The Venetian hoax.(Current and coming)(Benjamin West and the Venetian Secret)

A dramatic but nearly forgotten episode in the history of painting is the subject of a small exhibition opening this month at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven. In late 1795 Benjamin West, the American expatriate painter who had succeeded Sir Joshua Reynolds as the president of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, became the victim of a remarkable scam that would very nearly cost him his reputation.

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This is the story in a nutshell: a shadowy figure named Thomas Provis and his daughter, an artist, convinced West that they possessed a copy of an old manuscript that recorded descriptions of materials and techniques used by Venetian Renaissance painters--most notably Titian--to achieve the famously luminous effects of light and color that British painters had long admired but that were presumed lost, forgotten, or shrouded in secrecy. West paid Provis a fair sum for what he believed was exclusive use of the manuscript and spent much of the next two years in his studio experimenting with the "Venetian Secret" to create a succession of increasingly complex paintings, culminating in his 1796-1797 canvas Cicero Discovering the Tomb of Archimedes, which he hoped would represent a lucrative technical breakthrough. In the meantime, Provis and his daughter had also managed to persuade a number of West's fellow academicians of the authenticity of the manuscript, convincing them too to pay up for access to its secrets. Eventually the fraud was exposed and the satirical press mercilessly pilloried the artists, West in particular because of his lofty position. In an effort to redeem himself, in 1804 West painted a second version of his Cicero canvas, an "atonement" version using traditional, conservative studio practices.

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Both versions of the painting are included in the exhibition at the Yale Center with ...