, and the fact that it's on canvas tells you a great deal. Leonardo preferred panel, and all his other portraits are on panel. A good summary of the efforts made by the proponents (and owners) of the Isleworth Mona Lisa comes to us courtesy of Luke Syson (see here), who curated the 2012 Leonardo exhibition at the National Gallery in London, and was commenting earlier this year on a lavish exhibition of the Isleworth picture in Singapore:
The story ignores art history, denies the principles of connoisseurship, and bypasses the experts. The whole thing is a little sad, especially for anyone visiting the display who is hoping to see a masterpiece by Leonardo.
Andrew Graham-Dixon, however, was impressed by the picture, when he saw it in a Singapore bank vault, saying:*
There’s a lot to be said for first impressions, and I did well not to jump backwards in shock. It’s too good in my opinion for any of the other school of Leonardo painters… I think it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that this is the picture that Francesco [del Giocondo] took, and then Leonardo goes off and paints another picture, and that’s the ‘Mona Lisa’ [in the Louvre].
To reinforce the Isleworth Mona Lisa’s claim to be an autograph Leonardo, we were shown an interview with ‘an eminent scientist in California’ Dr. John Asmus. Here, the programme really began to stray from the more acceptable realms of art history. Dr Asmus, who I am sure is indeed an eminent scientist, had, said Graham-Dixon:
[…] developed a new test to authenticate paintings by Rembrandt; it compares the subtle distribution of light and shadow measured as histograms to isolate an artist’s unique way of painting.
Sadly, attribution by computer simply doesn’t work. Nobody of any serious repute in the world of Rembrandt authentication is ever going to rely on Dr Asmus’ Rembrandt histograms. I've never heard them mentioned before. And it was wrong of the programme to suggest, to a general audience, that attribution by computer is even possible in the first place. Furthermore, we were told by Dr Asmus himself that his initial tests (which showed a result of ’99%’ certainty that the Isleworth picture was indeed painted by Leonardo) were made on the basis of a photograph of the Isleworth picture taken on an ‘instamatic camera’. We were even shown the bad photograph on the screen. It’s one thing to try and compare, with the aid of a computer, artistic techniques on the basis of good digital photos - but quite another to try it on the basis of a poor quality print. So when Dr Asmus concludes that his tests ‘demonstrate that the technique for blinding light and shade in each face [that is, the Isleworth Mona Lisa and the Louvre Mona Lisa] appears uncannily similar’, he is merely observing the characteristics of a copy.
Another piece of evidence we were shown in favour of the Isleworth painting - and as evidence that there were once two Mona Lisa’s - was a drawing by Raphael which is said to be a ‘a copy’ of the Mona Lisa (below). The drawing shows a woman with a similar pose of hands, the head in the same direction, a landscape background, and two columns on either side of her.
The Isleworth backers say this relates more closely to their picture than the Louvre one. But of course it does not. There are too many differences between Raphael’s drawing and both the Louvre picture and the Isleworth picture for us to say it is a direct ‘copy’ of either. The ledge behind the sitter is at a higher level. The dress, both across the chest and the sleeves, is different. The landscape is different. Perhaps Raphael, whose own portraits at this date follow similar poses, was making an interpretation of the Mona Lisa, if he saw it, or a recollection of it.
(Much is made of the issue of the columns in Mona Lisa-ology. Proponents of the Isleworth Mona Lisa point to the columns in their painting and say it is evidence that it is not a copy of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, because that has only fragments of column visible. We must here, however, come back to the issue of condition. We cannot be entirely certain (though some claim you can) that the Louvre picture has never been trimmed at the sides, perhaps even very early in its career. Or, perhaps an early copyist decided to add in slightly larger columns of their own accord, and copies were taken from that copy, and so on. Again, it’s one of those things we can’t be certain about.)
In the end, Graham-Dixon decided that the Isleworth Mona Lisa wasn’t by Leonardo. His logic was curious. He correctly noted that the usual ‘barage of scientific tests’ such as infra-red, x-ray, carbon dating etc. cannot tell us that Leonardo definitely painted the Isleworth picture, only that he might have done (and in fact only that any half decent artist from the period or later might have done). He then, however, looked at the location of the paint analysis samples taken by the 'Mona Lisa Foundation' (which acts as cheerleader for the Isleworth picture) and noticed that none were taken from the face itself. He wondered if a later restorer might have interfered with the head in the Isleworth picture, to somehow ‘bring it up’ to a level good enough to make it appear Leonardo-esque. ‘Until the face is tested, doubt remains’, he concludes, as if (again) an attribution to any artist can be achieved by something as straightforward as a scientific test.
So, with the Isleworth picture duly ruled out (which was, I admit, a relief**), we followed one final lead on the hunt for the ‘other’ Mona Lisa. Enter Pascal Cotte, the scientist and inventor of the Lumiere multi-spectral high definition camera. The camera allows us, he claimes, to ‘peel back the layers of a painting, like an onion’, and he can reconstruct the way the painting was made as a result. M. Cotte took a series of multi-spectral scans of the Louvre Mona Lisa in 2004, and has been ‘decoding’ his results ever since. This programme was the first time he unveiled them. A book was announced almost immediately after transmission.
Now, regular readers will know that AHN and Pascal Cotte have ‘previous’. His recent analysis of Leonardo’s ‘Lady with an Ermine’ showed, he said, that the picture was first not painted with an ermine, but with the hands in a different place. Then the ermine was added, and moved. Having looked at the published photos, I concluded that M. Cotte was leaping to conclusions. You can read about that here.
And I’m afraid to say that this time I think M. Cotte’s eyes are again deceiving him. The last part of the programme followed M. Cotte taking us through ever more extraordinary theories; that Mona Lisa was first painted with an elaborate head-dress, which Leonardo then scraped off; that she may have had a blanket on her lap (like the Queen Mum); that she once had a much larger head; that her face was moved 14 degrees; that her mouth was originally smaller; and so on. My favourite was the discovery of 11 hairpins (below), which were determined not to be random array of damages or blemishes (for example) by the fact that there were part of a special type of headdress, into which hair pins went in almost random manner.
The conclusion? That the Mona Lisa in the Louvre was actually two paintings all along. Leonardo had begun to paint Lisa del Giocondo, just like Vasari and Vespucci said. But then he painted over her, and put someone else’s head on instead. Graham-Dixon speculated that this may have been a lover of Giuliano de Medici, Pacifica Brandano. M. Cotte has made a digital recreation (below) of what the ‘original’ Mona Lisa looked like (answer; Gollum’s mum).
I’m sorry to say that all this is scarcely believable. I find it extraordinary that for decades now art historians have wrung their hands about the dangers of ‘connoisseurship’ - that is, the ability to look at the surface of a painting and tell who painted it - but now some are prepared to accept completely the much more dubious interpretation of images underneath a painting. We are now so reluctant to trust our own eyes, that we outsource these questions to scientists, and just because the results are presented by a man or woman in a white coat (or in this case a bow tie) we feel compelled to accept them. Science must be right.
But I’m afraid it isn’t - not always. And science in art history is in its infancy. We have no way of verifying M. Cotte’s tests. He’s the only one with the camera. And we haven't tested nearly enough paintings for us to say with confidence that we know how to interpret such images. In fact, it seems to me to be quite easy to question Cotte's results, just by using common sense and one’s own eyes. Where M. Cotte sees a larger head (below), artists and art historians will see a straightforward ‘penumbra’, which is the area of dead colour an artist lays down on the panel or canvas as a background colour, and onto which he begins to paint the head. Since we know that the Mona Lisa was painted over a number of years by Leonardo, it is likely that the background was added at a later stage than the initial life sittings, accounting for the differences M. Cotte’s cameras have identified around the head. Indeed, all M. Cotte's images prove is that Leonardo, like so many portraitists, fiddled with and changed his composition as he went along. This is a long way from saying; 'it's two different people'.
And don’t just take my word for it. Here is the view of Prof. Martin Kemp, who has worked extensively with M. Cotte in the past. With apologies, I here quote Prof. Kemp’s recent blog post extensively. He's much more diplomatic than I am:
Now that Pascal’s book is out in all its visual glory, and in the wake of the media interviews, edited as always to emphasise difference, it is worth laying out briefly how his researches look to me. It represents an extraordinary body of dedicated effort. He asked me for comments for his website - knowing that I disagreed with some of his interpretations. He is a good guy.
The LAM technique undoubtedly provides an important new weapon in the armoury of those interested in scientific examinations of layered paintings. The Holy Grail of scientific examination is to disclose the successive layers that lie below the present surface. Pascal’s mode of analysis, adapting mathematical techniques from signal processing, is revealing far more from the deeper layers than was previously possible, but it does not definitively isolate information from a single layer. We are also unclear as to what is happening as the different frequencies of light penetrate the paint layers to varying degrees and interact in diverse ways with the varied optical properties of the materials within the layers of the picture. This means that tricky acts of interpretation are necessary – even more difficult than is the case with x-rays and infrared. There is always the danger of seeing what we want to see. None of us are immune from this.
Looking at a selection of the LAM images as an art historian, I can see things that are wholly consistent with Leonardo’s creative methods, such as the indication of the use of cartoon and the restless manoeuvrings of contours. Some of what Pascal sees and reconstructs, such as the elaborate headdress, makes no sense to me in terms of design procedures or in terms of Renaissance paintings. I have difficulties with his detailed reconstructions of finished or semi-finished paintings under the surface of the present one. Leonardo’s processes were very fluid, with things coming and going, and with varied levels of finish across the picture. There is obviously a question of presentation here, and I would have resisted the temptation to translate the complex and often ambiguous images from the lower layers into such definite “pictures”.
My strong sense, at this early stage in our understanding of what we are looking at, is that we are witnessing something consistent with the documentation and with Leonardo’s ways of proceeding. I see the painting beginning as a direct portrait of Lisa – building on the innovations of Leonardo’s Milanese portraits – and becoming increasingly conceptualised as picture that combines the combines the tropes of Renaissance love poetry with a profound interest in the microcosm of the human body and the “body of the earth”. I see a steady evolution from portrait to “picture”. The change in her draperies from a Florentine style (as Pascal shows) into a more conceptualised array of veils etc., is part of this process of generalisation. All this is consistent with the idea I first expressed in my 1981 monograph, that Giuliano de’ Medici asked Leonardo to finish the beautiful and remarkable picture when they were both in Rome from 1513-16.
Pascal is opening up very important fields for analysis. We are at the beginning, Anyone is unwise to pronounce with certainty at this stage. I will have to make some sense of all this for the monograph of the Mona Lisa that I am currently writing with Giuseppe Pallanti.
All of which reinforces my earlier scepticism about Cotte's analysis of Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine. I note that so far, the Louvre has said rien.
Now, I am not trying to suggest here that Andrew Graham-Dixon's programme itself was flawed. I think it was an interesting and worthwhile investigation which genuinely added to our knowledge of the Mona Lisa. All it was missing was the occasional caveat. It’s a shame too that it didn't conclude with some form of independent assessment from Prof. Kemp. He was introduced at the beginning as an expert, so one might have expected to see him at the end. As we know, he would not have agreed with Pascal Cotte's and Andrew Graham-Dixon's conclusions. But I don't think the programme would have lost anything by leaving its dramatic conclusions open to doubt and interpretation.
I haven’t yet mentioned another picture that Graham-Dixon went to see as a possible ‘other’ Mona Lisa; a work in Russia. It seemed quite clearly to be a later copy, and eventually with the help of more science we were shown that it couldn’t have been by Leonardo, for the ground layer dates to the 17th Century. We were told that little was known about the picture, except that it had been in an American collection since the end of the 18th Century, that it was bought from them by a Russian owner, and that 'it had hardly been seen since'. In fact (as a reader alerted us via Twitter) this picture had been sold at auction at Christie's in New York in 2009 as a copy of the Mona Lisa, and sold for $122,500, against an estimate of $20k-$30k. I'm not for a minute saying that such sale history means a picture can't be an important discovery. But one might think that had a potential '2nd Mona Lisa' appeared under the noses of every Old Master dealer and auction specialist in the world, it would have made more than $122,500.
And a few days after the BBC programme went out, there was a fresh flurry of excitement about a ‘new Mona Lisa’. It was the same picture Graham-Dixon went to see in Russia (detail below). Only this time, it had the name of ‘leading da Vinci scholar’ Prof. Carlo Pedretti attached to it. And why is he so confident that the Russian picture has a chance of being by Leonardo? Because he too has developed a ‘new art analysis software’. So we're back to square one in the Mona Lisa game; anything goes, as long as you can get enough media hype.
Computer software, ‘magic cameras’, mis-interpreted images, optimistically assessed paint analysis, the views of well-intentioned scientists who don’t know their way around a painting; is this to be the new way of deciding (at least in the public arena) what is and what is not a Leonardo (or a Michelangelo or whatever else is next)? Not if I have anything to do with it. The public deserves better.
By the way, I'm not claiming to be uniquely right in any of the above. Please do let me know what you thought of the new claims, whether you agree or not.
* I've been asked to see a few pictures in 'bank vaults'. It's usually a sure sign of something being a dud.
** This is not intended to be an exhaustive critique of the Isleworth Mona Lisa - I might get round to that one day.
Update - thanks for all your comments. I'll put them up tomorrow (Weds).
Apologies (ctd.)
December 10 2015
Picture: IG
I'm rather snowed under at the moment with the day job. So, sorry about the lack of posts. I'm hoping to write something about the BBC Mona Lisa programme, which I watched yesterday. Great telly, not so great art history. Here's a fair summary I think in Apollo (and not just because it quotes me ranting away on Twitter). I'm also writing a summary of the Old Master sales for The Art Newspaper. Here's my highlight of the week.
As you can see above, I've been trying to train the Deputy Editor to help out in these moments of crisis. But she still can't spell 'connoisseurship', and until then I daren't leave her in charge.
Apologies...
December 8 2015
Sorry for the lack of action at the moment; it's Old Master week in London, and things are a little busy. Back soon!
Update - Wowee; a woeful evening sale at Christie's, totalling £6.45m. That's about half the pre-sale combined lower estimate. Many pictures buying in.
Before you all write off Old Masters, my hunch is that Christie's poor sale reflects the current state of affairs between the major auction houses. I may have to eat my words tomorrow night, but I expect Sotheby's to do much better.
Update II - the Day Sale at Christie's was much stronger. Good prices and sell rates. You can see the prices here. The total was over £3.5m. Of course, it won't stop the usual talk about 'the middle market' being dead. A fuller round up of the sales from me later in the week.
