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Fingerprint analysis is a biometric, forensic method. In other words, it uses a physiological characteristic to identify the artist. (Maltoni, D. Handbook of Fingerprint Recognition, Springer, New York, 2003, p. ix.) Only recently have fingerprints been used to identify artists. The use of fingerprints in criminal investigation developed in the late Nineteenth Century.
Pre-historic people understood that fingerprints were distinctive and important. In 1971, Neolithic fingerprint carvings were found on Gavrinis Island, off the coast of Brittany, France. (Cunliffe, B. The Celtic World, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1979, pp. 17-28.) The same year, a lamp decorated with fingerprint impressions was found in Israel dating ca. 400 A.D. In 2000, a Neolithic freestanding stone carved with a fingerprint was discovered on Goat Island, also off the coast of Brittany. A clay seal with a fingerprint carved on it dating from about 300 B.C. was discovered in 2001. ("Fingerprints," Oxford Illustrated Dictionary of Prehistoric Europe, Oxford University Press, Oxford, U.K., 2002.) But, scholars do not yet understand what significance the ancients attached to fingerprints.
One of the Gavrinis Island slabs with fingerprint-like carving image. Courtesy Wikipedia
The concept of evidence was not even part of court proceedings until 1504, when King Henry VII decreed that there must be eyewitness testimony before someone would be convicted of a certain crime. The first published work on fingerprint analysis did not view fingerprinting in the context of criminality, but as part of the classification of people. Dr. Nehemiah Grew, a medical doctor in England, wrote on the ridge, pore, and furrow structure of fingerprints in 1684. Grew was also an amateur botanist and wrote extensively on plant anatomy. (Beaven, C. Fingerprints, Hyperion, New York, 2001, pp. 36-37.)
During the Nineteenth Century, two vying systems of criminal identification appeared: fingerprinting and anthropometry. Alphonse Bertillon (1853-1914) developed anthropometry (also called Bertillonage), based on measurements of eleven parts of the body, plus scars and birthmarks. (Caplan, J. and Torpe, J., eds., Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2001, pp. 65-88.) Originally, Bertillon was interested in halting severe recidivism in Paris. Translations of Bertillon's manuals appeared all over the world and were used to train police officers. But Bertillonage was used by many to tie criminality with ethnic or racial origin. By the early Twentieth Century, "dactyloscopy," the original term for the study of fingerprints, had supplanted anthropometry in England, throughout the British Empire, and in South America. (Cole, S., Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2001, pp. 102, 113.)
An English civil servant in India, Sir William James Herschel (1833-1917) was the first to use fingerprints for identification of parties to contracts in 1882. Dr. Henry Faulds, M.D. from Scotland, used fingerprint identification to exonerate someone accused of stealing from his hospital in Japan (see Faulds, H. "On the Skin-furrows of the Hand," Nature, 1880, p. 605.) Faulds tried to interest Charles Darwin in fingerprints, but Darwin sent Faulds' letter about fingerprinting to his cousin Francis Galton. Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911), English statistician, anthropologist and psychometrician, wrote an article arguing that no two fingerprints were identical. (see Galton, F. Fingerprints, Macmillan, London, 1892.) Galton's scholarship made fingerprints acceptable evidence in English courts of law. Today, the view that no two fingerprints are identical is under attack. (Cole, S., Suspect Identities, pp. 258-273.)
Sir Edward Henry, while helping to govern British India wrote Classification and Uses of Fingerprints, which introduced a system for classifying fingerprints that greatly simplified searching for fingerprints. Henry divided finger impressions into four types: arches, loops, whorls and composites. (Lee, H.C. and Gaesslen, R.E., eds., Advances in Fingerprint Technology, Elsevier, New York, 1991, pp. 80-85.) Great Britain started using the Henry system in 1901, and it is still the most popular system of fingerprint classification.
In 1882, Gilbert Thompson of the U.S. Geological Survey was the first official to use his fingerprint (in this case his thumbprint) to designate his authentic orders. Federal penitentiaries in the U.S began fingerprinting prisoners in 1904. (Wilton, G.W. Fingerprints: History, Law and Romance, William Hodge, Glasgow, 1938, pp.59-62.) Yet as late as 1906, city police departments in the United States used both fingerprinting and the Bertillon system. As an experiment, all arrested prostitutes in New York City were fingerprinted in 1910. It was thought that the Bertillon measurements could not and should not be applied to women. During the period around World War I, there was massive immigration into the United States. Many criminologists and police officials thought that anthropometry was tantamount to racial typing. A dedicated fingerprint division was established by the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover in 1924. Today the United States has the largest collection of fingerprints in the world. (Maltoni, p. 24)
Bertillon's methods were discredited when they failed in the high-profile Mona Lisa case in 1911. The thief was a Louvre employee who had a criminal record and had been fingerprinted. But only the right fingerprints were on record under the Bertillon system; in the Mona Lisa case the fingerprints were from the left hand. It took two years for the thief to turn up with the painting. Many speculated that if Bertillon had kept a database of left hand, as well as right hand, fingerprints, the Mona Lisa would have been recovered in two hours rather than two years. (Cole, S. "The Way We Live Now: 5-13-01; The Myth of Fingerprints," New York Times Magazine, Sunday, 13 May 2001, p. 13.)
The fingerprints of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) himself have been a popular subject of scholarship. In 2005 an Italian anthropologist, Luigi Capasso, led a team at the University of Chiesti that found the fingerprint of Leonardo's left index finger (image below). They scrutinized over fifty documents Leonardo had touched and isolated two hundred possible Leonardo fingerprints. According to Capasso, the fingerprint showed that Leonardo was Middle Eastern, probably a slave, and not of Italian ancestry. ("Arts Briefly," New York Times, 2 December 2006.)
Alleged fingerprint of Leonardo da Vinci discovered by Luigi Capasso
Scholars believe this is Leonardo da Vinci's fingerprint embedded in a manuscript
Leonardo da Vinci is among the many artists who used their fingers to paint. His fingerprint is distinctive because he was left-handed. In 2000, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC asked the FBI to conduct a fingerprint search on the only Leonardo da Vinci portrait in the United States: Ginevra de' Benci of Florence painted in 1474, oil on panel, 38.2 x 36.7 cm.
Fingerprints in the lower left background of the portrait of Ginevra had been discovered in the 1960s when the painting first came to the National Gallery. Thomas Brachet, one of the National Gallery conservators, published studies of the fingerprint on this painting, as well as fingerprints he found in pictures by contemporaries of Leonardo da Vinci. (Kirsh, A. and Levinson, R., Seeing Through Paintings: Physical Examination in Art Historical Studies, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2000, p. 134.) More fingerprints were discovered on the portrait of Ginevra when it was cleaned in 1990. The fingerprints are apparent in the portrait of Ginevra even in ordinary light, and they are highly visible under X-ray. The FBI sent Louis Hupp, their highest-ranking fingerprint expert, to look at the Ginevra painting at the National Gallery. The FBI's investigation of the fingerprints on the National Gallery painting was interrupted by the events of 9/11 and has not been completed. ("Cracking the da Vinci Code," Sunday Times of London, 19 September 2004, online edition.) A French Leonardo da Vinci painting has also yielded fingerprints. (Henneberger, M., "A Work in Progress," Art News Online, January 2003.)
Other prominent artists who painted with their fingers include Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528); Giovanni Bellini (1430-1516); Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525-69) (see "Digital Analysis 'Fingerprints' Artists," Scientific American, 23 November 2004); Cornelius Ketel (1548-1616), Piero della Francesca (1410-1492); Michelangelo (1475-1564); Goya (1746-1828); Degas (1834-1917); Jackson Pollock (1912-1956); and Francis Bacon (1909-1992). These fingerprints might provide good "exemplars" (samples) for authentication. (Kirsh and Levinson, p. 134.)
The authenticity of a picture supposedly by Jackson Pollock has been the subject of controversy, film, and ongoing litigation. In the early 1990s, Teri Horton bought an abstract painting in a California thrift store for about $5.00. Many highly credentialed art experts are skeptical that the painting is by Pollock, including Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A Canadian restorer, however, claims to have found Pollock fingerprints on the reverse of Ms Horton's painting that match alleged Pollock fingerprints. These supposed Pollock fingerprints are on the can of blue paint (image below) the restorer found at the Pollock-Krasner studio at East Hampton, New York. (Cole, S., "A Little Art, A Little Science, A Little 'CSI'," New York Times, 31 December 2006, online edition)
The alleged fingerprint of Jackson Pollock, image from "Art News," June 2008
In September 2009 fingerprints of van Gogh, termed "excellent," were found on a painting Summer Evening (1888), according to Ella Hendricks, chief of conservation at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. (Bailey, M., "Van Gogh's fingerprints found in mistral work," The Art Newspaper, September 2009, p. 27.) The prints seem to be of two fingers on the artist's left hand. They are the best van Gogh fingerprints found to date and might be useful in authentication.
A Leonardo da Vinci was tentatively identified using fingerprint analysis in October 2009. The pen and chalk work on paper of a young woman in profile has been the subject of international scholarly investigation for several years. Infrared light was used to find a fingerprint for comparison with a good sample fingerprint from Leonardo's oil on panel work, St. Jerome (1482) at the Vatican. (Itzkoff, D., "Arts Beat," New York Times, 13 October 2009, online edition.) The newly attributed drawing was also subjected to carbon dating, which was less specific and placed the painting as having been created between 1440 and 1650. ("Fingerprint Tech Identifies Leonardo da Vinci, Times of London, 13 October 2009, online edition.)
Fingerprint analysis is an increasingly popular tool in art authentication. Some are still skeptical of its application, but fingerprints provide valuable information that could help us authenticate or attribute your painting. Please contact us at info@artexpertswebsite.com or 1-386-676-0160 for more information on how fingerprint analysis may be relevant to your painting. |
