Nicholas Turner himself had been something of a sleuth while curator at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in the 1990s, and he was at the center of arguably the greatest controversy of the museum’s history. Shortly after starting in his position in 1994, Turner made the astounding declaration that six major drawings attributed to Renaissance Masters were forgeries. They included a pen-and-ink drawing of a woman attributed to Raphael, a portrait of an infant attributed to Fra Bartolommeo, and several other pieces, some attributed and some not. Turner was appalled by the apparent clumsiness in the works, which to his trained eye screamed forgery. One example was a Desiderio da Settignano, which the Getty had just bought for $349,000. A figure on the bottom of the Desiderio turned out to be identical to the figure on the left edge—but in reverse. Mixing and matching elements from different compositions by the same artist is one typical forger’s ploy.
Indeed, a supposed Fra Bartolommeo drawing, a black-chalk study of an infant’s head, had caught Turner’s eye as being the near replica-in-reverse of a study in a German museum—same child, same artist. The baby used to face right; now the baby faced left.
After Turner raised the alarm, Ari Wallert, an associate scientist at the Getty Conservation Institute, examined a supposed Raphael with X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy and found that it contained titanium oxide, which was not in existence at the time. Turner believed that this was proof of fakery. But just as Turner was about to pursue the matter, Getty shut him down. What ensued was a very messy and bitter affair that culminated in Turner’s dismissal. As part of his severance, he was paid a substantial amount of money to waive any disputes with the museum, including his assertion that his predecessor had purchased forgeries. He was not content, however, to walk away, and he sued again. To allow known forgeries to stand was an insult to the conscience of a curator.
In a lengthy article about the claims in the New York Times Magazine in 2001, Peter Landesman hit the nail on the head when he wrote,
We want to walk into a museum and know that what we find there is real. “Museums act as a guarantee of the authenticity of what’s on display, but the sources of authenticity are decreasing,” [Mark] Jones [head curator of the British Museum’s “Fake?” exhibition] says. “People are more geographically mobile than their parents were. The past is some sort of fiction. The loss of certainty about what is and what is not real, and the increasing fictionalization of the past, means that museums have found themselves acting as psychic anchors. . . . But the knowledge that we don’t always know what is real—and neither, always, do museums—infects us with doubts that corrupt all of our other dealings with the culturally sacred. Experts are fallible. We have to take responsibility for what we look at. “If a museum contains things which are inauthentic,” Jones says, “then what it is saying becomes a lie.”5
In subsequent years, Turner did not give up on his quest. His primary suspect was a man named Eric Hebborn, a brilliant forger of Old Masters who actually revealed all in the 1980s. Hebborn never admitted to the Getty forgeries, but he did brazenly acknowledge his role as a forger in general in 2004 in a book—The Art Forger’s Handbook—in which he boasted of his methods and philosophy. He had a particularly bold explanation for his actions:
There is nothing criminal in making a drawing in any style one wishes, nor is there anything criminal about asking an expert what he thinks of it. “But what about gaining pecuniary advantages by deception?” My answer to this is that I can see no reason why I should give my work away. Furthermore, I can truly claim never to have asked or received sums of money for my Old Masters in excess of what an artist of my reputation can command for his own work.
The pecuniary advantages were gained by the dealers, and for this reason I object to being considered a criminal. However much some people may confess to a sneaking regard for rogues, I do not happen to belong to the fraternity—let them save their sneaking regard for the dealers. Moreover, if Christie’s, Colnaghi’s, Sotheby’s and other important merchants who have handled my work really think that I am a crook, why do they not press charges?
The answer which comes first to mind is of course that they do not want to rock the boat, and no doubt this is true, for as London art dealer and specialist in nineteenth-century paintings David Gould said about the Keating affair: “There’s an awful lot more that hasn’t come out and won’t come out. You don’t want to rock the market. Faith in the market is a very delicate thing.”6
Turner’s disappointing experience trying to bring forgeries to the attention of his museum’s directors would support Hebborn’s suspicion that it was not always in the market’s best interest to know the truth. In my experience, however, there is more than an excess of caution when it comes to attributions. I have never known a connoisseur who would tolerate error for the sake of the market. When I began to consider the possibility that I was holding a Leonardo, I knew that only the most rigorous examination would do. Indeed, one would have to be a fool not to be wary of a Leonardo attribution. There’s bound to be controversy. The last time a serious claim was made, it took nearly a century to sort it out.
In the early years of the twentieth century, Kansas City, Missouri, was the last place one might expect to find a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, especially since there was not another Leonardo to be found in the entire United States. Yet that was the claim being made.
In 1920, Harry Hahn, a car salesman, married a Frenchwoman named Andrée Lardoux, whose godmother gave the couple a very special wedding gift: a picture that had been authenticated as a Leonardo by Georges Sortais, a French expert who specialized in the Italian Renaissance. The picture happened to be nearly identical to a work of Leonardo’s housed in the Louvre, called La Belle Ferronnière. That portrait was believed to be of Lucrezia Crivelli, a mistress of Ludovico il Moro Sforza’s in the 1490s. (Ferronnière, which means “ironmonger,” refers to the fact that the subject of the portrait wears a thin gold chain with a gemstone across her forehead.)
The young couple didn’t have much interest in art but did appreciate the economic advantage of owning a Leonardo. The Hahns contacted J. Conrad Hug, a local art dealer, who arranged to sell the painting to the Kansas City Art Institute for $250,000, a princely sum at the time, especially since the new museum normally had an annual procurement budget of $60,000 to $80,000. One can only imagine how important a Leonardo might have been to the museum.
Sir Joseph Duveen, thought by many to be the greatest art dealer in the world, had never seen the Hahns’ painting or even a photo of it, but when he learned of the sale he immediately declared it a copy. “The painting in Kansas City is a measly copy of which there have been hundreds made of this and other subjects by Leonardo da Vinci and offered to the world as genuine,” he said. “Leonardo never made replicas of his works, and the real original La Belle Ferronnière is in the Louvre.”7
Persuaded by Duveen’s certainty, the museum canceled the purchase, and the Hahns were left holding a portrait whose value was suddenly in question. They were horrified that their dreams had been so casually dashed by a man they had never met and who had never “met” their Leonardo. Andrée Hahn sued Duveen for $500,000.
In his responses to the lawsuit, Duveen listed eleven elite European and American experts who agreed with him, and he continued his assault on the Hahns’ portrait, writing, “The head does not show the consummate skill of the human structure that is fundamental and inherent in the works of Leonardo. The head is attached to the shoulders in a poor fashion, the plaits of flesh below the chin are not natural; the neck itself is a dummy cylinder of flesh, and the left hand profile of the neck is out of design: the moulding of the shoulders and neck is primitive.”8
A trial by jury was held in the Supreme Court of New York, before Justice William Harman Black. It commenced on February 5, 1929, and lasted twenty-eight days. The trial was a populist tour de force, including dramatic and controversial testimony by Duveen and his experts. Among them was a man named Bernard Berenson, w
ho was a world-renowned authority on the Renaissance and a connoisseur of the Masters. Hahn referred to him as “the majordomo of the picture guessers.”9 In a curious incident, Berenson had previously gone on record as saying he doubted that the Louvre version was authentic; now he appeared at the trial prepared to testify otherwise. Harry Hahn cynically judged Berenson’s change of heart as the result of the generous payment Duveen was giving him.
Berenson’s description of his qualifications as an expert included this lofty statement: “You get a sense, if you have had sufficiently long training—this is not for beginners. It takes a very long time before you get a sort of sixth sense that comes from accumulated experience. When you get that, you get a sense of what the master is up to, what he is likely to do, able to do, and what he is not likely to be able to do.”10
Nonsense, responded Harry Hahn—doublespeak. He later wrote that he was not alone in challenging the hoity-toity mentality of connoisseurs, whose pretentions relied on such questionable attributes as Berenson’s sixth sense: “Some groups in the art world have at last commenced to breathe and bestir. They are demanding something more than a neatly worded attribution from a Mr. Berenson or his like as a guarantee of authenticity. They have seen some highly questionable old masters cluttering up our public museums.”11 That was probably wishful thinking on Hahn’s part, for no such revolt ever occurred.
When Duveen took the stand, he insisted that the Hahns’ painting was a fake, even though he seemed to contradict his own connoisseurship with this testimony in this exchange with the Hahns’ lawyer, S. Lawrence Miller:
Miller: What is your method of expertizing paintings?
Duveen: First I look to see whether it is an original or a copy.
Miller: Oh, then you have to see it in order to pronounce on it?
Duveen: I have bought paintings by looking at a photograph.
Miller: Then it is necessary to see either the painting itself or a photograph of it?
Duveen: Yes.
Miller: In this case, however, you saw neither when you passed judgment on the painting?
Duveen: In this case I saw neither.12
Time magazine wrote colorfully of the trial, describing Duveen on the stand:
For four days Sir Joseph had been a harried witness. He had flayed the Hahn picture, testily calling its left eye “dead,” “very dead,” and “beadlike.” On the fifth day he covered the whole damozel with one more coating of scorn. “She is a fat person!” he gibed. “A peasant type.” Then he joyously pointed to a reproduction of the Louvre Belle. “This is a great lady of the period.” Reverting to the Hahn painting he described the shoulders as flabby, the arms as puffy, the breast as lacking modeling, the embroidery as untrue to Leonardo’s period. “The hair!” he exclaimed, “That’s not hair—that is mud! . . . If an artist paints wood it must be wood, not steel. If he paints hair it must be hair, not mud.”13
The Hahns had their supporters, including Georges Sortais, who had made the initial attribution, and J. Conrad Hug, the elderly art dealer who had represented the work in the museum sale. Evidence was also presented that a number of experts had judged the Louvre portrait as being by Leonardo’s school but not by the Master himself.
At the end of the day, the task of sorting out the expert opinions was left to the jury. In his instructions, Judge Black cautioned the jurors in a manner that might have been a not-so-subtle dig at Duveen. “You will be wary in accepting the conclusion of experts,” he said. “Because a man says he is an expert does not make him one. An expert is no better than his knowledge, and it is for you to determine how much an expert a witness is.”14 The jurors deliberated for fifteen hours before announcing to Black that they could not reach a verdict. He dismissed them, and the process started all over again. The Hahns pushed for a second trial, and one was scheduled for April 15, 1930. However, Duveen had become ill and did not think he could withstand another trial. He reached a $60,000 out-of-court settlement with Andrée Hahn, which left the question of the portrait’s authenticity in limbo.
Duveen had always contended that the Hahns’ painting was an eighteenth-century copy of the one in the Louvre. In 1933, after spending several years studying the chemistry of paint, Harry Hahn came forward with new pigment evidence, which he said proved just the opposite was true: the Louvre painting was the copy.
In particular, he made two chemical comparisons: the shadow color and the lip color. In the Hahns’ portrait, the lady’s shadows were painted with lapis lazuli, the expensive mineral used during the Renaissance, including by Leonardo, but which was not available in the eighteenth century. The Louvre version’s shadows were created with lampblack, a product from the soot of oil lamps, which was used in the eighteenth century.
The Hahn version’s lip color was a red dye from the so-called kermes berry, which is not a berry at all but a red insect that was dried and ground for pigment. The Louvre version’s lips were also stained with the color of a cochineal insect, which arrived in Europe from the Americas only with Cortés in 1523, years after Leonardo’s death.
Hahn also showed that their portrait was done with a mix of water-based tempura and oil, which was more typical of Leonardo at the time, whereas the Louvre painting was entirely oil. “The full oil technique is definitely not the technique of Leonardo nor any of his pupils, and did not come into use until the time of Titian and Correggio,” the budding expert Hahn observed.15
Still no one would listen. The Hahns held on to the painting, believing that someday their claim would be vindicated. During World War II, they kept it in a bank vault.
As the years passed, Harry Hahn’s bitterness over what he called the Old Masters racket only grew. He believed that museum curators—especially those at the Louvre—were craven overlords who could not bear the idea that they held a copy while the real thing was in the hands of a lowly American. After the war, he collaborated with the painter Thomas Hart Benton in writing a book titled The Rape of La Belle.
In the introduction, Benton wrote scathingly of the art community. “I have long been profoundly suspicious of America’s Old Masters mania. I have been suspicious of the institutions which encouraged it, and of the secretive and often oblique characters there reigning who make of art and the history of art a perfumed carcass. . . . The professional critic is a frustrate who is always cockeyed in his view.”16
In the main text, Hahn released his frustration, writing, “Anyone who knows what has been going on in the art world since the turn of the century recognizes that the business of the art expert is largely fraudulent. It is a well established fact that the dubious and counterfeit works of art hanging in honored niches in some of our best public museums and private collections vastly outnumber the genuine works. And it is clear that venal art experts are responsible for this condition.”17
Hahn also complained of the naiveté and greed of wealthy art collectors who longed to possess rare paintings, writing, “Any man not yet in his dotage, not completely ga-ga, who willingly parts with several hundred thousands of dollars for three square feet of painted canvas simply on the glittering say-so of a polished gentleman with continental mannerisms, striped pants and gray spats, is a patient for a psychiatrist if there ever was one.”18
The controversy went on for decades, and the Hahns never did find satisfaction. Only recently has the painting, titled Portrait of a Woman Called La Bella Ferronnière, been subjected to a modern level of forensic analysis and been judged to be a copy—in the style of Leonardo but not by his hand, probably painted in the eighteenth century. The Hahns would certainly dispute these findings. For example, one piece of evidence is the backing, which is canvas, tested as eighteenth century. However, on the back of the Hahns’ canvas is an inscription: “Removed from wood and transferred to canvas by Hacquin in Paris 1777”—which would explain the dating of the surface.
In 2010, Sotheby’s put the Hahns’ portrait up for auction and published this in a press release: “In 1993, La Belle Ferronniè
re was examined by a leading Leonardo expert, who concluded that while the painting was not by Leonardo, it did in fact have age, and suggested that it dated to the first half of the 17th Century. Recent scientific analysis of the pigments used confirms that conjecture and suggests the work was painted by a French artist, or someone using French materials, before 1750.” Ironically, even though it was judged a copy, the controversy surrounding the portrait increased its value. It fetched $1.5 million at Sotheby’s in 2010.19
For many people, the case still isn’t closed. The obstinate consensus of the art world, based on so little, reminds me of the same wall of denial that I have experienced. John Brewer, who wrote about Hahn’s painting in his 2009 book, The American Leonardo, found the experience sobering. He said, “Working on this book I was often astonished at the cavalier (and, as far as I could see, largely groundless) judgments made by members of the art world, comments based more on fitting in with a consensus or on hearsay than any careful deliberation or consideration of evidence.”20
I hasten to add that for me the case was closed as soon as I saw the work. I found it to be a very nice copy, and I probably would have barely given it a nod had it come up for sale in a Paris auction room. I don’t think it’s worth a tenth of what it made at the auction. My verdict is that the hope of a Leonardo da Vinci miracle created worth where there was none.
I am aware that history is filled with disputes about provenance and authenticity, with the eye of the connoisseur the only evidence. But what of opposing connoisseurs? We long for surety but often have to make do with trust. Now we are entering a new era, when science can deliver a verdict with a level of proof we are unaccustomed to. A collaboration between connoisseurship and science seems in order. The connoisseur can shuffle the cards, but we must leave it to science to cut the deck.
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