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Lost masterpiece12/19/2023 ![]() ![]() Madeline was in the back seat of the F-350. Dunsford had been driving through the night, making stops along the way - in Charlotte, North Carolina, to pick up an associate, Madeline Rose at his sister’s house in Virginia, to collect some of the money and at a couple of different Wells-Fargo locations to get the rest of it. It was late afternoon on a Friday in July 2019. ![]() Depending whose account you believe, he was holding either $12,000 or $15,000 in cash. This is the Cimabue in the kitchen, and it’s yours to buy for about six million euros.In the parking lot of a Panera, just off I-95 in Stafford, Virginia, Rick Dunsford climbed into the passenger seat of a white Ford F-350 pick-up. A historical work of art is necessarily a mysterious thing: the more chiaroscuro you admit, the less of a drop-dead, solid-gold commodity it becomes.īut questions are boring, and hesitation is dull. Maybe this painting was heavily restored at some time in the nearly 800-year history being credited to it, another potential complexity that would make it less super-marketable. Anyway, those people crowding Christ look a bit post-medieval to me. He therefore bigged up Cimabue and downplayed the equally pioneering painters of Siena.Īre we doing the same to excitedly call this painting a Cimabue? Could its mixture of mystical gold space and real-life detail be by someone else? If attributed to a “follower of Cimabue” or even to a Sienese master, it would be less glamorous and less coveted than an original by this revered painter. This wasn’t an innocent mistake: Vasari was court artist to the Medici and wanted to credit Florence with starting the Renaissance. Vasari falsely claimed he painted the Rucellai Madonna, a famous altarpiece in the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence that is credited today to the Sienese artist Duccio. His contemporary Dante wrote that he was made to look old hat by his younger and much more characterful rival, Giotto. Fewer than 20 of his paintings survive and they show just the rudiments of an artistic personality. It’s hard to be certain about Cimabue’s style. It shouldn’t be accepted solely on the seller’s say-so, or because it makes a good story. Shouldn’t the whole business of identifying masterpieces be a little more nuanced when there are known to be actual forgers out there doing uncannily convincing work? Not that I am saying this is a fake – just that the identification of old paintings is and always has been fraught with peril. Great stories about unlikely discoveries sweep all before them, but art experts have recently been fooled by proven fakes. This is the new norm at the profitable end of the Old Masters market. What’s worrying is the way this painting, like the Caravaggio from the loft, is being boldly called a Cimabue without wider discussion. Yet any unsigned painting found in a kitchen corridor surely needs lengthy appraisal by many different experts. The identification of old paintings is and always has been fraught with peril. Not much, but a beginning – the start of the discovery of real-life in art that would lead to Leonardo da Vinci. ![]() Those traits do appear in his “new” painting The Mocking of Christ: a crowd of impassioned people surround Jesus in front of two buildings that are shown in depth and shaded. If this is truly a Cimabue, it is a rare surviving work by the painter credited by Giorgio Vasari in his 1550 book The Lives of the Artists with liberating Italian art from starchy Byzantine formality by making human figures more alive and objects more three-dimensional. But we do need to stand back and recognise the astonishing nature of the claim being made. We do not need to question Turquin’s good faith. So irresistible it makes sceptics sound like spoilsports. The magic of finding a masterpiece in (or close to) a kitchen is an irresistible story. This has all the hallmarks of the marketing campaign that made the “ Caravaggio in the attic” such a hit. Or has he got a breathless tendency to over-enthuse about “discoveries” that may be more complex than they seem? ![]() Clearly, Eric Turquin has got a very good eye for world-class treasures hidden in plain sight in sleepy French homes. ![]()
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