Faking it: Using DNA to authenticate art
“The Supper at Emmaus”, Han van Meegeren, Image courtesy of: Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam
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Art forgery has been going on for centuries, as us humans apparently just love ripping people off. But this type of fraud is becoming increasingly hard to get away with, thanks to our good old friend technology. Before we delve into it, let’s just quickly step back in time and learn more about the history of art forgery.
The Romans apparently liked to dabble in a bit of art forgery, by adding fake signatures or marks to pieces of art to insinuate they belonged to someone more famous, or passing off replicas of ancient Greek antiques. Then in the Italian renaissance in the 15th and 16th centuries grand masters would sneakily sell pieces of art produced by their apprentices, and nobody was any the wiser. Even some of the most famous artists wanted a look in. In 1496, Michelangelo created a sculpture called “Sleeping Cupid”, which he treated with acidic earth to make it appear like an ancient antique. He then sold this for a high price to a dealer who eventually found out it was a fake and demanded his money back.
More recently, one of the most infamous forgers of the 20th century was Dutch artist Han van Meegeren, who turned to faking it after he failed to make it with his own work. In 1937 he created a painting called “Supper at Emmaus” and claimed it was by the famous artist Johannes Vermeer. To his delight, the work was admired far and wide by critics and was eventually sold to Rotterdam’s Boijmans Gallery. Once van Meegeren had a taste of the fake art life, he couldn’t get enough. He went on to create six more Vermeer fakes and sold them for an estimated whopping $60 million, including to the prominent Nazi Hermann Göring.
The market for fraudulent art has continued to boom through to today. As an example of the scale and the money to be made, from the 1960s through to 2010,Wolfgang Beltracchi and his wife Helene fooled the art world with their forgeries of surrealist paintings, generating more than $100 million in sales. And the prestigious Knoedler gallery in New York had to close down and settle multimillion dollar lawsuits after apparently purchasing and flogging paintings supposedly by modern artists like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.
The biggest problem with catching art fraud is that there’s no failsafe test to prove something is a fake. As was seen in the case of van Meegeren, and many other times in history, even the most knowledgeable experts can be fooled by a convincing forgery. Certificates of authenticity can be faked too. And although a lot can be learned from studying the materials that are used in an artwork, there’s only so much authenticators can do in terms of taking and analysing samples from a potentially priceless painting.
In an attempt to fight modern-day art forgery, researchers have been developing techniques that involve using DNA to tag pieces of art. So, how does it work? Synthetic DNA, which can be made to order, is used to create a unique ID for the artwork. This is embedded into a tag which is stuck somewhere discrete, like the back of the canvas, or even covertly so that nobody even notices it’s there. The DNA effectively labels the artwork without damaging it, creating a permanent connection that can be detected even if the tag is removed. Synthetic DNA is very stable, so the system should last a long time. And it would be very, VERY hard to recreate to put on a fake.
These kinds of tags would enable art to be verified as true originals, and their heritage traced forward into the future. If this was the case, then anyone purchasing a piece of art without one of these encrypted tags could safely assume it was a fake, or at least be suspicious of it. And, as might be expected, enterprising art security firms like the company TagSmart are now connecting DNA labels with blockchain technology to create a permanent record of ownership.
Although the tags that are currently in development use synthetic DNA, there’s no reason why the same system couldn’t be used to tag an artwork with the artist’s own DNA if they’re still alive, providing a permanent indelible connection between artist and artwork long into the future. Obviously, this technique will only work for artworks that are already known about and authenticated. It can’t help with verifying previously undiscovered masterpieces that mysteriously turn up in an attic. But there might be another way that DNA can be useful for authenticating art and other artefacts.
As we explored back in episode 13 of our last series, Genetics at your fingertips, humans leave DNA everywhere, from our skin, saliva and hair follicles, and thanks to supersensitive techniques like PCR, this DNA can now be extracted and sequenced. So if you’re an artist, you’ll probably leave some DNA in your artworks too. There are now companies springing up that offer to try and extract DNA from hair or other biological remnants left trapped in artworks by the artist, which can be sequenced and used for verification - as long as there’s another sample of the artist’s DNA that it can be compared with. And that leads us neatly on to our next story.
