Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Tim Harford describes a very interesting incident in How to Make the World Add Up . It’s about an art expert named Abraham Bredius. The man’s speciality was Vermeer. He was a proven expert who had spotted many frauds of Rembrandt and Vermeer paintings over a career spanning decades. And yet he got fooled by a fraud Vermeer painting titled Christ at Emmaus .   Harford’s digs into how an expert could have been fooled by a painting like Emmaus . Sure, anyone can be fooled, make an odd mistake. But this painting didn’t even look anything great, not remotely comparable to any of Vermeer’s masterpieces. So how could someone Bredius fall for it?   The short answer: it fed into Bredius’ history; what he wanted to believe.   Now for the longer version. Bredius had a fascination for Vermeer’s religious works. Only two existed. The first one had been identified by Bredius himself. The second one he’d declared to not be a Vermeer. Other experts had disagreed, and the con...

Until I read a book review on the topic , I didn’t realize that forging art wasn’t always a crime! Unlike, say, forging drugs and currency, which have always been a crime. That makes sense. After all, as the Economist puts it : “If the purchasers of great art were buying paintings only for their beauty, they would be content to display fine fakes on their walls.” That’s rational thinking. But the Middle Ages were hardly the age of reason, were they? And yet the Middle Ages did not consider art forgery a crime. Why? Firstly, paintings and sculptures were mostly meant for religious purposes, which meant they were almost always commissioned by the Church. And since the Church had no intention of selling them, who would believe your copy was the real thing anyway? Besides, many of those works of art were not valued for their look or the painter/sculptor. Instead: “What mattered about objects such as these was not so much whether they were originals or copies, whether they ...