241 Pizza

Thirdly, a work is subjected to scientific scrutiny: anything from dendrochronology (which will tell you when the tree used to make a panel was planted), through isotope analysis of pigments and DNA profiling of organic materials, to complex mathematical formulae analysing angles and proportions. And of course, there are plenty of ad-hoc tricks. One technique for assessing Pre-Columbian art, apparently, is taste: does it have the earthy tang of the soil?

And yet nothing is certain. You can think you know an artist, but the fluctuation in quality between the low and high tide of his work may be enormous, Shaw-Taylor explains. And technical evidence can be false: a damaged work may have been restored, for instance, and if the paint sample selected comes from the wrong area, the results will be wrong.

()

Rembrandt is a famous case in point. The oeuvre of a painter who trained hundreds of young artists in his studio includes an inordinate number of “maybes”. Depending on whom you talk to, he is the author of anything from 50 to 700 works.

Authentication has become an obsession to members of the Rembrandt Research Project, which, since its foundation in 1969, has published four enormous volumes of evidence (with more to come) and sent museum visitors swashing, like ship’s passengers in a storm, from one side of the gallery to another as one so-called Rembrandt is peremptorily discredited while another neglected “school of” picture is suddenly anointed the “real thing”.

It all seems pretty random. If you are a dealer, you probably have an optimistic eye, Shaw-Taylor suggests, because you have nothing to lose and a lot to gain. But if you are a scholar, you tend to be more pessimistic, because the sale of the painting probably won’t benefit you and you have a reputation to risk. Institutional muscle, he adds, is important. A powerful museum can usually field a player to defend its picture.

French law confers on a single person (typically the artist’s heir or dealer, and so not necessarily the most qualified individual) the droit moral, or right to authenticate. This can prove farcical, as Peter Carey suggested in Theft, a picaresque novel published in June, in which the duplicities of a brutally commercial art world are probed. Perhaps the only true way to assess a picture, suggests Rupert Featherstone, the senior paintings conservator for the Royal Collection, is to look at it again and again . . . . and again. After long months of cohabitation with Caravaggio, he has probably seen right through to his soul.

This is the soul that thousands of art lovers will seek. They want to stand in front of “the real thing”, to connect to the master. And yet, if it weren’t for some certificate, they could not tell the difference between the authentic and the fake. How much does it matter? “It’s a great painting and so, whether or not the attribution changes, it does not change the picture itself,” declared a spokesman for the National Gallery of Victoria in defence of its questionable Van Gogh.

Andy Warhol (the authentication of whose legacy is particularly complicated) challenged our clichéd approaches to authorship. “Why don’t you ask my assistant Gerard Malanga some questions,” he told interviewers. “He did a lot of my paintings.” He endorsed false works: “This is not by me. Andy Warhol,” he scrawled on the back. And if Pollock was an icon of anarchic energy, maybe a faux- Pollock brings us closer to his chaotic spirit than some bureaucratically documented canvas. Maybe sometimes the fake can be real.

BEAUTY IS TRUTH — BUT NOT ALWAYS

Authenticating artwork: click here to see Caravaggio, The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew

REAL TURNS OUT FAKE