{"id":1256,"date":"2006-07-06T09:31:12","date_gmt":"2006-07-06T17:31:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2006\/07\/ducci-doh.html"},"modified":"2008-01-24T19:11:32","modified_gmt":"2008-01-25T00:11:32","slug":"duccidoh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/archives\/2006\/07\/duccidoh.html","title":{"rendered":"Ducci-D’oh!"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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

He ridiculed its “low quality” and said it wasn’t “even a good forgery.”<\/p>\n

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

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.<\/p>\n

There was no immediate response yesterday from the museum or Christie’s, which handled the sale for a Belgian family.<\/p>\n

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

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.”<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Refresher course: The Missing Madonna: The story behind the Met’s most expensive acquisition<\/a> (New Yorker, July 11, 2005).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,47,40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts_entertainment","category-crap_your_pants_say_yeah","category-insert_muted_trumpets_sad_wahwah_here"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1256"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1256\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}