Ducci-D’oh!

An art history professor is claiming that “one of the great single acquisitions of the last half century” — the one the Met just acquired for like $50 bazillion — is actually a nineteenth-century fraud:

A painting the Metropolitan Museum of Art bought for more than $45 million and hailed as a 14th century masterpiece is a fake, according to a leading New York authority.

The “Madonna and Child” the museum attributes to Renaissance artist Duccio di Buoninsegna was really painted in the 19th century, said James Beck, an art history professor at Columbia University.

The 8-inch-by-11-inch tempera and gold on wood panel was the most expensive single object The Met ever bought when it acquired it in November 2004.

“If I’m right, this is $50 million in . . . money down the tube,” Beck told The Post. “And I’m right. It’s incontestable.”

He ridiculed its “low quality” and said it wasn’t “even a good forgery.”

There are no documents proving its ownership before around 1904, and Beck believes it was painted “in about the 1880s.”

Beck said he began to have doubts about the work six months ago and when he approached The Met, where officials expressed confidence the work is genuine.

There was no immediate response yesterday from the museum or Christie’s, which handled the sale for a Belgian family.

But Met curator Keith Christiansen told The Times of London, “There is no reason to doubt the period and the authenticity of the picture.”

Beck said the best proof that it’s a fake is the way it shows the Madonna and child behind a parapet, an artistic use of space and planes that only came later in the Renaissance. He rejected Christiansen’s claim that the work is “the first illusionistic parapet in European art.”

Refresher course: The Missing Madonna: The story behind the Met’s most expensive acquisition (New Yorker, July 11, 2005).