TranscriptMan So, what was the most interesting art exhibition you’ve ever seen?Woman Probably one I saw in London a few years ago. I spent my summer holiday there, and one rainy day I visited the National Gallery. What amazed me most was that almost all the paintings were fakes. They weren’t genuine.Man So why did the gallery show them?Woman Well, they thought it would be interesting to have an exhibition about the role of science in understanding art. And it is. It’s fascinating to see some of the mistakes museums made before the development of sophisticated scientific methods. Nowadays, of course, experts examine works of art they want to buy scientifically, and this helps them decide whether the price is right and whether they’re dealing with the real thing at all.Man Do they ever make mistakes?Woman Yes, expensive mistakes! And this exhibition showed some of the worst mistakes the gallery had made in the past. One mistake in 1845 cost the keeper – that’s the person in charge of the gallery – his job. The gallery paid a lot of money for a painting they thought was by Hans Holbein, but actually, it was painted at least seventeen years after the artist had died!Man How embarrassing! What about other big mistakes?Woman Well, on one occasion they bought what they thought were two paintings by Botticelli. They paid about 1,000 pounds for one of them – a lot of money at the time – and more than 1,600 for the other one. It turns out that the cheaper one is genuine, but the more expensive one probably isn’t.Man Any other nasty surprises?Woman Well, there are some long-running disputes! The most well-known is probably the story of The Madonna of the Pinks. It was bought by the gallery in 2004. The seller had always thought the picture was a copy of a painting by Raphael, but the expert from the gallery disagreed. He thought it was a genuine Raphael. However, the painting was going to be sold to an American collector and the gallery was very keen to keep it in Britain. They had to raise a lot of money to be able to buy it for the National Gallery. In fact, they paid over £22 million for it. A lot of people criticised the museum’s expert for wasting the National Gallery’s money on a copy, but he was sure that the painting was genuine and that it was worth every penny they paid for it! The debate continues to this day.
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