Word: lardoux
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...Museum here an X-ray picture of the Louvre copy of the disputed painting. Supreme Court Justice Black, desiring to hasten the conclusion of the case, urged that an air-plane be dispatched to bring the negative to New York, where, by a comparison with Mrs. Andree Lardoux Hahn's copy, it might decide which is the original...
Ammunition. Then for eight years the trial was held in abeyance while both sides collected ammunition. Expert minions of Sir Joseph and of Mrs. Hahn went to the Louvre, taking the Lardoux painting with them. They peered, compared, photographed, microphotographed, studied old scripts, gathered historical data...
Back to Sir Joseph came favorable reports by "expertizers" of the two paintings. Said they of the Lardoux portrait: "Soggy and bulgy ... it resembles in portions a child's balloon . . . mouth too luscious . . . angularity of the 18th century is here translated into the suavity of the late 18th...
...Joseph knew nothing of pigmentation or the chemistry of .colors. He had pronounced on the Lardoux painting without seeing either the painting itself or -a photograph. Once he stated his dou'bt that the Louvre Belle was by Leonardo, then he retracted and said he was sure of it. He could not find hatching strokes on the Lardoux portrait which he claimed to have seen eight years before; he apologized for his failing eyesight...
Defense. Sir Joseph volleyed in return. He defined an expert as "a man who knows pictures and can tell a copy from an original." Of the Lardoux painting he said: "The neck is a clumsy cylinder of flesh . . . there are unnatural plates of flesh . . . faulty construction, faulty anatomy." He pointed to "poor" shadows, an off-perspective eye, awkward drawing. He defined technique as the "handwriting" of an artist whereby a "friend" can always recognize his work. Leonardo, he felt, could never have been a botchy anatomist, nor did the picture reveal his technique...