{"id":3009,"date":"2016-02-15T14:05:15","date_gmt":"2016-02-15T14:05:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/news\/specialcollections\/?p=3009"},"modified":"2016-02-15T14:05:15","modified_gmt":"2016-02-15T14:05:15","slug":"how-cat-hair-brought-down-a-pair-of-art-forgers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/2016\/02\/15\/how-cat-hair-brought-down-a-pair-of-art-forgers\/","title":{"rendered":"How cat hair brought down a pair of art forgers"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Many<\/a>
Many forgers have tried to imitate the distinctive style of Clementine Hunter, a self-taught artist who painted this 1963 piece, Picking Cotton. Picking Cotton, 1950s (oil on board), Hunter, Clementine (c.1883\u20131988) \/ Minneapolis Institute of Arts, MN, USA \/ The Ethel Morrison Van Derlip Fund \/ Bridgeman Images.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

WASHINGTON, D.C.\u2014<\/strong>When a curator at Yale University started digging through his gallery\u2019s storage space, he wasn\u2019t expecting to find anything special. But within the piles of mediocre works, a 1.5-meter-tall canvas caught his eye. Called\u00a0The Education of the Virgin<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>it depicted a very young Virgin Mary being taught to read\u00a0by her parents, St. Anne and St. Joaquim. Its surface was badly damaged, with cracked paint and parts of the image worn away. Even still, the curator thought he recognized the hand behind the painting: The 17th century Spanish master Diego Vel\u00e1zquez.<\/p>\n

But how to know for sure? Today at the meeting of AAAS (publisher of\u00a0Science<\/em>) here, researchers\u00a0discussed<\/a>\u00a0how scientific analysis can help identify the artist behind a painting, even when his or her identity has been lost for centuries or millennia.<\/p>\n

In the case of Vel\u00e1zquez, researchers had previously identified certain quirks that show up again and again in his paintings. Although green pigments and dyes were available in 17th century Seville, where he worked, Vel\u00e1zquez preferred to create his own greens by mixing blues and yellows. When researchers analyzed the material used to create St. Joaquim\u2019s green robe, they found a mixture of calcium carbonate (yellow) and the copper-based based pigment azurite (blue). The cracked surface of the painting also revealed the fine lines that the artist sketched on the canvas to guide his hand while painting the image, a technique that Vel\u00e1zquez is known to have employed.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf the top layer [of paint] were completely undamaged, it would be impossible to see this,\u201d says Ian McClure, an art conservator at Yale. (He wasn\u2019t the one who found the painting, but he helped lead the team that analyzed it.) And when his team took an x-ray photograph of\u00a0The Education of the Virgin<\/em>, they saw that an earlier version of St. Anne\u2019s face had been scraped off and redone. Lesser imitators (or outright forgers) of Vel\u00e1zquez were very unlikely to show that attention detail, McClure told the audience. \u201cThis painting is very unlikely to be a copy \u2026 This is very much the artist in process.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON, D.C.\u2014When a curator at Yale University started digging through his gallery\u2019s storage space, he wasn\u2019t expecting to find anything special. But within the piles of mediocre works, a 1.5-meter-tall canvas caught his eye. Called\u00a0The Education of the Virgin,\u00a0it depicted a very young Virgin Mary being taught to read\u00a0by her parents, St. Anne and St. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3009","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-archives-in-the-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3009","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3009"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3009\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}