With the exhibition of Richard Feigen’s collection of Italian paintings, curator and expert Laurence Canter battles to bring connoisseurship back to the discipline of art history. Ted Loos reports
A dozen years ago the art dealer Richard L. Feigen attended an auction of European paintings at Sotheby’s in London and found a picture he liked: a richly colored scene of a religious vision, with a hovering saint and four angels, all topped by shimmering gold halos, that was attributed to a minor Italian painter.
“It seemed like it was from the third decade of the 15th century,” said Mr. Feigen, 79, who has been collecting art since he was a teenager. “But the perspective and the way some of the spaces were rendered seemed very far out for that moment.”
He picked it up for about $20,000 and a year later asked Laurence Kanter, an expert in early Italian painting and at the time a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for his opinion of the work. Examining a photograph of the painting, Mr. Kanter immediately felt the rush of discovery.(…more at NY Times website…)