The arcane world of art-historical attribution had a rare moment in the spotlight last November, when a painting by Leonardo da Vinci was sold at auction for $450 million.
It wasn’t just the price that drew attention.
In contrast with the near-unanimous judgment of actual experts, numerous critics who were deeply unfamiliar with world of old masters sowed doubt about the painting’s authenticity. The divide illustrated the chasm between the mainstream art world, which relies heavily on money and fashion, and academic scholarship, which is (mostly) subject to very different pressures.
One of the few people to bridge this divide is Philippe Costamagna, the director of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Ajaccio, Corsica, and a self-described “Eye.”
“The task of what I call the ‘Eye’ is to establish the authorship of paintings by sight alone,” Costamagna writes in his forthcoming book The Eye: An Insider’s Memoir of Masterpieces, Money, and the Magnetism of Art (August 2018, New Vessel Press).
While such a claim might sound outlandish, Costamagna has made a name for himself as a go-to expert for 16th century Italian painting. Using a combination of scholarship, historical documentation, formal analysis, and intuition, he’s regularly asked to pass judgment on artwork whose attribution is ambiguous.
(There are often questions surrounding a painting’s authorship; over the centuries, many works have been touched-up, modified, or even had their canvases cut and reshaped, making attribution difficult at best.)
Most surprisingly, Costamagna provides his services for free.
“Obviously!” Costamagna says in a phone interview. “That way it’s very easy to be honest and say exactly what you think. If you think a painting’s not by the artist they want, it’s easy to tell them no. And I don’t care about money.”
He might not care about the money, but as is evidenced by the recent blockbuster success of the “rediscovered” Leonardo, which was originally bought, pre-restoration, at a regional auction house for virtually pennies, there are many, many other people who do.