There's a great piece buried in the Times today, about a Manhattan art dealer who owned a portrait for ten years, selling it last year for what she had paid, nearly $22,000, and now European experts using high-tech imagery are saying it's likely a Leonardo. In the piece Kate Ganz, the dealer, attempts to justify her own decision-making by saying she consulted with several art historians and a museum conservator and deemed the mixed-media portrait not to be a Leonardo long ago. The reporter asks her to name the experts. Ganz declines. Then Ganz says:
Leonardo, whether it resonates with all of the qualities that define
his handwriting — sublime modeling, exquisite delicacy, an unparalleled
understanding of anatomy — and to me this drawing has none of those
things.”
Ganz's statements strike me as rationalizations. Even her classical "beautiful enough to be a Leonardo" standard fails. I saw Cymbeline the other night, late Shakespeare; I can assure you the language is not beautiful enough to be Shakespeare. (Though to his credit, Ron Rosenbaum, employed such standards in correctly sniffing out a Shakespeare impostor poem some years ago). I wonder what Ganz really feels. Whether she's angry at all the people she employs who failed to raise the Leonardo bubble–and angry at the experts she supposedly visited–before she resold the painting, or whether she's a rich person who needs to be right, and is going to try and convince herself of her own meritorious judgment from here on…
