Sir, Most monographs devoted to Duccio from the past half- century consider the Madonna and Child in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to be by Duccio (“$50m ‘masterpiece’ is poor forgery, says art professor”, July 6; letter, July 8). However, none of the writers saw the picture first-hand, so from the point of view of connoisseurship, such attributions are of necessity tarnished.

Notwithstanding museum claims, technical tests cannot attribute works of art, nor can science date pigments used in the picture. Wood dating comes closer although, for reasons unknown to me, that important test has not been applied to the panel.

The museum says that the parapet or perspective shelf in its painting influenced a picture located in the Museo Civico of Montepulciano. Actually that object is irrelevant to the discussion of the $50 million painting because of the immense differences in size, scale, format, function and the Assisi tradition to which it belongs. The Montepulciano Madonna and Angels has three standing figures within an arch, while the Met’s tiny picture is a rectangular tableau with a single group, a conception congenial to 15th-century Flemish and Italian Renaissance portraits, where the parapet functions spatially as a plane in front of the sacred images.

The bottom line is that the Met asks us to believe the impossible: a nameless artist has appropriated a revolutionary element created by Duccio, but in none of his known works has the Master himself ever used it. Nor have any of his greatest pupils: Pietro Lorenzetti, Ambrogio Lorenzetti or Simone Martini. Such a sequence of events is unknown in the history of art.

My motive for raising the Duccio matter is that I am the founder of the not-for-profit organisation ArtWatch International, whose mission is to defend the dignity of art and artists of our past. When a mediocre object is classified as a great work by a great artist, that artist is unfairly diminished and the public is misled.

PROFESSOR JAMES BECK
Columbia University,
New York

Explore Letters

• Feedback