#art-attribution

#art-attribution

Beneath the layers of dirt accumulated over the centuries, a very particular color palette appeared. The tones, the blends, the way the human figure was treated: all of it began to resemble the style Michelangelo would use years later in none other than the Sistine Chapel.

One of her most famous portraits allegedly shows the queen as a young girl, holding a shuttle used for weaving in one hand and a red thread in the other. Assumed to have been about seven years old, she wears a steely gaze directed at the observer, typical of a powerful queen-to-be. The acclaimed watercolour, painted in 1762 by Genevan painter Jean-Étienne Liotard, appears in biographies of Marie Antoinette all around the world.

And yet, not a century earlier, that name was near unknown to anyone who knew anything about the history of painting in France. In fact, it was a German art historian with prodigious visual recall, Hermann Voss, who in 1915 thought to connect two paintings in the Nantes Museum of Fine Arts (respectively signed "GS. de La Tour" and "G. de La Tour") with an unsigned canvas, titled Newborn Child, in Rennes.