by Jon Lackman | 10 January 2007 | Medieval, Museums
From Columbia Magazine: “[James] Beck’s challenge to the authenticity of the Metropolitan Duccio has been laid out in the appendix of his book, Connoisseurship in Crisis: From Duccio to Raphael, to be published by European Press Academic Publishing this fall … ‘It’s a delicate matter, all this crap,’ says Beck, 76. ‘The politics of culture. If this were a big corporation and this kind of mistake occurred, heads would roll’ … But Keith Christiansen, a curator of European paintings at the Met, believes that Beck, in questioning the Duccio, is harming the very cause he professes to champion. ‘Frankly,’ Christiansen says, ‘Jim is out of his depth. It’s not enough to walk into a room, stand in front of something, and say, ‘Gee, I don’t like that. It must be a fake.’ You have to deal with the fact that there is a very considerable body of highly expertise scholarship [supporting a Duccio attribution]; and I’m not talking about us at the Met, I’m talking about the cumulative bibliography of this picture, people who really do know the material. No one’s had the remotest thought that this was a forgery’ … An institution can’t be in the position of defending a picture — for which there is no credible reason to have any doubts — against a lunatic.”
(via CultureGrrl).
