LR Drill Set 13, Question 4
Museum curator: One way to identify forged paintings(40 more words not shown)
Which one of the following,(14 more words not shown)
- AArt historians have(15 more words not shown)
- BSpectroanalysis is only(12 more words not shown)
- CIt is difficult(18 more words not shown)
- DThe painting in(10 more words not shown)
- EThe painting in(12 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
What if someone touched up the painting later?
The chemical test finds materials that weren't available during the artist's lifetime. That would be a serious problem if every bit of paint on the canvas had to come from the original artist. But a painting can survive long after its creator, and someone might repair or alter it along the way.
That gives us a possible way to accept both statements: the original work is genuine, while some material now on it came from a later restoration. We don't need to declare the chemical test useless. It could correctly identify the later materials without showing that the entire painting is a forgery.
What we’re looking for
The question asks us to resolve the apparent discrepancy. I'd look for evidence of later additions to this painting—something that explains how newer material got onto a genuine old work.
Working the answers
- A
An incomplete list of materials from every artistic era doesn't establish that these particular materials were available during this artist's life. More fundamentally, the curator states that they were not available. A invites us to question that fact generally rather than showing how the stated fact can coexist with a genuine painting.
- B
Other authentication methods might exist, but we aren't given a result from any of them or an explanation of the newer pigments. Knowing there are several tools doesn't resolve what looks puzzling about this tool's result on this painting.
- C
A convincing ownership history might be difficult to fake, but the passage doesn't tell us this painting has such a history. Even if it did, we'd still want to explain why its pigments contain later materials. C adds a general observation about authentication without explaining this discrepancy.
- D
Never having been suspected is different from being genuine. A forgery might escape suspicion for years. And an earlier lack of suspicion doesn't explain the test's finding now. We need information about how the materials arrived, not how people previously regarded the work.
- ECorrect
Restoration adds work after the original painting was completed. Those later touch-ups could introduce materials unavailable to the original artist. The test can therefore detect newer pigment on a painting whose original creation is genuine.
E doesn't require us to treat every layer of the painting as dating from the same moment. That's the assumption that made the two facts seem impossible to reconcile. The original work and the later additions can have different histories.
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