England's National Gallery to Exhibit Fakes

The Financial Times is reporting that the National Gallery will exhibit this summer a group of fakes purchased by the museum. This includes the fake An Allegory by Sandro Botticelli (see image) purchased in the 1840's. The article is short, and sometimes you need to register for a FT article, so I have taken the liberty of posting the full article. Some of the exhibit will include not only miss attributions, but actual attempts to defraud and deceive. The National Gallery exhibit called Close Examination: Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries will run from June 30 – September 12. If in England over the summer it would be a good exhibit to attend.

The Financial Times reports:

The National Gallery’s biggest blunders – such as the supposed masterpiece by Sandro Botticelli, entitled An Allegory – are to be aired in public for the first time in a summer exhibition.

Modern technology has made it much easier to assess accurately the date of a painting – with occasionally embarrassing results. Among the works on display is the gallery’s “prize fake”, according to Ashok Roy, its director of scientific research: a painting acquired by the gallery in 1845 as an important work by Hans Holbein the younger.

The attribution was soon doubted, and the resulting scandal caused the resignation of Sir Charles Lock Eastlake, keeper of the National Gallery, in 1847.

Now fresh analysis of the painting’s wood panel support have proved the doubters correct. It shows that the work was executed in the 1560s – well after Holbein’s death in 1543. It was probably painted by the Flemish artist Michiel Coxcie.

Another mistake was made when the gallery bought what it thought were two paintings by Sandro Botticelli at an 1874 auction of works collected by Alexander Barker. One of them, Venus and Mars, is now regarded as one of the Renaissance painter’s masterpieces.

But the other, An Allegory, which fetched a higher price in the auction, was soon reassessed as an inferior work, probably painted by a follower. The two works will be hung side-by-side in the exhibition, which opens on June 30.

Mr Roy said that, although new techniques meant the gallery would no longer make serious dating errors, the question of authorship was a more subjective matter. “We will still rely on historical research and connoisseurship,” he said.

One of the exhibition’s rooms will focus on “deception and deceit”: deliberate attempts to fool experts. The gallery purchased a typical Renaissance-style portrait in 1923 believing it to be a 15th-century work. Scientific analysis carried out in the 1990s revealed the presence of pigments that were not available until the 19th century, however, and that the surface had been coated with a resin to simulate the appearance of age.

“It was heralded as a unique example of a painting by an unknown artist, and so it was – but it was an artist of the 20th century,” said Mr Roy. “It was created with the intent to deceive.”