The attributions game

Many art historians have written their own story of the making of an aesthete: Ruskin, Berenson and Kenneth Clark to name just three in the Anglo-Saxon world. The pattern varies, but typically it might include being bullied at school, a mentor, an epiphany in Italy, and the de rigueur discovery of Piero della Francesca.

The Eye has all the possibilities of being an appealing book in the same tradition — but for the author’s grating references to himself and his vocation as the ‘Eye’, as if this were some higher calling, a Glasperlenspiel in which the priesthood spends all day attributing Florentine paintings. ‘The Eye,’ we are informed, ‘is a miniature Christopher Columbus who roves over the world of art, alert to any surprises.’ Or these lines, worthy of Kahlil Gibran: ‘Though I was born with an Eye, I became an Eye… I am an Eye so that others can see.’ Craig Brown would have a field day. I began to imagine Thomas Chippendale referring to himself as ‘the Hand’. However, if one substitutes ‘art historian’ for ‘Eye’ the book becomes bearable and even enjoyable.

Who is Philippe Costamagna? He is the director of the Musée des Beaux-arts in Ajaccio, a respected specialist on Pontormo and Bronzino. Indeed, Costamagna’s book opens with his identification of a Bronzino Crucifixion in the Nice museum, an act of revelation that he compares to Claudel’s mystical conversion after hearing Vespers in Notre Dame.

Our ‘Eye’ comes from a cultivated bourgeois medical family that owned nice furniture and had family portraits painted by Renoir. There is a pleasing description of his early visits with his nanny to the smaller museums of Paris, his first artistic awakening when he visited André Malraux’s exhibition of the Musée Imaginaire at the Maeght Foundation in Vence, and later his attendance at the lectures of Michel Laclotte on Italian painting at the Ecole du Louvre.