by Jon Lackman | 7 July 2006 | Medieval
From the Times of London: “A painting that was hailed as a 14th-century masterpiece when it was bought last year by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for a reported $50 million is a 19th-century fake in the view of a leading American scholar. James Beck, Professor of Art History at Columbia University in New York, believes that Duccio’s Madonna and Child, which the Met dates to 1300, is the work of a much later hand. He says that it could never have come from the hand of a towering genius considered, with Giotto, to have been a principal founder of Western European painting. ‘It is a fake based upon indications found in works by or associated with Duccio,’ he said. ‘It is not even a good forgery’ … In September he will be publishing his conclusions in a book, The Crisis of Connoisseurship: from Duccio to Raphael.”
