Did Raphael Make Us Do WhoDunit?

WSJ’s “Is This Painting A Raphael or Not?” covers experts’ debate over a 1995 find & how “fortune rides on” it BUT even if painting not judged 100% Raphael isn’t it better than 99.99% of crap elitists pass off today as “fine art”?

As the story goes, “For decades, a group of investors has been hoping to prove that an artwork found [by a Chicago area cabinet maker on vaca] in an Illinois antique shop is by the Renaissance master.” The work itself “depicts Mary holding an infant Jesus in her lap as her older cousin Elizabeth and a toddler John the Baptist look on lovingly; the backdrop features an oak tree with a goldfinch, an ancient symbol foreshadowing the Crucifixion.” Was the painting dated all the way back to the Renaissance or not? And, if so, was it created by Raphael and, therefore, worth MILLIONS? The WSJ piece goes on in great detail about how art experts around the globe have been pouring over the cabinet maker’s painting & its “brush strokes” with every artistic & technological technique known to the art world … and, still, the pros & cons seem evenly divided pending a “final” decision to be made by someone, somewhere.

Whatever. Arguably the main take away is that the top art experts mostly agree on one thing: The discovered Madonna with Baby Jesus is a remarkable work whose “faces” certainly quack, waddle & fly like Raphael while the surrounding features & panels “may” have been completed by the master’s assistants, as was typical of the time. Another unspoken take away from the decades long debate perhaps? That being, a reminder of how truly GREAT many of the Renaissance artists’ techniques were &, especially, compared to some of the “works of art” today that may be no more than handfuls of paint splashed on a canvass being passed off as masterpieces.

Davd Soul