The Expert Eye and Its Blind Spots
Connoisseurship promised certainty. Forgers from van Meegeren to Beltracchi proved how much it relied on desire.
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For a century, the authentication of paintings rested largely on the trained eye of the connoisseur. The great forgery cases reveal how that eye can be led — not by incompetence, but by the very expertise that makes an expert.
Van Meegeren succeeded because critics wanted to discover a new Vermeer. Beltracchi succeeded because the market wanted the works to be real, and because provenance — the paper trail — could be forged as convincingly as the paint.
This essay traces the slow migration of authentication from the eye to the laboratory, and asks what is gained and lost when science replaces the judgment of the scholar.