While they were eating, Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying, ‘Take and eat; this is my body’.
Matthew, New Testament, The Evangelists, 26:6
For an art historian or an independent expert, attribution consists in linking the authorship of a given work of art to a specific artist. It is based, therefore, on a particular desire for truth or knowledge which is of a different nature to that involved in interpreting a work of art. This desire for truth is entirely guided by the requirements of the social magic of the work of art. The sanctification of the artist-creator and of his art established a link between the individual artist and his work which had no equivalent in the world of artisan craftsmanship. This intimate relationship between the creator and his creation quickly expanded to take in, on the one hand, the particular logic of the art market, which, like any other market, is based on a confidence in the exact nature and value of the products circulating within it, and, on the other hand, the logic of the museum as a public institution exhibiting clearly authenticated works of art. Attribution generally suggests being able to find in the work a number of reliable indicators which enable it to be linked to a given individual, and not just to an era, a school or an aesthetic trend.
Attributing and authenticating are such commonplace operations within the art world that the processes involved end up being no longer questioned. Yet there are many structural social conditions without which such practices would make little sense. The preoccupation with authenticating works of art and attributing them to specified creators is fundamentally linked to the establishment of art as a category falling within the domain of highly legitimate practices which are clearly distinct from practices associated with craftsmanship or industrial production. It is this elevation of artists and their creations to the realm of the sacred which generates the value of objects raised to the rank of works of art. Paintings or sculptures are not just ordinary objects but objects worthy of attention or of interest. By the same token, as soon as an unknown object is presented as a work of art, the desire to find out the true nature of this object is automatically raised. This leads in particular to certain procedures designed to verify its nature and its status. As we have seen, a comparison between holy relics and the works of great masters strikes the researcher’s mind almost naturally.
Firstly, in the same way that relics were associated with people who were themselves exceptional and distinguished from common mortals (Jesus, the saints), works of art are created by exceptional artists known and recognized to a greater or lesser extent. The magic of the relic, like that of the work of art, lies in this intimate link between someone judged to be exceptional – saint or artist – and certain specific objects. And it is precisely because, in the context of rivalry between churches1 like that between art lovers or museums, there is a strong temptation to claim the authenticity of the objects in their possession (and the absence of authenticity in the case of those possessed by others), that the process of authentication is crucial in preventing polemics or controversies:
Because of this emphasis on the work–person equation, entire scholarly disciplines devote themselves to establishing who actually painted which paintings and whether the paintings now exhibited under the name of X are actually X’s work, whether the scores we hear played were written by the person alleged to have written them, whether the words in a novel were written by the person whose name is on the title page or were plagiarized from someone else who deserves the credit or blame.2
If the methods used by art history were for a very long time, and in many ways still are, very much on an individual level, it is because this discipline has been responsible for rendering the practical service of legitimizing and authenticating works. By writing hagiographical biographies of artists regarded as important and by playing the game of attribution and disattribution of works by those same artists, a significant number of art historians have thus contributed more to creating artistic belief than they have to studying it.
Next, all forms of attributionism, even the most elementary, are in some way linked to the existence of markets of varying degrees of legality with the market for relics coming first followed by the establishment of the art market. A reliable attribution is all the more necessary given that there is the possibility of taking advantage both symbolically (attracting believers) and economically (selling a holy relic, or a canvas by a master painter, which are by definition ‘rare’, at a very high price). Although both relics and works of art are bought and sold, the market for relics remained largely illegal, whereas the art market developed along legal lines, encouraging all the actors of the art world to link economic value and aesthetic value. The greater the focus on those painters seen as ‘great painters’, the more valuable their works. Evidently this has consequences on the way each new object claiming the status of an autograph work is viewed. Given the price that can be obtained from this advantageous attachment of a canvas to a great name in painting, the task of authentication becomes an essential process. And it goes without saying that the economic market heavily influences any decisions around attribution or disattribution.
Finally, from relics to works of art, what also changed was the nature of the tests used to authenticate objects, to establish whether they are indeed from the era they purport to be from and to attribute them to saints or particular artists. The development of a scientific approach and the techniques associated with it, mean that the work of art has benefited from a much more informed, clearly documented and precise examination. With history of art becoming an academic discipline, and also with the advent of laboratories capable of scientifically analysing works of art, revealing what was not visible to the naked eye, and penetrating the previously hidden secrets of the materials (canvas and pigments), the authentication of a work has gradually become a highly scientific matter.
When an expert or an art historian attributes a work today, they do so against the background of a number of different histories of varying duration including, notably, the history of the establishment of art as a separate and sacred domain, that of the creation of an art market and of the institution of the museum and that of an attribution process becoming scientifically ever more sophisticated. By concentrating attention too closely on present practices, we can easily fail to see the full details of practices so commonplace they scarcely attract attention.
We are no longer aware, for example, that the process of classifying and hierarchizing works of art, of rejecting them when they fail to meet the criteria for authentication, is a way of subjecting objects to processes which are fundamentally associated with people. Social (hierarchized) relationships associated with people are projected onto objects. Given that art is the product of a separation between the sacred and the profane and, by the same token, is inherently part of relations of domination, any process which sanctifies works of art and imposes an internal hierarchy on the art world in fact echoes the classifications and hierarchies imposed on people. Not only does the separation of objects into sacred and profane categories draw its origins from the relationships established within society (dominators and dominated), but classifying, excluding and hierarchizing objects is an indirect way of classifying, excluding and hierarchizing people (those who are associated with these different categories of objects).
To the category of objects must be added that of the dead. For the process of associating a painting with the name of a great master, like that of transforming a dead painter into a ‘genius’ or a ‘great master’ of painting, deflects judgements which usually apply to the living, towards objects or the dead. Conflicts around the classification and position in the hierarchy of both living and dead end up separating the victors (the major painters) from the vanquished (the minor painters) as well as determining the position occupied by each of the participants or ex-participants in the hierarchy of the victors. Those vanquished in the past can even be re-evaluated as victors by subsequent generations. These conflicts serve, therefore, to establish the degree of legitimacy or of sacredness and of recognition. Such legitimacy is all the stronger for the individuals concerned in that the position occupied or the recognition received are rare and distinctive, with the absolute ideal being the highly legitimate class with a single member.3 It is therefore important to rediscover the processes of legitimization and delegitimization, of sanctification and desanctification which apply to the living, behind all the judgements, positive as well as negative, which are brought to bear on both the dead and on objects.
This displacement of the processes involved in classifying and hierarchizing makes perfect sense as long as we remember that, in the art world,4 individuals classify and hierarchize themselves, notably by appropriating, physically and/or symbolically, objects which have already been classified and hierarchized:
In 1548, when drawing up his will, Vendramin [who owned Giorgione’s The Tempest] confided the extent to which his collection of paintings brought him ‘a little repose and peace of mind in the midst of the fatigues of the family business affairs’; he loved them ‘for their excellence and their rarity’. Rarity is the password for any urge to collect, an opportune reminder of this obstinate fact that what we call art in Western history is, essentially, one of the faces of social domination.5
Knowing that the living seek to appropriate the objects (masterpieces) in question by buying them or by associating themselves in one way or another with them, it could be said that objects and the dead are fundamentally linked to hierarchies inherited from both past and present, and that, in this way, they are part of the domination, the legitimacy and the development of relative powers in the actual world of the living.
Being associated with sacred objects, regarded as important, is a way of self-aggrandisement and, essentially, of feeling justified in living as we live. Physically owning or symbolically mastering (through knowledge) sacred objects is a means of becoming sacred oneself and of emerging from the state of insignificance which is the lot of all those who have no form of relationship with the collectively organized sacred centres. Food for the soul, justification of existence, sense of social importance – all attempts to approach the sacred are strategies of distancing oneself from the insignificance and the absurdity of all mortal existence.6
We have to know the historical conditions which motivate our conceptualization.
M. Foucault, ‘The subject and the power’, in H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics, Abingdon: Routledge, 1982, p. 209
The goal of science is to rigorously determine the truth of things, on the basis of objective facts. But we might well question which particular truth it is – politically, economically, religiously, culturally, legally, etc. – required to address. Those who, on the basis of a naïve relativism, challenge the reality of a scientific truth by putting religious, political, cultural and scientific discourses on the same level and who, speaking of ‘religious truths’ in the same register as ‘scientific truths’, are in fact committing a double error. On the one hand, they are forgetting that scientific truth is founded on demanding procedures, theoretical as well as empirical (experiments, observations, enquiries, demonstrations, reasoning), to which the other forms of discourse are not subject, thus authorizing the term ‘truth’ to be confined to the most strictly controlled scientific procedures; but, on the other hand, they end up obscuring the fact that the production of scientific truths can be fundamentally orientated by demands and even beliefs outside the realm of science. Through science (i.e. with the aid of scientific methods), we seek to obtain knowledge which is indisputably more accurate, more reliable and better controlled than any other form of knowledge, but where exactly do we direct our scientific research? And why do we seek there rather than elsewhere? That is the important question.
A powerful defender of science, Bertrand Russell drew a distinction between religion and science by claiming that scientific beliefs were not of the same order as religious beliefs: ‘Belief in science is different from belief in religion. Scientific beliefs are not held dogmatically. The objects of belief, as well as the underlying attitudes, are quite different. We may have either a scientific attitude or a religious attitude towards the same object.’7 But while we may agree with the philosopher about the nature of proposals formulated with the help of scientific methods (with rigour, a concern for logic and the obsession with the application of empirical proof and also with the certainty that the truth thus arrived at will necessarily be one day challenged), it is also a question of being similarly lucid about the unexamined beliefs that underlie the orientations of research.
If there was only one single, unique ‘Truth’ to uncover, such a question would not need to be asked. If it were a case only of seeking ‘THE Truth’, there would be no particular problem to resolve beyond the issue of knowing if such research were possible, if it were desirable and if we were prepared to devote all our efforts to attaining or approaching this truth. But there are numerous truths (and, in a sense, they are even infinite) and the time devoted to the establishment of these truths is limited. Consequently, it is a matter of knowing in which domain, in which direction and upon which aspects of the world this search for truths should be concentrated. And it is for this reason that social issues, beliefs, ideologies, feelings about what is important and what is not, are at the heart of the problem in the search for truths. As researchers are faced with an infinite number of directions of possible research, the question of knowing why they choose one route rather than another, why they throw light on this aspect of the world rather than that one, is far from being a secondary question. Science could be put to the service of other pressing needs and of other important questions. It would always be seeking to announce other truths about the world.
It is therefore precisely because there is a multitude of possible ‘scientific truths’ that the question of the orientation or the framework structuring the quest for truth is critical.8 Like someone searching for a key they have lost in the street but only looking under the lit-up street-light, the scholar is sometimes devoid of all reflexivity as to the wisdom of attempting to answer this or that type of question or of finding solutions to this or that kind of problem. Through a sort of implicit policy of the truth, injunctions or solicitations whether cultural, political or religious, often end up focusing, not so much on the approach adopted, which is a matter for criteria internal to science, as on the objects studied or the questions tackled. For, when scholars do their work properly, with the methods, rigour and care required, they do indeed succeed in producing what we might call ‘truth’ about the world. But what purpose does this truth actually serve? To what cultural belief is it objectively attached? What unquestioned background context guides the search for this truth?
A complete scholar should not only seek the truth of certain facts, but should also find himself questioning the ‘reasons’ or the ‘conditions’ which drive him to seek in a particular direction. He should not fail to question the frameworks of beliefs within the limits of which the quest for truth can be conducted. This kind of reflexivity does not imply any challenging to the scientific approach or any relativization of well-conducted scientific research, but is based instead on an awareness of the unquestioned facts and the foundations of belief against the background of which scholars, usually without even realizing it, situate their research. Scientific practice would have no interest whatsoever if, as well as obliging researchers to respect the strict rules of the scientific game, it did not encourage them to reflect on the reasons which make them orientate their research in one direction rather than another.
A similar interrogation on the subject of art makes it clear that nobody would go to the lengths of resorting to chemical, radiographic or historical investigations in order to establish a link between an object (e.g. the painting) and a person (e.g., the painter), if they did not believe in the importance of the unique nature of works of art, if originality did not represent a cardinal value in our attitudes to cultural matters and if art works associated with the great names of painting had not, for many centuries already, been associated with enormous national (cultural), economic and aesthetic interests. By engaging in a sort of archaeological research, of a regressive nature, which reveals the impact of the past on the present, the sociologist can show how the quest for scientific truths becomes part of the frameworks of encompassing beliefs. Why, indeed, do scholars put their energies into trying to link paintings, sculptures, drawings, etc., to certain exceptional individuals (Rembrandt, Raphael, Poussin, Vermeer, etc.)? In itself, their research is perfectly serious and robust, but it belongs to a type of investigation which fundamentally depends on beliefs and issues (notably cultural and economic ones) belonging outside the realm of science. If the method used to seek the truth is perfectly rational, the decision to apply it in this or that instance, in response to this or that question, to bring a solution to this or that problem, is not in itself either rational or truly scientific.
Former director of the department of paintings at the Louvre, Vincent Pomarède, in an interview which took place in June 2006, declared: ‘Our job is to seek out the truth and to identify in a very precise manner, the attribution of the works for which we are responsible.’9 But the ‘truth’ in question is sought in an extremely narrow channel and is merely the tip of an iceberg most of which, made up of cultural beliefs, is submerged. Beliefs and the quest for truth are not incompatible, but link together and influence each other: the energy and the resources of science are deployed to verify a factual point which only makes sense in relation to beliefs left unquestioned. Art historians and museum curators, like scientists working in the laboratories analysing art works, are seekers of truth, unconsciously guided by systems of cultural beliefs. The use of science and technology in the process of attributing works of art or in verifying their ‘authenticity’ seems, at first glance, to constitute a flagrant proof of the secularization of the world, of its rationalization and the growing role of science. Science would invade all the domains of knowledge and power and would make us abandon the terrain of a magic, or at least pre-rational, past. Could the same not be said when it comes to the authentication of miracles by the ecclesiastical institution? The church relies on science to eliminate all but the inexplicable cases in order to qualify these as miracles. Science can no longer be ignored by anyone and today even the Church is obliged to rely on it before making a decision on the matter. All of that seems perfectly clear. And yet, nothing is more deceptive than these self-evident facts which we cannot escape and which prevent us from seeing the magical foundations of the use of science, rendering us blind to and ignorant of the foundations of belief on which such measures are based.
In order to gain clearer insight, we need to begin by asking where science should cast its penetrating gaze and which reality it should seize upon in order to establish the truth of a fact, state or situation: ‘No one should deny […] that knowledge is often produced collaboratively, by members of a social group, or that contingent facts about that group may explain why it shows an interest in certain questions over others.’10 This type of reflection finds its source in Weber, for whom: ‘The analysis of scientific problems is regularly motivated by “practical” questions’.11
The historical narrative of expertise and attribution is often underpinned by a sort of ‘history of the truth’, whereas the central question to be raised should focus on finding out why one type of truth is produced rather than another.12 Why does knowledge (whether history, physics or chemistry), contribute to the process of resolving questions of authenticity for a particular canvas, sculpture or text? Why does it play the role it is accorded in questions over the attribution of a particular canvas, sculpture or text to a particular artist or writer? As the specialists in the field sometimes significantly put it: ‘Science in the service of art’.13 The positivist researcher would say that this association between a creation and a creator is an integral part of historical truth and that the role of scholars is to uncover this truth. Of course. But can we go further by asking what kind of truth we are dealing with and what purpose finding it would serve? To what tacit beliefs, what practical functions, what economic interests and structures of legitimacy do the scholars who produce this kind of truth subscribe?
When it comes to the definition of a ‘genuine painting’, a naively realistic view would be inclined to say that it simply refers to a painting made by hand of the painter in question. But a more constructivist, and sociologically more realistic, view would say that an authentic painting is a painting recognized as such by those who combine authority and appropriate skills in the subject of art (and more particularly on the work of the painter in question). The authentic painting is therefore indissociably linked to the cohort of experts who are expected to reach a verdict on the subject of authenticity. All of that may seem obvious, yet in fact nothing is really obvious if we consider the potential scope for divergences of view over the gap between the true nature of the object and the way it is classified when the various experts fail to agree. Which experts are telling the truth? Should we trust those who are very highly skilled even if they hold lowly positions within their institutions? Or should we rather believe experts with important positions in their institutions but with skills a little less suited to the assessment of the painting in question, etc.? Even when officially appointed by the courts, what value should be attributed to the judgement of experts who are legally recognized but have no kind of credibility within the art history community? In the reality of judgements, authority and skill are mixed together in such a complex way that it is extremely difficult to uncover the facts ‘all other things being equal’. But, whatever the extra-aesthetic or extra-scientific interests they may have in defending the authenticity of a work, the most highly placed authorities of the most important national museums or the most prestigious academic institutions will very often have the last word where controversy exists. As the jurist and journalist François Duret-Robert observes: ‘We come up against the establishment. The Louvre is never wrong and the appeal court is never wrong. […] Where art is concerned, pictures will always have their detractors. BUT, when the Louvre says something, everyone agrees that the Louvre is right.’14
Art historians and museum curators15 who publish articles about works of art, catalogue them or take part in organizing major public exhibitions, researchers, technicians from private or public analysis laboratories, gallery owners and art dealers who are scouring the art market for works sometimes regarded as daubs which they can then transform into master-pieces, auctioneers and experts from salerooms who decide to put works up for sale under a range of descriptions (autograph painting, ‘attributed to’, ‘school of …’, ‘pupil of …’, ‘in the style of …’, ‘from the studio of …’, ‘contemporary copy’, ‘forgery’, ‘later copy’, etc.,), experts appointed by the courts in the event of litigation, museum curators who acquire paintings and play a role in establishing and in particular in stabilizing, their legitimacy, art critics, cultural journalists and journalists specializing in art who write about works of art: all these actors from within the art world claim, explicitly or implicitly, to be telling the truth about the works in circulation whose status is sometimes extremely uncertain.16
As such, they are all, in one way or another, experts, talking about works with varying degrees of authority depending on the degree of legitimacy of the institution they are associated with, on the more or less elevated position they hold and on abilities and skills they are judged to have in terms of the objects they are dealing with.17 But even before they provide historical or aesthetic commentaries on works (and their creators), it is first and foremost their existence as works which are worthy of being written about and admired that experts are responsible for establishing, confirming and recording. Are they dealing with works of art, and even masterpieces, or merely ‘simple copies’, or perhaps extremely illegitimate forgeries? What is at stake in such cases, is nothing less than the right of that object to enter the sacred order.
Honorary director of the Louvre, Michel Laclotte, refers to the ‘figure of the connoisseur as demiurge’18 as embodied by the great world art expert Bernard Berenson (1865–1959). The expression is by no means exaggerated since the leading experts (art historians, connoisseurs or museum curators), who are in possession of both skills recognized by everyone and very important positions within prestigious institutions, have the power to make or break a picture’s reputation. The power to authenticate and to attribute paintings is nothing less than the power to connect an object to the name of a prestigious artist or to sever that link, with all the economic consequences that such an act entails. Certainly, the painting was created by the artist, who is the first demiurge. But, with the passage of time, the link between the artist and the painting becomes less obvious and can only be established by the great experts in question. The painting may have been created by Rembrandt or Raphael, but it is almost created a second time by the action of authentication and attribution. The actors of the art world themselves talk about the ‘inventors’ of paintings with reference to major attributors, who have rescued certain canvases from anonymity and the profane world, and frequently resort to the metaphor of the divine to refer to the power held by art historians.19 This metaphor is by no means innocuous and the researcher needs to take it extremely seriously. It is linked, as we have seen, to the long history of the sanctification of artists.
On the subject of the major experts, Duret-Robert refers to ‘the mandarins of painting’ and defines the mandarin by saying that ‘anyone with the power to baptise a painting that has turned up out of the blue as a Vermeer, a Velasquez or a Rembrandt, with some chance of being believed by serious people can be, quite rightly, considered a mandarin’.20 The metaphor of baptism is pertinent in that it is the archetypal model of the performative act. The power to name and to describe which can be exercised by those who are in a position to manipulate shared beliefs by making people believe in the reality of their verdict. Yet it is a fragile power, too, which only lasts as long as the balance of forces remains the same. It needs only the authoritative spokesperson to change for the status of paintings to be affected.
In this way, after the French Revolution, artists belonging to academies of painting saw their ability to pronounce the truth about canvases snatched from them by the museums in favour of connoisseurs and art dealers who had developed more sophisticated and reliable technical skills. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, controversies saw them clashing with experts who were not themselves artists (notably with art dealers) who claimed the victory of expertise by denouncing all errors of attribution previously made.21 In the same way, noble families had for a long time exercised the power to qualify works of art and to attest their origins. But this power was to be challenged by cultural institutions no longer satisfied by the good reputation of the families who lent works for exhibitions. For example, in 1867, the administrators of the British Institution decided they would no longer accept the attributions made by the owners of art works and were threatened as a result with legal proceedings by Lord Charlemont who cited the fact that these were paintings that had been in his family for almost a century.22 And when in 1894 the New Gallery of London organized an exhibition of Venetian art, the organizers found themselves being criticized in no uncertain terms by Bernard Berenson on the grounds that ‘the attributions are, for the most part, unreliable’. The great art historian pointed out the irresponsibility of members of the organizing committee who had accepted the attributions made by owners of the works without serious verification.23 Even if the great experts often came from the same social backgrounds, the development of a professional expertise meant that they often ended up contesting social authority on the grounds of their professional skills.
But, whatever their authority and skills, the experts’ verdicts are essentially derived from their position and the continued exercise of their profession:
The only good mandarin is a living one. For after the mandarin disappears, his successor rushes to refute the opinions of his predecessor – who is no longer there to defend himself. Berenson predicted this when he said to Mr Maurice Rheims: ‘I will scarcely have closed my eyes when the young sharks who populate American universities and European museums will cast doubts on most of my opinions!’ Berenson was quite right. Since his death, many of his attributions have been challenged.24
If the attribution of a painting does not depend simply on its intrinsic properties, but is also affected by the shifts in the balance of power between experts, it is easy to understand why the constructivist vision, which takes account of the social conditions favouring these acts of social magic, is in the end more realistic than the naively realistic vision which is based on the simple principle that a picture has indeed been genuinely created by a given artist.
Each performative act by which an expert succeeds in moving an object from the realm of the profane to that of the sacred has, of course, consequences on the biography of this object and on the behaviour of all those who end up interacting with it and who need to show all the respect, the care and attention owed to an important object. But it is first and foremost the indication of a dividing line between the sacred and the profane. This line separating what will never be sacred from what is invited to exist within the sacred order will be confirmed and reaffirmed with each new act of attribution or authentication. The magical transition from a simple picture (not yet authenticated) to a painting which is duly authenticated is often what strikes the observer. But we end up forgetting that the difference is most pronounced between the (limited) total number of objects which are likely to be subjected to any such test of authenticity and the vast ocean made up of all those who are doomed to remain ordinary objects forever. The pictorial order therefore takes us from autograph paintings by masters which simultaneously accrue very high aesthetic and economic value, to potential ‘replicas’ of the original painting painted by the artist himself, to autograph paintings by more minor painters of lesser aesthetic or economic value, to simple contemporary copies which have less aesthetic value but still retain a certain economic value as historical objects, to more recent copies and to forgeries which have scarcely any aesthetic value but can, when their history is known, have a certain historical value and a certain economic value, and, finally, to ordinary objects which are not allowed into the domain of art and which are some-times reduced to their simple market value, indeed to their simple functional value. There are therefore two major lines of separation here: (1) the line separating the objects which are candidates and have succeeded in the authentication tests (autograph paintings) from those that have been put through the tests and have failed (minor paintings, copies, forgeries); (2) the line separating the objects which are potential candidates (works of art) from the objects which are not potential candidates (ordinary objects).
Status of objects: the case of painting
| OBJECTS – CANDIDATES FOR THE AUTHENTICATION TESTS |
| Autograph paintings by recognized masters Autograph paintings by more minor painters |
| Contemporary copies Later copies Fakes |
| OBJECTS – NOT CANDIDATES FOR THE AUTHENTICATION TESTS |
| All ordinary objects |
When it comes to deciding in the matter of the attribution and authenticity of a work, the expert inevitably has a more ‘realistic’ and prescriptive relationship with the object in question than do the scholars who are less dependent on the social demands made by the art markets and the museums. Whereas the scholar can criticize and doubt his own knowledge to an extreme degree, the expert is restricted by the practical limits imposed on him by the institutions. As a result, it is rare for any expert, even those art historians who are most detached from the art market, to radically question the very notion of authentication or attribution, even though such processes are very much linked to the necessity to generate social values (economic and museum-related) which could be considered to belong outside the realm of any rigorously independent scientific undertaking.
Experts are therefore supposed to tell the ‘truth’ about the status of works and their role is one of doing things with the words they use. By expressing certainty or by allowing a shadow of doubt to creep in, by acting as though the authenticity or the attribution were obvious or by explicitly disputing it, experts participate in establishing the status of objects which, at the end of the process, enter the paradise of sacred objects, are cast into the hell of secondary works, copies or forgeries, or are confined for a long time in the purgatory of works whose status is very uncertain. What complicates matters further still are the permanent conflicts over the definition of the verity of works of art. Within their own domain, experts’ opinions frequently diverge. Each new pronouncement or each publication either reinforces a conviction or undoes it and, when the best known and most powerful experts clash, serious controversies can ensue with unpredictable outcomes.
The objective of those seeking to have the status of a work recognized is of course to bring any controversy to an end, to close the file and ensure it is never re-opened. Today, for example, no one would dispute the authenticity of the Mona Lisa and of the attribution of this canvas to Leonardo da Vinci. But not all paintings have achieved such universal recognition. Many of them have been, and are still, disputed.25
The catalogue raisonné sets out to establish the exhaustive list of the works of a painter or sculptor by indicating, in each instance, where the works are, their owners, and any relevant historical information. In the grand tradition inaugurated by Vasari, each entry generally ends with a summary of what is known about the artist, his life and his work. But the catalogue raisonné is also, and above all, the place where attribution or de-attribution is confirmed. In its pages, the author states whether a particular work is a copy or an autograph work, thereby taking sides in favour or against certain controversial attributions. Sometimes no mention at all is made of certain canvases which are, consequently, disqualified by their absence. And, given the symbolic and economic consequences of such attributions, it is not difficult to measure the significance of inclusions or omissions, and of inclusions under one or another heading. Performative acts par excellence, public occasions by means of which art historians bring their scientific credibility into play26 and through which they also associate their own names with the great names in art and put themselves forward as the central reference point for the actors of the art market, these catalogues reinforce or transform the reality of things by pronouncing judgements, usually in the form of constative utterances.
Haskell cites an anonymous letter sent on 1 January 1795 to the Republican Society of Arts in which the author deplores the fact that ‘the public is admiring ill-shaped, gilded vases on show in the museum instead of “the pure forms of the antique”’. ‘Don’t remove them, he insists: keep anything that illustrates the history of art, however ridiculous – but at least publish a catalogue raisonné to tell people what to admire. In painting, rather than in the applied arts, a catalogue raisonné of what people should admire began to appear not very long afterwards.’27 The catalogue raisonné is therefore the official text which separates the wheat from the chaff and which tells the public ‘what to admire’. Admiring the wrong thing would be the ultimate error: it would be akin to admiring the wrong political authorities.
Duret-Robert refers to the ‘tyranny of cataloguers’,28 stressing, in a polemical tone, the central role and the power of those who choose what to include, or exclude in a catalogue. For cataloguers do indeed wield the power of life or death for works of art. They have, in the manner of a god, the power to confer existence to or relegate to insignificance the objects to which they refer. They bring them into existence by mentioning them or they cast them into oblivion by not mentioning them. They can also place them in a state of purgatory, of indefinite waiting, which casts the shadow of doubt on works and on their value. Auctioneers, experts, gallery owners continuously rely on these indications of legitimacy, illegitimacy or uncertainty in referring to the works that they value and sell. And it is to the authors of these catalogues raisonnés that they turn sometimes when new works appear on the market: ‘Dealers, experts, auctioneers, will always submit newcomers to the authors concerned: in order to guarantee that they will figure in some future volume. They could specify, for example, according to the hallowed phrase, that the said paintings “will be included in the supplement to the catalogue raisonné of the works painted by X, currently being prepared by Y”.’29
But the power of making something exist is never perfect and the ‘tyranny’ is always a collective one, since no author of a catalogue raisonné has ever had a monopoly in terms of attribution. Many different catalogues raisonnés can exist and contradict each other and it is the relative legitimacy of the various authors which can tip the balance in one direction or another. In all cases, as soon as there is competition and contradiction between catalogues, doubt can set in. However, in the case of artists elevated to the pinnacle of artistic glory (as in the case of Poussin), the number of art historians in a position to catalogue can sometimes be so limited and the definitive references so restricted, given the differences in legitimacy between the various authors that, in reality, the catalogue of certain experts may be, at least temporarily, in the position of a near monopoly.30
The exhibition has become, at least since the seventeenth century in Rome, a ritual form of bringing together works of art and the public.31 It was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, that exhibitions in honour of old masters started to appear.32 When a major Poussin exhibition was organized in the 1930s and then again in the 1990s, those organizing the exhibitions were, without necessarily realizing it, subscribing to a long history.
The exhibition has often been an instrument of national or local politics. No doubt in the light of his personal mistrust of exhibitions and of the risks entailed in constantly moving paintings, Haskell emphasized all the (extra-aesthetic) reasons which lay behind the increase in exhibitions from the end of the nineteenth century onwards. Amongst these, he cites the nationalism of those whose intention is to propagate ‘national glory’ and promote the ‘French spirit’ (or, for that matter, the Italian or Dutch spirit) and the national politics of artistic prestige. ‘The remarkable exhibitions that sprung up throughout Europe at the turn of the century tended to be dedicated to groups of artists, partly because such shows could be far more effective than ones devoted to a single Old Master at propagating those rival nationalisms that constituted the principal ideological battle ground in the years preceding the First World War.’33 An exhibition attracts attention to a museum, a town and, beyond that, a country, and museum directors and municipal or national authorities work together, or in competition, to defend their symbolic interests.
The exhibition brings together paintings coming sometimes from all over the world and which in normal circumstances can only be seen separately. As such, the exhibition was in the first place a source of knowledge for art historians who were thereby able to see under one roof paintings from different periods of the artist’s life, to revise the chronology of a series of paintings and to challenge certain attributions which, in the light of an immediate visual comparison, could be subject to doubt.
But, like all public undertakings, the exhibition has a legitimizing effect on the artists it features. In certain cases, where artists were on the way to being consecrated by history, it could increase both the value (both aesthetic and economic34) and the interest generated by their work. In this sense, an exhibition is never just a simple showcase, an opportunity to make visible a legitimacy moreover already acquired. It is also a springboard, a performative act, which as such creates value. Haskell notes, for example, that the British Institute’s Joshua Reynolds exhibition in 1813 attracted large crowds of people and resulted in a noticeable rise in prices for the artist’s work.35 In 1960, when the Louvre organized an exhibition entirely dedicated to Poussin, Germain Bazin, at the time director of the museum, was fully aware of the performative nature of the exhibition: ‘The work of a master is magnified by having so many examples of his excellence under one roof.’36
The fact that the summit or the pantheon of sanctified artists from the past continues to impose itself throughout time with an impression of eternity and inevitability often prevents us being aware of the constant work involved in bringing to prominence a new set of artists, that is to say, in the rediscovery or resurrection of artists from the past who have been more or less forgotten. For the artists of the past, it is art historians who play the role of discoverers, and part of their legitimacy lies in the fact that they have successfully participated in the re-evaluation of unknown or less esteemed painters.37 So, in the case of Poussin, the precise focus of my study here, the main art historians – Sir Anthony Blunt, Denis Mahon, Jacques Thuillier and Pierre Rosenberg – are all historians who have successfully promoted seventeenth-century painting, long considered as less interesting and less prestigious than classical or Renaissance art.38
Take, for example, the role of art historians in the case of Georges de La Tour (1593–1652). The exhibition on ‘Realist Painters’, organized by the Orangerie in Paris in 1934, thus largely contributed to the fame of this painter, until then known only by a handful of seven or eight specialists throughout the world.39 Thuillier emphasizes the role of art historians in the resurgence of interest in La Tour:
La Tour is the triumph of the History of Art, and its justification. For La Tour would not exist without the History of Art. No sooner dead, the man considered a ‘famous painter’ slipped into oblivion for almost three centuries. Only the painstaking work of art historians enabled this miracle to happen: to restore, from a mere name, one of the greatest painters of the seventeenth century.40
Rosenberg makes a similar point: ‘Art historians have a responsibility towards the painters of the past. It is they, in the end, who allow them to survive. Georges de La Tour, whom we are discussing here, was completely unknown. His paintings existed of course, but with eccentric attributions.’41
Like the catalogue raisonné, the exhibition can also be an opportunity to publicize canvases as yet unattributed or disputed, which it is hoped might be promoted to autograph status. To be or not to be exhibited, that is, still, the question. Exhibiting (or putting pressure with a view to exhibiting) a work of indeterminate status is a strategy of publicity and legitimization which tends to allow the work in question to pass over to the ranks of autograph works, some of which may be potential masterpieces. For example, after the Joshua Reynolds exhibition in 1813, the administrators of the British Institute decided to mount an exhibition bringing together various British artists, among them Hogarth, Gainsborough, Wilson and Zoffany. Now, as Haskell points out, the question of the attribution of canvases arose when it was discovered that, ‘despite the precautions that had been taken, a number of the Wilsons already hanging on the walls were not originals but had been accepted after pressure from collectors and dealers keen to augment their value by letting them be seen in such illustrious company’.42
Art history is full of cases of paintings initially without value which suddenly acquire it under the scrutiny of experts ready to give them a prestigious authorship, and, conversely, of paintings which abruptly lose their value as a result of a sudden severing of the link attaching them to their prestigious origin (discovery of a hoax, attribution to a less well-known painter after new paintings have resurfaced and forced a re-evaluation of the initial attribution, attributions to the school of a painter with uncertainty as to the part played by the master in the work, etc.). The same painting can, moreover, be subject to oscillations, gaining and then losing its value depending on the successive attributions granted to it. That proves that ‘a painting in itself is not worth very much’ and that ‘what gives it value is essentially the lineage it is accorded’.43
Such fluctuations begin with ones which can be observed on an individual scale, by the same expert, and depending on the context at the time of a given evaluation. When there is considerable uncertainty and the elements of proof or counter-proof surface bit by bit, the same expert can change opinion several times, whilst still giving the same impression of someone who believes in what he is saying. Thus, during a case between an art dealer (Bruno Meissner) and an auctioneer and art expert (Éric Turquin) at the beginning of this century, the art dealer’s lawyer
was quick to mock changes of opinion expressed by Éric Turquin, who had first declared the painting to be an honest copy and then a genuine work, before admitting that he was not so sure, and then finally declaring that it was an original, and that he had unshakable faith in it. To which, Maître Catherine Sarcia-Roche, defending Éric Turquin, retorted that art history was by no means an exact science: ‘On the art market, what is good today may be controversial tomorrow and excellent the day after. We all know that is the case’.44
Art historians sometimes beat their breasts by pleading the poor conditions in which they often see paintings (poorly lit, hung too high, difficult to make out under a thick layer of varnish, un-restored or badly restored, etc.). Seventeenth-century specialist, Pierre Rosenberg admitted, in an interview he gave to the Journal des Arts, that he himself had changed his mind about a Poussin: ‘There are some paintings which I have long considered to be copies. I’m thinking of Richmond’s Achilles among the daughters of Lycomedes which I published as a copy in 1982. I saw it again over a year ago while it was in the process of being restored and I am convinced that this version is the original painting by Poussin.’45 But when they speak about other people’s fluctuations of opinion, and particularly those of their direct competitors, it is often to make fun of them, to emphasize the fact that they do not have the eye, or to imply that their judgements cannot really be relied on.
But, of course, variations in the status of a painting also depend on the state of power struggles between experts. The story of Apollo and Marsyas, long attributed to Raphael, is examined by Haskell,46 and is a fair representation of such changes of attribution where there is not enough objective information to unite the experts.
At the end of 1849, in Brunswick Place, a London dealer and editor of classical literature died, leaving behind numerous books, sculptures, engravings, drawings and paintings. These were put on sale by the executors and amongst what mostly amounted to works of little value, the agents from Christie’s singled out a few paintings, including an Apollo and Marsyas. At the auction at Christie’s, the painting was attributed to the artist Mantegna, but was manifestly not by the hand of Mantegna. It was acquired by a dealer on behalf of Morris Moore. The latter was to defend with great conviction the attribution of the painting to Raphael though with varying degrees of success depending on the place and time:
From that moment onwards it became the most controversial Old Master of the second half of the nineteenth century, arousing violent passions in London, Paris, Dresden, Vienna, Berlin, Milan, Venice and Rome. Every connoisseur and expert became involved in the debate; every available method and technique was employed to determine its authorship. Names, from the greatest to the most insignificant, were suggested on all sides. The whole modern history of attributionism can be studied through a close analysis of the fortunes of this one picture (p. 155).
Initially, Morris Moore was persuaded to exhibit the painting in the National Gallery. He had some supporters amongst the curators of the museum. But John David Passavant, a recognized authority on the paintings of Raphael, declared his ‘unalterable opinion’ that the painting was by Francesco Francia, before then retracting that statement to say he had come to the conclusion it was the work of the painter Timoteo Viti. Passavant was a scholar who had introduced the idea of a published catalogue raisonné listing the paintings considered authentic and giving information on versions, copies, etc. The fact that he did not confirm the attribution of the painting to Raphael meant that the National Gallery no longer considered acquiring the work. The whole episode, Haskell tells us, ‘marks the first triumph of the art historian over the policy of unprofessional museum trustees (the question of buying the picture for the National Gallery virtually ended at this stage) and it inaugurates repeated clashes between empirical English connoisseurship and German scholarship’ (p. 159).
Moore, for his part, benefited from the fact that he had been recognized as the first person to have identified a work by Michelangelo: ‘It was easy enough to assume that a man who had discovered a Michelangelo could also have discovered a Raphael’ (p. 162). And above all, his combative stance meant that even when his attribution to Raphael was disputed, he still defended his conviction and continued his work to get the painting recognized by constantly expanding his contacts (‘Certainly no art lover has ever campaigned with such tenacity and vigour for an attribution, and it was everywhere acknowledged that he did so out of a love for the truth, as he saw it, and not for financial gain’ (p. 168)). For example, in order to counter Passavant’s opinion, in 1851 Moore approached Gustav Waagen, director of the Berlin Gallery and the second most important Raphael expert in the world at that time. Waagen agreed to look at the painting but refused to give his opinion.
Moore was not, however, discouraged and, from the beginning of 1858, set about exhibiting the painting all over Europe:
He decided to exhibit his controversial painting in the main capitals of Europe and thus – as he hoped – break through the constraints imposed by an Anglo-German conspiracy and inadequate methods of reproduction. Old Master exhibitions had been held before, though only in England were they a regular feature of social and cultural life, but never had a single picture been carried across so many frontiers in an attempt to win recognition. Not surprisingly the venture aroused much curiosity, comment and debate (p. 164).
With an extremely keen sense of legitimacy, Moore sought, moreover, to have his picture on show in prestigious locations in order to associate his painting with respected places and to show that it was worthy of appearing there:
He had hoped to show Apollo and Marsyas in a room in the palace of the Institute, but when permission was refused, it and the hard-won photograph of the Academia drawing were briefly exhibited in the Salon Carré of the Louvre and thereafter in an artist’s studio in the Rue de Grenelle. The occasion was an outstanding success and it is entirely due to this success that the picture is in the Louvre today.
Those who came along to admire it were contributing, by their own legitimacy, to make the painting into one worthy of interest. This was the case for Flandrin, Ingres, Mérimée, Delécluze, Charles Blanc and Delacroix.
Despite scoring some points in terms of legitimacy, including an article by Henri Delaborde in La Revue des deux mondes, which ‘first tried to give some documentary backing to the attribution to Raphael’ (p. 165), a certain amount of reticence continued to be expressed as to the authenticity of the painting, particularly by the press. But Moore was delighted with his trip to Paris, which was in other respects more favourable to the attribution of the painting to Raphael than were London or Berlin. Haskell cites an article by a French art critic, Edmond About, mocking English nationalism and fighting the cause for Moore’s picture: ‘Amateurs and experts will allow their throats to be cut rather than naturalize a masterpiece they have not invented. The prejudice will be too great for their pride and certainly for their interest.’ After its time in Paris, the painting was then exhibited in Munich and afterwards in Dresden ‘to widespread acclaim’ (p. 167).
The status of the painting then remained uncertain until the 1880s, thirty years after Moore first acquired it. Giovanni Morelli thought that the painting was not by Raphael and inclined towards Pérugin, but ‘the greatest authorities on Raphael of the second half of the nineteenth century – Eugène Müntz in 1881, Crowe and Cavalcaselle a year later – accepted the picture as being by Raphael’ (p. 169). And when the painting was acquired by the Louvre in 1883, the sales contract stipulated that it had been known since 1850 as the ‘Raphael of Mr Morris Moore’, suggesting that doubt still existed over the authorship of the work.
But the most interesting aspect of this tale of doubts and controversies is the side-lining of what could naively seem crucial in the eyes of those who think that art is purely and simply in the service of the beautiful: if the painting was not definitively rejected by those who did not believe it was a Raphael, it is also because some of those who saw it found some interest in it. François-Anatole Gruyer, curator of paintings at the Louvre, wrote to the director of the Louvre in 1883, pointing out that the establishment could have acquired this work in 1858, but had not done so because of doubts over the attribution to Raphael. He comments on this in the following manner:
In my opinion, it was a mistake. The individual who sells and those who buy disappear. The work itself remains and that is what is important. The painting of Apollo and Marsyas is remarkable, that can be denied by no one. Well, let us think about the worst that could happen: imagine that we make a mistake and that one day someone comes along with proof that this painting is the work of an artist we have not even considered yet. We would still have enriched the Louvre with one more chef d’oeuvre and we would moreover have endowed our museum with a painter with a completely unknown value, a painter so talented that he could sometimes be confused with the greatest master of all (p. 169).
Haskell continues, writing:
It is worth pausing for a moment over this remarkable and moving passage. There can be no doubt that by now Gruyer had serious doubts about the attribution to Raphael: the government would refuse to put up the funds to buy the picture, and Morris Moore would refuse to sell it. He went into the transaction therefore prepared to suppress what he suspected would be the truth in order to obtain a beautiful painting. This is an important episode in the social history of attributionism and it should be recorded (p. 170).
Gruyer’s comment is highly significant in that it touches on certain perverse effects of the most widely shared beliefs held by actors from the art world by pointing to the risk that the strict logic of attributionism, which favours known and recognized values (Raphael is therefore a great painter universally recognized) can distract attention from the real aesthetic value of the work independently from the reality of this attribution. The desire for authenticity at any price (the painting is or is not by Raphael) has come to be in contradiction with purely aesthetic values (the painting is or is not beautiful).47 As Duret-Robert writes:
There was, it is said, a time when the amateur bought what he liked because he liked it. Without the need for any other considerations. As a result, he was the only judge of the wisdom of his decision to acquire or to abstain. Did such a time genuinely exist? Things have certainly moved on. For if in our time, the amateur still buys what he likes, he only likes what is authentic. Even though generally speaking incapable of judging for himself the authenticity of what he likes. So there he is, obliged to call on the great oracle of the art market – the expert. Alas! The expert is merely mortal. And as such, subject to error.48
From this long story of the controversies over Apollo and Marsyas Haskell draws the conclusion that extra-artistic or extra-aesthetic considerations or qualities carry significant weight in the attribution process: ‘Nationalism, personal feelings, unwillingness to acknowledge mistakes, financial considerations do play a part in the attribution of paintings, even when there is no question of conscious dishonesty’ (p. 174). In this domain, there is no such thing as a ‘pure’ judgement in the sense of being purely guided only by the desire for truth. More often than not, these matters are marred by interests, desires, jealousies and by the effects of many different rivalries.
Given that the work of art was now regarded as sacred, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, the great amateurs of art and the rich collectors, all of whom came from either the dominant classes (the aristocracy) or from sectors of the rising classes (the bourgeoisie), did their utmost to demonstrate their distance from the profane by learning to know about and recognize works of art and also by learning to speak about them in a legitimate manner in order to demonstrate their abilities. Thus,
the practices of the amateurs and collectors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly in Antwerp, were firstly practices of distinction, in the double sense that Pierre Bourdieu gives to the term. For these connoisseurs, the collection and the art of judging art appropriately are in fact both a way of showing off their erudition and their mastery of aesthetic discourse, that is to say their status as individuals of quality, and also a way of emphasizing the distance that separates them from the common man, from the people, from those who lack any understanding of such delicate and complicated matters. Being able to identify the authors of a painting, attribute an unsigned work, distinguish a copy from an original, detect a forgery, are all proof that only the connoisseur can triumph thanks to his particular skills.49
It was in the sixteenth century, amongst Italian writers, that ‘the first accounts of the substitution of an authentic work of art by an imitation intended to mislead’50 began to be seen. Nevertheless, the difference between original and copy was not particularly marked until the end of the seventeenth century. Patrick Le Chanu cites, for example, a scene from The Diary of Cavalière Bernini’s visit to France (1665) by Paul Fréart de Chantelou, friend and patron of Poussin, where we see that no radical difference is drawn between a copy and an original: ‘Such a scene would be almost unthinkable today. It relies on a belief that the essence of what makes up the “very substance” of a chef d’oeuvre is preserved in a copy painted by a talented artist. Hence the vogue of copies in the most prestigious collections and first and foremost in those of the king himself.’51
Even at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the perfectly legitimate practice of the copy which could circulate in a controlled manner in the most distinguished circles did not challenge belief in art. The dividing line between copies and originals was not a permanent obsession on the part of those exhibiting works. Moreover, full confidence was placed in the great families who lent their paintings and these were therefore exhibited with the information supplied by the families themselves:
Relatively few of the pictures exhibited can today be identified with total confidence, and even at the time many were almost certainly known to be copies, or at least studio versions, of celebrated master-pieces kept in churches or in outstanding but unavailable collections. It is thus not easy to determine how much reliance can be placed – or, indeed, was intended to be placed – in Ghezzi’s attributions, despite the fact that he enjoyed great fame as a connoisseur. It can in any case be assumed that (as was to be the case in virtually all subsequent exhibitions) it was the lender, and not the borrower, who determined under which name a picture should be shown.52
That speaks volumes about the lack of importance accorded to experts at this time and, with little risk of error, it may be assumed that a great many copies of original works were admired.
At the end of the eighteenth century, connoisseurship53 and collecting gained popularity amongst the elite in Europe (especially in France, Italy and England).54 In order to be familiar with European art, it was necessary to travel throughout Europe and to occasionally buy works, both of which implied a significant economic capital. Through these repeated visits to museums, churches, cathedrals and private collections, a body of visual empirical knowledge was built up, a capacity to recognize works, link them to other works and sometimes to series of works, a knowledge or capacity sometimes summed up in the notion of possessing an eye. The connoisseur is therefore, in the British tradition, this aristocratic gentleman who travels extensively and visits all possible art locations, buying, collecting and attributing anonymous works to their creators, thanks to his eye. In the history of art, he will also play the role of someone who discovers artists who are somewhat forgotten or neglected.55
The specialist’s eye is clearly not just a natural phenomenon, an innate talent. Connoisseurs and art historians themselves condense into this word the accumulation of visual experiences in the art field. What was at stake was not so much distinguishing yourself from the profane who would not have the natural gift of seeing and recognizing,56 but in distinguishing between those who have a direct and practical knowledge of works of art, as a result of the amount of time spent amongst them, and those whose knowledge was academic, scholarly, acquired from books. As the art historian Jacques Thuillier writes: ‘As a last resort, whatever the claims and the silences of catalogues and inventories (after death), the eye is the only judge.’57 The specialists could therefore appropriate the popular saying: ‘Seeing is believing.’
It was of course the development of the art market and of large private collections in the late eighteenth century, alongside the advent of public museums which took on responsibility for the values of rarity, originality and singularity, which reinforced the need for attribution.58 Any commercial exchange assumes a knowledge of the exact nature of what is being bought, particularly in the field of art where prices have no direct link with the time dedicated to producing the object. Since it is indeed a question of the sacred and of a belief in the inestimable value of works by certain clearly designated artists, the cult of the authentic is inevitable. The work must have been integrally produced by the hand of the artist for the magic to work completely. And when experts are forced by the imperatives of institutions to seek tangible proofs of the presence of that exceptional individual, they commit themselves with passion to the study of the details: ‘Thus, the brush stroke and the detail in painting became privileged sites where new ideas about the uniqueness of the creator were constructed. In 1762 an author wrote: “A brushstroke, the deft treatment on trees in a painting, reveals its author”.’59 However rational, empirically based and well-argued it might be, the knowledge developing here is deeply orientated by the framework of unquestioned beliefs.60
It was not until the very beginning of the nineteenth century that the question of attribution was to become an urgent one. Haskell recalls that in London, in 1798, catalogues ‘even disclaim responsibility for the originality of the works on view (although this is “presumed”)’.61 This meant then that, even if the question of originality was now in everyone’s mind, works of an extremely uncertain status were still being exhibited. Likewise, in Paris, at the end of the eighteenth century, it was only ‘on very rare occasions’ that commentators raised ‘specific issues of attribution or authenticity’. On the other hand, from 1800 onwards, exhibitions were the occasion of ‘vigorous controversy’.62
But it was not until the end of the nineteenth century that the practice of attribution became generalized, relying increasingly on scientific methods. Well-publicized major cases of forgeries or copies discovered by connoisseurs contributed to the rise of attributionism. Thus, for example, in 1871, Adolf Bayersdorfer proved that the famous Holbein Madonna des Bürgermeisters Meyer (Dresden) was in fact a copy of an original located in Darmstadt.
In this second half of the nineteenth century, Giovanni Morelli (1816–1891) was the art historian who embodied this shift towards scientific methods, even if his method had some precedents in the early eighteenth century. Morelli confronted his contemporary Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle (1819–1897), criticizing him for basing his judgements purely on his intuitions. He was followed by Bernard Berenson, a formidable North American art critic specializing in the Italian Renaissance. Morelli and Berenson put more emphasis on the detailed examination of works. For Morelli, it is in the insignificant details (those rarely imitated such as the ears, nose and fingernails) that the signature of the artist really lies:
Brilliantly examined by E. Wind, this method clearly reflects current tendencies of the time. Its scientific character is undeniable but, on the other hand, it seems to follow a method similar to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective investigations. The attribution specialist Morelli recognizes the hand of the artist thanks to a detail un-noticed by the majority of people and perhaps even by the author himself, in the same way Conan Doyle’s hero identifies a person thanks to clues which remain imperceptible to his friend Watson and even to the person who left them behind. The same rule applies to both the attribution specialist and the detective: the unmistakeable detail, the element which attracts the eye, is the least reliable; the best hidden clues are the ones which will unfailingly lead to the protagonist.63
It was evidently a sort of clue-based science64 which was being developed, but a science which is entirely based on unquestioned beliefs in the importance of the authorship of the work, itself relying on the belief in the hierarchy of artists established for a relatively long time. It is because this background of beliefs exists that Morelli or Berenson resorted to so much ingenuity in their quest to identify the exceptional.
Who has the authority to tell the truth about works of art? Historically, the categories of people qualified to speak about art and to make decisions about authenticity and the attribution of works have varied. As we have seen, owners coming from the nobility or from the higher echelons of the bourgeoisie were for a long time scarcely challenged over the attributions they suggested in the case of works being sold or loaned to museums (after all, the market for works of art remained very restricted for a long time and only the great families could afford the luxury of such signs of cultural nobility within the interplay of rivalries at the heart of the elite). This situation was to change radically with the arrival of experts, enlightened amateurs who stood out because of their practical understanding of art (essentially acquired by frequenting works of art all over Europe from an early age) and then art historians and museum curators challenging connoisseurship on a more scientific basis (rational and empirically based knowledge of works, and of the contexts in which they were created, acquired in the major specialized academic institutions). From this point of view, specialists in analysis techniques, based on X-rays and chemical tests, would play an increasingly significant role in the history of attribution. They would appear both as the partners and the rivals of art historians: partners in the sense that art historians and curators could base much of their arguments on the data provided by the laboratories: but also rivals when it came to the question of knowing who could tell the truth, who would have the last word and the power to pass judgement on works.
Science and technology began to participate in the attribution process from the end of the eighteenth century.65 They became part of a project to penetrate the mysteries of creation and to ‘explore the invisible’.66 The techniques used rely on radiography (radiation using infrared, ultraviolet fluorescence, X-rays or Röntgen rays) or lighting techniques (tangential or oblique, monochromatic sodium lights) and scientific photography (microphotography or macrophotography). These reveal drawings, inscriptions, hidden paintings, reworkings carried out by artists during the creative process, which allow any areas repainted in the course of subsequent restorations to be distinguished from original areas. They also make it possible to date pigments, canvases, frames, or, with the use of microscopes or different lighting, reveal individual brush strokes and, by the same process, the gestures of the painter. Thus, science and technology lay bare the hidden and make the invisible visible.
As early as 1780 in the Palace of the Louvre, the physicist Jacques Charles invented a ‘megascope’, a forerunner of macrophotography, which enabled images of pictures or works of art to be enlarged. The text written by the chemist Jean-Antoine Chaptal, La chimie peut-elle servir aux arts? appeared in 1805 and represented a significant advance in the field. In 1860, Louis Pasteur was appointed professor of Science and Art at the École des Beaux-arts in Paris. It was not until 1888, however, that the first research laboratory was created at the Staatliches Museum in Berlin. Then, in 1895, the physicist Röntgen attempted the first X-ray of a painting. In England, a laboratory was opened at The British Museum in 1919, followed in 1925 by one in the Cairo museum, in 1927 in the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge and in 1930 in the Museum of Fine Art in Boston. The Louvre inaugurated its laboratory around 1931 followed by the Laboratoire central des Musées de Belgique and the Max Doerner Institute in Munich in 1934 and laboratories then opened at the National Gallery and The Courtauld Institute of Art in London in 1935 and at the Istituto Centrale del Restauro in Rome in 1941. In 1938, Alan Burroughs’s book Art criticism from a laboratory was the first work to be published on the use of X-rays in the study of old paintings.
Images or the results from tests were then compared with information derived from other sources, on the pigments used at the time, the painting techniques of the period or those specific to individual artists, and on any specific particularities (e.g. Poussin’s trembling hand, the result of illness in the latter stages of his career), etc. It was then the turn of art historians who often had the historical, biographical and aesthetic knowledge needed to interpret the signs or clues revealed by technical analyses. Just as X-rays on the human body are interpreted by doctors, the X-ray images obtained by the laboratories are interpreted by art historians.67
It is easy to understand the fascination which the application of these forms of analysis to works of art provoked. Indeed, as sacred objects, works of art have a double function: they are ordinary objects endowed with a sacred aura which makes them more than just brush strokes on pieces of canvas. Science therefore comes to the help of magic by giving the illusion of penetrating the mystery of these objects unlike other objects. Scientific study of what cannot be perceived with the naked eye, of the imperceptible, echoes the invisible of the sacred. As Jean-Michel Dupouy writes: ‘Röntgen’s discovery of X-rays essentially founded the discipline of the scientific study of works of art. Indeed, it was this new possibility, then almost magical and completely new, of seeing the invisible, which motivated a fresh look at the cultural heritage stored in museums and it was at this period that the first museum laboratories in the world were created.’68
But the history of the introduction of science and technology in the domain of art is by no means a straightforward one and did not always go smoothly. By claiming to contribute to the unveiling of the secrets hidden in works of art, the researchers and technicians in these fields were encroaching on a domain which had long been that of art dealers, connoisseurs and, at a time when museums were increasingly important, of art historians and curators. Taken together, these scientific and technological methods seriously undermined the monopoly of the experts’ eye. These tensions are visible in a number of texts produced by various people. Science and technology are ‘soulless’, they ‘take away the poetry’, they can be regarded with a certain distance or even disdain by aesthetes, dealers, museum curators or art historians – all those who favour an emotional relationship with the work of art, even if they differ from each other according to their mastery of historical knowledge about art works and their creators. The strained attitude towards the laboratories on the part of historians or curators, who claim either to have the eye, or else to have scholarly knowledge of artists and their works, is constantly present in these discourses.
Thus, Patrick Le Chanu, curator of national heritage, criticizes the ‘mythology of the laboratory’, which holds sway amongst the general public as well as in certain professional milieux. He seriously belittles the service that science is supposed to bring to art: ‘As for the radiographic or photographic documentation of a work, in this domain it all too often only succeeds in confirming intuitions arising during an examination with the naked eye.’69 Madeleine Hours, museum curator, former director of the Research Laboratory of the Museums of France and, from 1958 to 1964, the first person to popularize on television the knowledge and techniques which had succeeded in ‘uncovering the secrets’ of works of art, passionately defended, in 1964, the introduction of these scientific methods in the field of the arts, in the face of widespread resistance. ‘The intrusion of technology in the field of art’, she wrote, ‘is still sometimes the subject of scandal.’70 Some people consider the action of ‘penetrating a still dark sanctuary with a light in the hand’ as a ‘sacrilege’ (p. 29). The rather aggressive way in which she presents her argument is indicative of the resistance that the advent of science had provoked amongst the most conservative museum curators and art historians: ‘It seems to us that refusing this enrichment of our perceptions would be demonstrating a reprehensible conservatism’ (p. 12).
Introducing, in 1994, the first issue of Techné, the journal of the Louvre laboratory which featured a special report on Poussin, Jacques Thuillier, professor at the Collège de France since 1976, immediately points out the limits of the laboratory in the face of artistic genius: ‘A careful painter, whose prudent approach left little to hazard, Poussin is not one of these artists whose secrets the laboratory has the privilege of uncovering.’71 Implying, in other words, that it is not there but elsewhere, in historical and aesthetic knowledge of works, that the answer to questions about the authenticity of canvases is to be found. But the historian nevertheless recognizes the contribution of physical and chemical analyses of works, particularly with the use of X-rays which can reveal the presence of hidden works: ‘It is of course the triumph of radiography that it can uncover an earlier work hidden beneath the surface of a known painting and capable of recovering a lost stage in the career of an artist.’72
Occupying a significant academic position with his chair of ‘History of artistic creation in France’ at the Collège de France, he even, in the manner of a great sage, appeals for the cooperation of all those who, from different standpoints, methods and data, deal with works of art:
We can only be astonished and even scandalized at the barrier that exists between connoisseurship and the documentation provided by laboratories. It is certain that in the history of art, the various approaches to a work have an unfortunate tendency to ignore each other, tendencies which are all the stronger because they are drawn from isolated fortresses such as a museum, a university, archives, research laboratories … The blame might seem to lie in a certain laziness both in minds and in institutions.73
But this diplomatic ecumenism is only an initial rhetorical phase, quickly followed by a second phase which clearly establishes the relative places of everyone, and in particular the central and the peripheral places, the dominant places and the dominated ones, within the universe of art history:
We must not hide from the truth: the laboratory often frightens the art historian. It frightens him because it extracts from the work of art, that object scarcely any less complex than the human being, a few elements of a mechanical nature on which it concentrates its interest. It draws conclusions from these which have the authority of the scientific method whereas in fact they are often only simplistic interpretations, reached on the basis of too few samples and insufficient parameters. Dismissing these anxieties in a peremptory fashion in the name of the recognized privileges of the ‘exact’ sciences will not help the laboratory to take its true place within the discipline: on the contrary, it is by clarifying them and by taking them into account that it could define a new method.74
The fear emphasized by Thuillier therefore marks the tensions between the different fields of knowledge. By underlining the complexity and the singularity of art, the historian creates a hierarchy between the experts: techniques associated with physics or chemistry cannot singlehandedly say what works are. Scientific analysis must serve the art historian by bringing him proofs that he alone can interpret by placing them in a more complex network of knowledge concerning the artist, his works and the historical conditions in which they were created.
For his part, on the occasion of a study day on Poussin at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon on 13 May 2008, Pierre Rosenberg, honorary director of the Louvre, amusingly let slip a cutting remark addressed to the research laboratories during a commentary on Poussin’s Self-portrait (Berlin Museum). Speaking to an audience grouped around the canvas, he explained that the painting bore inscriptions which had been ‘covered and sometimes even removed by a famous Italian-American restorer […] on the pretext that these inscriptions were more recent’ (they dated from the eighteenth century). The historian explained that when he saw the picture now without its inscriptions, he found it ‘empty’. When he explained that it was ‘as a result of laboratory analyses’ that the obliterations had been made, he added: ‘I always speak with a little irony when mentioning laboratories, but I am probably wrong about that, certainly wrong.’ This indicates the art historian’s mistrust of the strictly scientific analysis which encroaches on the eye (and the skills) with which he is ostensibly endowed.
Should the laboratory bow to the eye of the historian, curator or academic, or kick up a fuss and demand entry into the great game of attribution? The nature of the power struggle varies depending on whether the laboratory is public or private. When laboratories are attached to large museums (the Louvre or the National Gallery, for example), they clearly see their role as that of science supporting the history of art. But in the case of privately owned laboratories, these can oscillate between a flattering presentation of themselves and demonstrations of loyalty. This is very clear in the case of the Lumière Technology laboratory in France which, while vaunting its qualities, sometimes with the aid of an aggressive self-promotional rhetoric, also prides itself on its website as being ‘at the service of’ the community of art historians and experts:
Thanks to its command of digital technology, recognized throughout the world, Lumière Technology enables museums, galleries and private collectors to present and study their masterpieces in unprecedented detail, allowing both the visible and the invisible to be seen as never before. […] You will see how Lumière Technology guarantees the colours of a painting, reproducing the original colours with colour sensitivity of unrivalled precision, revealing at the same time and with equal expertise, infrared measurements, underlying drawings, restorations and a virtual picture of the painter’s colour palette, all without touching the picture itself. […] This innovation is a genuine revolution for the art world, providing experts with a unique tool for the study and restoration of works which have never before been viewed and assessed with such precision and with reference to comparably precise photographic and scientific data. […]
Lumière Technology is now an indispensable actor in the expertise and study of art history. […]
We are not experts or art historians. We are simply experts in scientific imagery for the study of paintings and drawings. This is not the same thing.
There can be no doubt that these multispectral scientific measurements of pictorial works open up a new field of investigation, just as medical imagery enabled practitioners to improve their working methods.
These images should be discussed, analysed, compared and shared in an ethical way and with genuine respect for the works.
Denying Lumière Technology, the inventors of this process, the right to contribute to the debate about these images, and even to exist, on the pretext that we are not art historians makes no sense.
Like radiologists, we can provide a ‘check-up’, an initial examination, which can be used by art-historians to refine and interpret in a responsible, professional and systematic way in order to support their own research and opinions.
A reluctance to accept this situation merely puts off a debate which must inevitably take place. The general climate of negativity can only have a detrimental effect on research.
Those involved in appraisal and research have a duty to make use of the most effective methods in the search for the truth. Multispectral analysis as a scientific means of analysing works of art is emerging as one of the most sophisticated methods of achieving this. It is never too late to recognize a new development and to make use of it.75
And yet the condition sine qua non of the recognition of these laboratories must be that they place themselves in a position of servitude in relation to art historians and experts in order for any kind of cooperation to be possible. What is left unsaid in such relationships is obviously the fact that only major curators and leading experts are in a position to order the scientific analyses of works of art. But the ‘scientists’ counter-attack by defending the contribution of objective data which are therefore different to the art historian’s ‘feeling’, his interpretive skills or his eye. The mixture of modesty and aggressive justification of their existence with which private laboratories typically present themselves, infinitely less deferential than the tone of public laboratories, clearly demonstrates the inevitable clash between the two sides, both claiming to be telling the truth in the matter of the authentication of works.76
But notwithstanding competition between laboratories and experts, it is clear that scientific methods do not challenge the sacrosanct quest for the unique quality of the particular artist: ‘At every stage of creation, even in the infinitely small ones’, writes Hours, ‘we can find traces, not only of the craft, of the hand of the artist but of his deepest impulses, of his own individuality’ (p. 12). In the end, science can only bring to history of art supplementary methods to do what until then it had done with its own means. Not only does it not question the beliefs on which such a quest for authenticity is based but, in so far as it is a discourse claiming to tell the truth about the world, it contributes to reinforcing these beliefs a little more. Taking the work itself, and only the work, as the object of study, the laboratory can even boast that it is reviving a fundamental principle of any aesthetic analysis: the focusing of the gaze on the work itself, without any external considerations. Hours is therefore delighted to be able to emphasize the fact that many historians end up by talking more about a given artist’s conception of painting, of his or her beliefs and ideas, than about the work itself which the scientific tests are constantly referring back to:
A great many studies of Poussin have been produced but when one looks at the bibliography devoted to this French painter, one of the most important in the seventeenth century and whose fame has remained undiminished ever since, it is striking to see that almost all the works published have devoted themselves to a study of Poussin’s psychology, his religion, the master’s theories on the history of art, but very few have focused on the way he painted (pp. 47–8).
By allowing the brush strokes of the artist to be made visible, science thus delves deep into the intimacy of the work and of the painter’s gestures.
Moreover, by allowing the original sections of the painting to be distinguished from any areas repainted by restorers, the laboratory contributes a little more to the cult of the original artist by reassuring the spectator of the work that he or she is not being ‘taken in’, or, in other words, is not moved by aspects of the painting which are in fact just re-workings associated with successive restorations of the picture: ‘Thanks to these techniques, it is possible to separate out the sections which have been re-done from the original work, to only appreciate advisedly, gauging the extent of true and false and thus satisfying our deep-seated desire for the truth’ (p. 17). Science embraces the cultural beliefs which lead to a distinction being made between the original and the copy, the true and the false. As a result, the ‘deep-seated desire for the truth’ can be understood as the ‘deep-seated desire for the truths which will satisfy cultural beliefs’. And the expression ‘to only appreciate advisedly’ accurately sums up the power of experts who are in a position to authorize legitimate aesthetic emotion and, given that no legitimate aesthetic emotion exists other than that provoked by the original work, science is there to guarantee the original status of the work. At the same time, its role is to reassure the spectator that he or she is not the victim of a hoax (copy or fake) or of a partial deception (original work with some parts repainted). The scientists seem to say to the spectators: ‘You are now entitled to contemplate art and to experience exceptional aesthetic emotions, for science guarantees the authentic nature of the work and of the emotions it will provoke.’
It could even be said that by making visible what is completely invisible to the naked eye, scientific analysis brings the cult of originality and of authenticity to its zenith, in the sense that it is only by means of exceptional methods that the proofs of authenticity, which escape normal vision, can be made to appear. This means some further distancing from the aesthetic experience which is entrusted to those who have the power to undertake these procedures (Hours speaks of ‘enlarging our field of perception and in particular enhancing the power of our eyes’, p. 127) with the task of announcing which is the masterpiece and which is the copy or the work from the studio of a painter:
In the Louvre there are two pendant paintings called the Philosophers which became part of the Royal Collections at the beginning of the eighteenth century. They are so alike, both literally and figuratively, that it was difficult to envisage a different attribution. Radiography revealed some differences in structure that macrophotography then confirmed on the surface. But it was infrared rays which proved that The philosopher in meditation and The philosopher with an open book could not both be by the same hand. While it is indisputable that the former is indeed by the hand of Rembrandt himself, the second appears to have been painted by one of his pupils. The appearance, the aesthetic sentiment, are very similar, but under these rays it becomes apparent that the shadow surrounding the Philosopher with an open book is empty, the steps of the staircase are only faintly drawn, the ceiling is greyish mass without any structure, whereas the painting which is its pendant allows the spirited drawing of the master to be sensed. The document proves that the pupil only painted the appearance of night, without adding any of that teeming of invisible life that Rembrandt liked to include. If, for a long time, the similarity of period, of technique, the identity of the subjects treated by copyists have been open to exploitation, sometimes for somewhat disreputable purposes, it seems highly likely that it will be increasingly difficult for false attributions to be given to these paintings. Copies or replicas will once again find their true value, often considerable, as tributes and for their decorative role (p. 99).
Science offers a guarantee that the work from the studio, the simple copy, the replica or the forgery cannot inspire the passionate commentaries they would inevitably provoke if they were taken for the works of masters. Paradoxically, scientific analysis provides the proof that the ordinary eye cannot definitively distinguish between the true and the false, or between one version by a known painter and another version by a less well-known painter. That requires hidden elements to be made visible (such as drawings, sketches, corrections or brush strokes invisible to the naked eye). Science reveals elements not accessible to an un-equipped aesthetic judgement.
Cases where pentimenti, or alterations,77 are revealed as a result of X-rays, undoubtedly represent some of the most controversial in the whole field of attribution. In cases where several versions are in competition, the ones which include such corrections are generally considered to be the original canvases, insofar as the artist who is in the process of creating the work is assumed not to be as sure of his gesture as the copyist who has the model in front of his eyes:
It is perhaps there that the applications of radiography in paintings is most significant since radiography indicates successive workings, where they exist, which convey either the assurance of the first gesture or, instead, the quest to achieve the desired image. It is sometimes possible therefore to witness, almost as a voyeur, the successive stages of creation. Raphael’s Holy Family, probably painted for Pope Julius II and housed in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome under the name of the Madonna of Loreto, was supposed to have disappeared. It was said that only very old copies of the work existed, in the Louvre, the Getty Museum, the National Gallery and in the Condé Museum in Chantilly. In the 1970s, a British researcher, Cecil Gould, had an intuition, on the basis of a certain number of iconographical details, that the version of this picture in Chantilly might be the original version. X-ray screening revealed that behind Saint Joseph there was a window with a landscape and that the head of Saint Joseph had not originally existed but had been added at a certain point in the execution of the painting. Yet x-ray screening of the other paintings did not show any such hesitation but all included the face of Joseph from the very beginning. This argument strongly supported Gould’s theory which is today accepted by the experts.78
A recent example of a painting which went from the status of a copy to that of an autograph painting reveals much about the role that science and the experts now play in relation to art. This is the case of Raphael’s Madonna of the Pearl which had gathered dust in the storerooms of a museum having been removed from public view as a result of a mistaken attribution, only to find itself ‘sanctified’ once again.
For many decades, the ‘Madonna of the Pearl’ lay undisturbed in the back of a cellar in a museum in Modena in Tuscany. Until then regarded as an unremarkable nineteenth century copy of a work by Raphael, the canvas regained its true identity last Friday. Scientific analyses, carried out over a period of several months by the Art-Test laboratories in Florence on the initiative of Mario Scalini, clearly attribute the authorship of the work to Raphael, one of the masters of the Italian Renaissance. The painting, a canvas of 30 × 35 cm dating from 1518–1520 and with an estimated value of €30 million, is in fact a fragment of the first draft of the painting ‘Virgin with the Pearl’, many versions of which exist, the most famous being in the Prado in Madrid.79
An internet subscriber reacting to the article which appeared online on the website of a newspaper expresses his astonishment at the power of experts who can authorize or censure the admiration of the work: ‘There is something extraordinary here. When this canvas was believed not to be by Raphael, there was nothing beautiful about it. Now we know it is indeed by Raphael, it’s a masterpiece.’
The process of attribution seems so ‘obvious’ that it excludes any possible alternatives. And given that the history of art, as the logical continuation of connoisseurship, depends on taking for granted the unique nature of artists, the writing of artists’ biographies and the need to provide the link between a work and a name, it is probably not the science best placed to throw light on all these apparently self-evident facts.80 Could it have been otherwise? Without the sanctification of artists or the growing pressure from an art market, there would probably not have been any absolute necessity for a need for authenticity and for the unique nature of works, and the very notion of a ‘work’ of art would certainly not exist. Recourse to history or historical sociology permits the reconstruction of the centuries-old foundations of beliefs which, moreover, have been partially challenged by more recent practices in contemporary art (notably by the arrival in museums of insignificant or industrial objects or by the practice of ‘multiples’). But if contemporary artists play with the rules of art and question the values of uniqueness, or rarity, of individual genius, they still do not desecrate the sacred status of the artist and nor do they contribute (indeed the very opposite is true) to shattering the social magic on which the economic value (sometimes astonishingly high) of the works is based.81 The artist’s name is at the same time a way of asserting the exceptionality of the creator, a useful means of indexing the works and of providing a commentary on them (with the idea of an ‘individual style’), and an economic principle guaranteeing the value of the works and ensuring the relative rarity of works in circulation.
The paradox of an art world which favours authenticity and authorship above any other consideration lies in the fact that purely aesthetic considerations are then seen as secondary. A painting which is judged aesthetically beautiful loses all its value and interest if it is considered to be a copy, a forgery or the work of an unknown artist. By making the distinction between an original and a copy, museums become part of a practice which has its origins in the art market. In the nineteenth century, the authenticity and originality of works was clearly more important than any aesthetic judgements.82
Moreover, the cult of the autograph work (‘by the hand of’) and of unique artists has led experts to disattribute paintings that were not exclusively painted by the hand of any one artist. But that assumes that the work of art has always been the creation of a unique individual and, in reality, this is far from the case. As Svetlana Alpers points out on the subject of Rembrandt,83 the studio was the focus of all possible creative combinations, which ranged from the work created wholly by the master, to the work signed by the master but executed in its entirety by pupils trained by him and painting in his style, and included works prepared by the pupils but painted by the master or works coproduced by the master and the pupils in varying degrees. Faced with such complexity, how can the authorship of a work possibly be judged? Making a decision about attribution on a ‘one work–one artist’ model is like using a ‘Procrustean bed’ which eliminates everything which fails to fit the model. It is no coincidence that hundreds of canvases attributed to Rembrandt were then challenged by twentieth-century experts (in the context of the Rembrandt Research Project set up in 1968 in The Hague and abandoned in 2011 because of lack of subsidies) initially subscribing to the winning model of the unique, original work and by the hand of the master (only).84 It ‘would be enough’ (but this conditional tense hides many centuries of art history which it would be very difficult to undo) to favour the period over the unique creator, to bring about a very marked change in the meaning and the perception of works sometimes judged as remarkable but which are not associated with a prestigious name.
One of the assumptions made by specialists when they meet to discuss the author of a canvas lies in the fact that the name of a given ‘grand master’, selected and separated from other painters by history, orientates the research and the investigations: is the picture by him? And, if so, to what extent? The question of attribution is therefore crucial and no one any longer challenges the central importance of this question. Everyone is eager to say whether the painting is or is not attributable to some great name in painting (Rembrandt, Poussin, Raphael, etc.) and, in cases where the artist had a studio and pupils (as is the case with Rembrandt but not with Poussin), the degree to which it is attributable to the artist himself. But no one asserts, for example, that the mastery, the beauty, the quality or the subtlety of the painting might one day matter more than the identity of its creator or creators. In such a case, it might be possible to think that a pupil or a group of pupils could, exceptionally or perhaps even frequently, produce a more beautiful painting than their master; that a copy could be of finer craftsmanship than the original, etc. Nevertheless, this manner of thinking colours the discourse of the most convinced of experts.
Presented as a kind of demiurge by the authors of the documentary filmed during the Rembrandt Study Days in the paintings department of the Louvre in 2006, Ernst van de Wetering, for forty years professor and director at the Rembrandt Research Project, the ‘benchmark institution in terms of scientific research and authentication of Rembrandt’s work, is referred to as “the great disattributer”.85 But in spite of the fact that his entire undertaking rests on the importance given to a name singled out and distinguished by history, the same Ernst van de Wetering can admit that ‘there is a whole body of works which are not by him but which so closely resemble his work that it is difficult to tell them apart’ and that ‘the question of knowing if a painting is the work of Rembrandt or of one of his pupils remains a delicate one because Rembrandt painted some mediocre pictures which one might be tempted to attribute to his pupils whereas certain pupils have painted works worthy of Rembrandt. It is not easy therefore to make the distinction.’
Finally, imaginary variations of what is possible might indeed suggest that the pedagogical or historical concern might have taken precedence in museums had these supported a policy of broader dissemination of culture based on the production of very good copies instead of becoming places associated with the cult of the unique and irreplaceable work par excellence. From such a perspective, contemporary copies would have a completely different value and modern copyists would be able to legally exercise their talent with a view to benefiting a large number of museum institutions. A more democratic policy, it would have avoided the effects of competition and strategies designed to secure works which favour the large capitals (places where capital is concentrated) to the detriment of a more egalitarian distribution across national territories. Finally, it would no doubt have slowed down market speculation by diminishing the desire to own a unique and original work. That was not in fact the course that real history ended up taking, but these reflections, which fall within the realm of (social) science fiction, are simply intended to make us aware of the profoundly arbitrary nature of the existing situation.
We should always start by questioning the reasons why the practices we observe in the present time, or which we reconstruct on the scale of a relatively recent history, are possible. What are the social structures which drive the opposition between the sacred and the profane, place art on the side of the sacred, and, in doing so, render possible a whole series of moves and strategies within the sacred domain itself? If the individual actors who represent those working in the service of the sacred make their moves like chess players on a chess board and can be studied as such, we must also ask, as I have done in the course of the preceding arguments, what implicit rules or principles they are governed by and, at the same time, try to discover the nature of the chess board on which all the various moves are played out.
In the course of Book 3, I will first take the reader into the intriguing history of Poussin’s fortunes, and then into the even more intriguing story of one of his canvases which has come to be known as The Flight into Egypt or Flight into Egypt with reclining traveller. Through this, I will analyse the numerous acts of social magic, the ‘consecrations’ and the ‘deconsecrations’, focusing as closely as possible on the actors concerned by the painting in question: auctioneer, gallery owners, art historians, museum curators, experts appointed by the courts, laboratory researchers, etc. The story that will unfold will include attributions and the challenging of these attributions, the successive legal rulings which would influence the annulment of the initial sale in order to definitively settle the question of the authenticity of a painting initially sold as a simple copy, and the patronage operation which governed its acquisition. It is a story which would have been worth telling in its own right. However, it would then have lost a large part of its meaning, since all the elements of that story, the actions, strategies and individual decisions, ultimately rest on the great structural conditions which are the historical conditions of possibility.