Similar to the other forgers before him, Beltracchi saw himself as an artist belonging to another era. Since only titles existed, Beltracchi would produce counterfeits according to the title.
In French and German gallery exposition catalogues dating from the 1910s and 1920s, he searched for paintings considered forever lost, ones whose images had never been replicated and reprinted. The archival version defines what that species ought to look like.Īll forgers learn from their predecessors, and the German forger Wolfgang Beltracchi (born 1951) built upon these cunning techniques. 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,” which argues that for every species of plant, there exists one single dried version of it in a botanical archive. 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. 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. Instead, Morelli proposed a system that gave budding connoisseurs a rational, scientific way to make attributions.
Earlier methods had emphasized looking at iconography (study of the meaning of images).
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