James Beck (art historian)

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James H. Beck (May 14, 1930 – May 26, 2007) was an American art historian specialising in the Italian Renaissance. He was an outspoken critic of many high-profile restorations and re-attributions of artworks, and founded the pressure group ArtWatch International to campaign against irresponsible practices in the art world.

Biography

James Beck was born in 1930 in

Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. At Columbia University he undertook his doctoral dissertation, on the sculpture of Jacopo della Quercia, under the supervision of Rudolf Wittkower
. Beck was granted a PhD in 1963 and he published his monograph on the sculptor in 1991. He remained on the art history faculty at Columbia for his entire life, serving as Professor of Italian Renaissance painting and sculpture from 1972.

Jacopo della Quercia's Madonna di Agliano, discovered by James Beck

A turning-point in Beck's career came in 1991 when, as the world's authority on Jacopo della Quercia, he was invited to comment on a recent restoration of one of the sculptor's works, an effigy of Ilaria del Carretto in Lucca Cathedral. Beck's enraged response was recorded by two reporters for newspapers based in Florence and Livorno, and in further interviews published in La Stampa (of Turin) and Il Giornale dell'Arte (based in Alessandria) he continued to voice his indignation at what he deemed a ruinous cleaning job. The sculpture's restorer - Dr. Gianni Caponi - filed lawsuits against him in the courts of all four cities citing criminal defamation, an offence punishable by up to three years in prison in Italy.[1]

Eventually, Beck won all four cases, and his success prompted him to establish

National Gallery's major acquisition of 2004) to Raphael
. He argued for the de-attribution of these works in his study From Duccio to Raphael: Connoisseurship in Crisis, published posthumously in 2007.

Discoveries

Self-portrait of Michelangelo

A round marble 36 cm representing the portrait of Michelangelo Buonarroti discovered by James Beck was reported in the "Michelangelo Assoluto" Scripta Maneant Editions of 2012 by Alessandro Vezzosi and presentations by Claudio Strinati.[2][3] Beck's discovery of a marble relief of the Madonna di Agliano by Jacopo della Quercia is mentioned in "Studi di storia dell'arte in onore di Mina Gregori" by Miklos Boskovits.[4]

References

  1. ^ Article 595 third paragraph of Italian Criminal Code
  2. ^ 'La formella è di Michelangelo'
  3. ^ "L'autoritratto di Michelangelo" Una scultura data all'artista Archived August 9, 2016, at the Wayback Machine
  4. ISBN 978-88-366-0450-0
    .
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