In A Forger’s Tale—convicted forger Shaun Greenhalgh’s new memoir—Greenhalgh reveals that he drew Leonardo da Vinci’s La Bella Principessa, which has been valued upwards of $100 million.
Greenhalgh even admits that he modeled the subject after a supermarket checkout girl.
If Greenhalgh’s claims are true, how did this forgery go unnoticed for so long? How did it pass the sniff tests of so many art historians and purported experts? Undoubtedly, Greenhalgh was able to combine excellent painterly skills with a knowledge of art history, materials and technique. But these alone would not have allowed him to dupe so many.
At the center of every major forgery scandal of the last century stands someone like Greenhalgh who not only could produce a very convincing fake, but who also understood how to corrupt the very systems of knowledge the art world uses to determine attributions and authenticity.
A Systematic Approach
True art connoisseurs are experts able to discern both the quality and authorship of a work of art. The practice of connoisseurship originates with an Italian physician named Giovanni Morelli, who began publishing essays in German in the 1870s under a Russian name, Ivan Lemorlieff, proposing intuition-based connoisseurship.
Earlier methods had emphasized looking at iconography (the study of the meaning of images). Instead, Morelli proposed a system that gave budding connoisseurs a rational, scientific way to make attributions. Focusing on overlooked details like the rendering of ears and hands, the technique placed great reliance on the expert’s capacity to read minute clues in order to extrapolate larger meanings.
His technique of observing neglected features would influence Sigmund Freud as he developed a methodology for interpreting dreams, along with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, a detective who solved crimes by looking for clues—like the unique shape of each human ear.
Our knowledge system for identifying artists and artworks also remains much indebted to Linnaean taxonomy, which is itself rooted in the concept of “type specimen”—the idea that for every species of plant, there exists one single dried version of it in a botanical archive. The archival version defines what that species ought to look like.
In art, the equivalent of type specimen is the indisputable works (usually in musuems) to which all other aspirants for the same attribution must conform.
Giving Experts What They’re Asking For
The first great forger of the 20th century, Han van Meegeren, had repeatedly failed to secure attribution for his fake Vermeers.
But in 1937, he succeeded spectacularly when reigning expert Abraham Bredius authenticated van Meegern’s fake Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus.
This work (which looks absolutely nothing like a Vermeer) was able to sway Bredius because the expert had always believed in the possibility of a Vermeer “religious period” since Vermeer had likely converted to Catholicism (his wife’s religion). In other words, van Meegern shrewdly exploited the expert’s own preconceived beliefs.
