Working for the Ingels Collection, Sweden, I had the pleasure to examine and document a Madonna and Child painting on panel, Sienese school. The provenience of the painting is uncertain since there is no documentation about its history before the end of WWII when was purchased for the Ingels Collection in Rome. So, the main and obvious issue for that technical examination was to find out hints of forgery.
Madonna and Child, panel painting in Sienese School style, Ingels Collection, Sweden. Currently under examination to evaluate if it is a modern 20th-century forgery or a real Sienese old master from around 1300.
To examine an early masters panel painting was quiet exiting since it’s a rare occasion to apply what you read in technical art examination manuals written by experts from the biggest museums. Panel paintings have the traditional layered structure: wooden support, ground, size, gilding and paints laid in a specific order. Each layer can deliver clues pointing to authenticity or forgery.
Madonna and Child, panel painting in Sienese School style, Ingels Collection, Sweden. Multispectral Imaging.
I want share in this post my suggested readings on technical art examination of early Italian masters:
Italian early Masters technical examination
1) D. Bomford, J. Dunkerton, D. Gordon, A. Roy “Art in the Making: Italian Painting Before 1400” National Gallery, London (1990). Extensive source of technical information and data such as x-radiographs, cross-sections and infrared reflectograms. This is the most important reference on this subject. Though, no information is provided specifically on the forgery detection topic since all the National Gallery paintings are supposed to be original so this issue is not even mentioned.
2) J. Dunkerton “Giotto to Durer: Early Renaissance Painting in The National Gallery: Early European Painting in the National Gallery, London” National Gallery London, Yale University Press (1991). Chapter Five is specifically about technical art examination. It’s less informative than the Art in the Making book above but for this same reason this chapter is a more an enjoyable and quick introductory reading on this topic.
Early Italian Masters: Italian paintings before 1400. Suggested readings.Icilio Federico Joni
3) G. Mazzoni “Falsi d’autore. Icilio Federico Joni e la cultura del falso tra Otto e Novecento. Catalogo della mostra (Siena, 2004)” Protagon Editori Toscani (2004). Unfortunately, just in Italian, this is the catalog of the exhibition held in Siena on the figure of Icilio Federico Joni. This skillful restorer was also the most famous Italian forger and produced extraordinary “old” Italian primitives paintings which were mostly sold to the American art market between the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.
4) Icilio Federico Joni “Affairs of a painter” Protagon Editori Toscani (2004). In 1934 Joni published in Italian a memoir of his life, with plenty of details about his forger activity, which made the art dealers very wary. They actually managed to get their hands on the English version published by Faber and Faber, 1936, and delete the parts that they thought could harm their credibility. The Protagon edition of 2004 compares page by page the Italian original version with the Faber and Faber edition of 1936. This memoir is a source of information on the forgery techniques such as on the craquelure making.
Restoration practices
5) C. Hoeniger “The Restoration of the Early Italian “Primitives” during the 20th century: valuing art and its consequences” JAIC Volume 38, Number 2, Article 3, pp144-161, (1999). This is a free online available paper it’s useful to understand what kinds of interventions we can expect to find on Italian “primitive” paintings. Indeed, the line between a forgery and an invasive restoration of an extensively damaged original painting was very blurred in the 20th century. This paper also shows an example of ultramarine scraped off Madonna’s mantel to reuse the pigment, confirming how valuable it was at that time.
