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Wednesday, 19 October 2016

"Art History News" Blog and Recent Provenance

One of the blogs I follow is Art History News: it has nothing to do with medieval manuscripts, but it occasionally has something interesting to me -- about the art market, for example.

It has been following the Affair of the Fake Cranach since the story broke, and today has a post about how the series of fakes could probably have been unmasked sooner if more attention had been paid to their (lack of) provenance:
http://www.arthistorynews.com/articles/4201_Provenance

Forgery is very rarely an issue with medieval manuscripts, but what has become very prevalent in recent years is the "restoration" of illuminations by dealers. They have apparently found a very gifted artist to restore and visually improve damaged miniatures, and often the only way of knowing what has happened is to compare the present appearance, with a photograph taken a few years or a few decades ago: yet another reason why the tracing of recent provenance is important.

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