Is This Rembrandt a Real One?

Roland Piquepaille writes "About a year ago, I told you about how computer scientists from Dartmouth college were investigating digital images. But they're also interested in old paintings authentication, as reports Wired Magazine in The Rembrandt Code. Mathematicians are using high-resolution digital cameras and computers to examine old paintings and evaluate their authenticity. Even the New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art is asking them to discover which of the 42 paintings it owns and that were once believed to be Rembrandts are really authentic. The Wired article is pretty entertaining, but this overview contains more details, pictures and references about this authentication process."

Comments

And what if they're not real?

[jmcmunn]

I mean, the pictures are good enough for the museum for all of these years. And if no one (even art scholars) can tell the difference, who cares if they are "real rembrandts" or not? Just because some guy happened to have painted them (or not) the paintings are no worse than they always have been. Will the museum keep them on display, and credit them to an unknown artist? Or is the controversy more in the fact that they paintings may be "copyright infringements"?

If it is a real painting (ie not a copy but a true hand painting) why does it matter who painted it? They obviously had talent.

Re:And what if they're not real?

[JonN]

We are a world based on reputations and labels. Without having credit given where credit is due, is to undermine the greatest (one can argue) human purpose...greed.

Re:And what if they're not real?

[Yartrebo]

How right you are. To take this to an extreme, how often do you see people sporting aluminum crowns or silverware these days?

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium#Natural_occ urrence, aluminum was once more valuable than gold. It is more than a coincidence that the prestige associated with aluminum is gone now that it costs a mere buck a pound.

Personally, I am very much a materialist (not to be confused with a hedonist) and I could care less if my diamond supplies come from a factory or the ground (actually, I do care, considering the human suffering associated with natural diamonds and the ecological damage done by any mining activity, but you get the point). At current prices, the only use I could see for diamond is specialized cutting equipment. Quite a shame too, because I can think of plenty of uses for cheap diamond because of it's scratch-resistanct properties such as the cover of LCD screens, windows, glass furniture, mirrors, etc. It's extreme rigitity could find use in precision analogue instruments. Diamond semiconductors have promise too if DeBeers could ever be eradicated.

The aluminum industry went the opposite way of the diamond industry, and it is now the second most important metal in the world behind steel. Aluminum has done a lot to help society by providing a cheap, light, and corrosion resistant metal used in everything from planes and cars to consumer goods and wiring. Diamonds have had a miniscule impact by slightly reducing drilling and cutting costs.

Re:And what if they're not real?

[iSearch]

My Polo shirt and the virtually identical version I bought on canal street for $4.00 were both made in the same factory by the same 7 year old chinese girl. Brand and status is all that matters to most people.

Re:And what if they're not real?

[Funkmaster_G]

if the painting is good, what's the difference that merits it being worth $100,000,000 instead of $1,000?

People value art for all sorts of reasons: they like the piece, or they collect the artist, or they're interested in history, or they want a status symbol, or they're so rich they don't know what to do with their money, etc..

A painting - especially old painting - is different from other products in that it cannot be reproduced. It can be photographed, or made into prints, but there is only one original. It's the scarcity that drives up the price. Imagine how much a wealthy person would pay for the original Mona Lisa... and then compare that to to what they would pay for a copy - even an almost perfect one.

Now Rembrandt is dead, so he cannot create any more paintings. The number of his artworks is finite. This is partly why the price of an artist's work goes up after he dies--the supply is set and can't be increased.

So even if, theoretically, an identical copy could be made - people would not pay as much for it because it is not the original, and it is not connected to the artist. Imagine if you had something signed by your favorite celebrity. You would value it because that person actually signed it. You would not value a forgery by Joe from accounting, even if was perfect. And if you found out it was a fake, you would probably want your money back if you paid for it.

Re:What gives?

[quokkapox]

Funny how all these posts suddenly go Offtopic when someone with unlimited mod points comes along.

Good thing the slashdot editors do not also control the Wikipedia.

Rembrandt was a master

[Conesus]

Why yes, IAAAH (art historian). One of the posters asked whether a great painter could be emulated by another artists and still have the forgery (as it were) be considered as influential as an original.

It's not just Rembrandt's personal technique. Rembrandt worked with multiple layers, allowing light to permeate the background and to reflect off of his subjects in the painting. This sensuous interest in the physical attributes of the body and its many colors, tonalities, and reflections created an impression of richness and fullness of form. The fact that his lines were more often suggested than revealed, as evidenced by his self-portrait in 1669, suggests the the bodies he paints are more naturalistic and complex than they let on.

To feel for a Rembrandt painting is to watch the subjects evoke emotion and a secular pathos that is thick with a somewhat ungraceful suggestion of form, in which paintings would sometimes look unfinished, perhaps, or rather, lacking a rigid definition of form.

You cannot just recreate this technique. It takes the painter who originally defined a style and technique to illustrate why the technique is being so revered. Many copied Warhol, but none are genuine Warhols. And Warhol merely did silk screens!

Notice that it's the artist who is creative and unique that is revered, not the imposer or forgery.

Re:What gives?

[quokkapox]

Do the editors of the New York Times bother to read their own newspaper? I suspect they do, and that they pay close attention to legitimate, repeated criticism.

How about a committee of ombudsmen then, if meta-discussion is offtopic in the article pages but it still takes place, there's a clear demand for a place for people to air issues that come up with editorial conduct.

Yeah, yeah, it's their site, but there's a large community here and this little concept of "don't be evil" that everyone seems to advocate.

Re:Slashdot Censorship

[Dogmatron]

Wow, I think I dislike Zonk as a /. editor even more now. Before it was because of his ungeekiness-- OMG i wub t3h videogames, I must be a geek!-- now it's because he's being an overly sensitive dick. Instead of responding to any of those accusations, he turns a cheek and mods them all down to oblivion. I can't say that helps your position too much, Zonker.

Ironic how the /. editors bitch and moan so much over censorship when they abuse their mod powers like this. Clearly, they couldn't give a damn about their professed love for all things free once their egos are at stake.

Two issues

[Anonymous Coward]

There are two issues involved here. They are Legitimacy and Meaning, and they hinge on the question of whether we're considering a fake Rembrandt or a copied Rembrandt.

A fake Rembrandt is a picture Rembrandt never painted but which was done in his style and with his techniques. A copied Rembrandt is a reproduction of a picture he did paint, where the original was lost before the advent of photography. There's no evidence to show that the copy isn't the original.

It may not be terribly important to find out whether a given painting is an original or a copy. Either way, Rembrandt created the ideas in it. It's a reflection of his worldview, and its his statement as an artist. The value would probably plummet for emotional and romantic reasons. This is the issue of Legitimacy and you can feel however you like about that.

A fake Rembrandt is a very different deal. Suppose that, five hundred years from now, film historians thought the movie Grease was actually made during the Fifties. Grease embodies the way that people felt about the Fifties and remebered it decades later. It is a depiction of the era, not a product of the era. Similarly, a fake Rembrandt is a depiction of Rembrandtness, not a production of Rembrandt.

Determining the authenticity of a piece affects the interpretation both of all other pieces by that artist and our understanding of the time in which the faker lived.

Alternately, suppose it was discovered that almost all of Hamlet was written by Shakespeare, but the famous To Be soliloquy was not. That speech would still be beautiful and much studied, but our understanding of the meaning of it would undoubtedly change.

Fundamentally, geeks find it very difficult to understand that a given painting is not important. It is that paintings contribution to the world of artistic ideas which is important. When you go to see the Mona Lisa you won't melt or suddenly smell the sea air of Renaissance Italy. There's no magic there. If you don't understand Renaissance art or plan to study it, there's probably no point in seeing the painting. It's just a chick with a funny look on her face. There are paintings from the modern era, illustrations or comic book pages or whatever, which will genuinely speak much more directly to you. They're painted in the language of your time.

The place where the two issues intersect is that an artist may well have put Meaning in some very tiny aspect of a painting which a copy cannot reproduce. Geeks are used to thinking that any data can be transcoded between forms. Music can be digitized to "beyond the range of human hearing," text can be typed, pictures can be scanned. The difference with a painting is that it is not actually a flat image on a piece of paper. A painting is a three dimensional sculpture, though a shallow one. The colour is only part of the visual information in a painting. Gloss, texture, thickness, translucency and a dozen other factors are also important.

Again, the geek cry tends to be "but the human perceptual system just merges these together." That's sort of true, but if the viewer moves his head, everything changes.

Because of this detail, it does matter whether a painting is the original or a copy. If it's a copy, we know some of the meaning has probably been lost. It may look like something Rembrandt could have painted, but it will only be what someone thought Rembrandt was saying, not what he actually said. It's a paraphrase.

Conclusion: Authenticity matters if you care about art for reasons beyond the monetary.

Re:That sad thing about this is...

[Kjella]

But if an artist can paint as well as one
of the Masters, shouldn't we be excited to find a 'fake'
because it means that there is another great painter out
there who we know nothing about - and who paints so well
that even an art expert can't point out why that person
is a worse painter than Rembrandt?

If I wanted a copyist, we have excellent reproductions to choose from. Columbus went to America 500 years ago. I went there 10 years ago. He was breaking new ground, I was just following a well-travelled path. That's also why it's not interesting if I could paint a picture like Rembrandt, even if I mimiced his style to the point where it could have been a Rembrandt. If I want to be the "next Rembrandt" I would have to find something of my own, and if it hit big there'd be copyists, but they would also be nothing more than that.