MICHAEL KIMMELMAN ESSAY


LONDON - At first glance “Close Examination: Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries,” here at the National Gallery, has the quaint, cheerfully scholastic earnestness of a science fair.

Some 30 pictures from the permanent collection have been enlisted in a celebratory primer on polarized light microscopy and other cumbersomely termed diagnostic tools employed by conservators today to determine when and how a picture was made.

The show may sound like homework, but it isn’t; far from it. It’s one of those gems, which, amid the hard science, stumbles onto squishier truths about what we are really looking for when we look at art. Out to instruct us in the chemistry of painting, it ends up suggesting how elusive art remains despite all the gadgets that we devise to master it.

Along the way it explores the mistaken- identity theme: a picture given in good faith by the City of Nuremberg to Charles I in 1636 as a work by Durer that’s proved to be a copy; a copy of a Veronese that, after grime is removed, emerges as genuine. And there are forgeries, pandering to our basest instinct for knocking experts off pedestals. People love fakes because fakes play into the populist suspicion that much art is just a scam, a suspicion encouraged by the fancy names wrongly attached to and insane prices often paid for the stuff. Names, dates, prices, provenance ? they do promise solid ground. In museums and galleries we can very often feel as if we’re adrift. Another Madonna and Child? Find the wall label. Raphael. O.K. We’re safe to grunt and nod approvingly.

I’m exaggerating, of course. We need names and numbers connected to pictures to write history and occasionally to remind ourselves, when these names and numbers turn out to be wrong, not only of scam artists but of the whole infinitude of human folly. There is, for example, the Italian Renaissance painting of a young woman, brunet, demure and wideeyed, standing before a window, that entered the gallery’s collection in the mid-19th-century. Was it by Lorenzo Lotto or Palma Vecchio? Experts debated. Either way, she was a beauty, despite her blemish: a layer of damage just beneath her hair, which conservators only got around to checking in 1978.

They discovered ? you guessed it ? that the demure brunette covered up a sultry blonde whose hair had been darkened, brow softened and breasts made more discreet to contrive what the unknown “restorer” more than a century ago thought fellow Victorians would regard as a comelier Renaissance portrait. To modern eyes the cleaned picture looks more striking, while the trickery that passed for conservation a century ago only proves how taste is hostage to its era.

But isn’t this painting also more than just an object lesson in historical subjectivity? A different Italian picture, also acquired over a century ago , shows another blonde, this time reclining in a landscape. Titled “The Allegory,” experts agreed when it was bought that it was by Botticelli, and the gallery paid a fortune for it, more than it paid for a second Botticelli at the same auction .

When “The Allegory” went on view, skeptics objected, and soon the prize picture became a kind of embarrassment to the gallery, which had to concede that maybe it wasn’t by Botticelli after all . The blonde looked like a cartoon character, nothing like the gallery’s other, cheaper Botticelli, which steadily rose in estimation to be regarded as a treasure and an ingenious purchase.

Presumed to be a fake, “The Allegory” ended up in storage, where modern conservators one day decided to take another look. It wasn’t a fake. In fact it was an old master painting, even if Botticelli may not have been the old master who painted it.

So “The Allegory” is what, then? A case study in dubious connoisseurship or mad money or gullible criticism? It’s a picture. And the picture is the same whether it is said to be old or new, genuine or fake, an original or a copy. Its role in the evolving narratives of art history changes. Its price can go up or down. But cost is not value.

That’s what we’re looking for when we look at art, no? Something of value, more meaningful than a name or a number . It demands that we look for ourselves.

And then you never know what you might find. A “Virgin and Child With an Angel,” an early work by Francesco Francia, the Bolognese master , for years was said by the gallery to exemplify the painter’s training as a goldsmith. Then an identical picture turned up. Gallery conservators examined their version and found that the tiny aging cracks on the surface had actually been painted, faked. Science proved it. And so there it hangs in the show, on a wall of shame, surrounded by the evidence of its true crime.

But look, never mind what the label says, and you may notice something else about the picture, too, some other truth. It’s beautiful.