There are many copies of the Taking of Christ, writes Aidan Dunne, Art Critic
Looking back at one of the most celebrated art forgeries in history - van Meegeren's fake Vermeers - it is hard to believe how such clumsy pastiches could ever have been taken for the real thing.
When it comes to the debate over which is the real Caravaggio, things are much more complicated.
As it happens, there are many copies of the Taking of Christ in existence. Most of them, as National Gallery Senior Curator Sergio Benedetti himself has said, are vastly inferior copies, virtually caricatures of the original, easily identifiable as imitations. But several are not.
Then there are the as yet insurmountable difficulties in tracing the history of the painting on the basis of contemporary documentation, which is fragmented, often ambiguous and sometimes even contradictory.
As Benedetti and Francesca Cappelletti wrote in 1993, "problems still remain when one attempts to trace Caravaggio's Taking of Christ from 1602 to its purchase by Hamilton Nisbet in 1802".
The Dublin painting corresponds in size and composition to the most reliable descriptions of the original, and it is demonstrably a very fine painting, fine enough, Benedetti argues, to warrant attribution to Caravaggio.
The original Taking of Christ, which was painted in 1602, was the subject of a commissioned copy as early as 1626. At some stage late in the 18th century, the painting was re-attributed to the Dutch painter Gerrit van Honthorst.
Honthorst, an extremely accomplished artist, was the best known of a group of Dutch followers of Caravaggio, and he was active in Rome until the late 1620s. Benedetti - and he is by no means alone in this - takes the attribution to Honthorst as being simply mistaken.
But the mis-attribution, if such it was, as documented in a 1793 inventory, gets Honthorst's Italian sobriquet wrong, and this error was repeated in the sale of a painting to Hamilton Nisbet in 1802. Since Nisbet's painting is the Dublin picture, the repeated error bolstered Benedetti's view that it is the original Caravaggio that had been mistakenly attributed to Honthorst.
The painting currently in Rome extends the composition by comparison with the Dublin picture, which might sound slightly disturbing. But it is by no means unknown for copyists to do just that. Caravaggio had a highly distinctive way of working at great speed from live models.
He habitually scored lines in the paint with the tip of his brush handle and revised as he went along. Traces of both these practices are usually discernable in the finished works.
There are alterations in progress to the Dublin painting, but they are relatively minor ones. The physical constituents and artistic quality of the painting are not inconsistent with it being by Caravaggio, but the Rome painting reportedly shows evidence of more significant revisions, which would strengthen the case for its being the original.
If those arguing for its authenticity can come up with hard evidence of Caravaggio's characteristic working methods in its execution, and if the quality of the painting is convincing, the Dublin picture's claim may start to look shaky.
Could there be two versions by Caravaggio, or might that attribution to Honthorst have been right all along? Whichever, it must be alarming to the National Gallery here that Sir Denis Mahon, who has donated paintings to the gallery and is widely respected as an expert on the period, is cited as backing the claims for the Rome painting.