Mr Fingerprint loses defamation case
December 16 2015
Picture: New Yorker Magazine
In July 2010, David Grann published an important investigative article in the New Yorker magazine highlighting the work of Peter Paul Biro (above), a restorer and art investigator who claimed to be able to authenticate pictures by finding fingerprints on them and matching them with the artist in question. The article claimed, essentially, that Biro was making things up, and found that he had an awkward history involving court cases and suspect paintings. In the most damaging passage, the New Yorker deduced that in one case - an alleged Jackson Pollock - Biro had taken real fingerprints from Pollock's studio, and then applied copies of them onto the painting in question. Very quickly, Biro's reputation collapsed.
Biro sued the magazine, and others, but this week finally lost his case. It's a shame it dragged on for so long.
Before the New Yorker article, Biro was involved in a lot of important art investigations. He was asked, for example, to analyse a fingerprint apparently found on the 'Bella Principessa' drawing attributed by Prof. Martin Kemp to Leonardo. Here's a passage from the New Yorker article which sets out how Biro apparently 'found' a finger-print on the Bella Principessa, with the aid of our old friend the 'multi-spectral camera' (the one invented by Pascal Cotte):
Even in a high-resolution photograph, the fingerprint was unreadable; Biro called it “complete visual confusion.” Many fingerprint examiners, he said, would have been stymied. Then, as if he were lining up a row of mug shots, he called up a series of photographs from a multispectral-imaging camera. Because the images had been made with different wavelengths of light, none of them looked exactly the same. In some photographs, the texture of the parchment—the background “noise,” as Biro put it—was pronounced. In others, the ridge patterns in the fingerprint were accentuated and the parchment all but faded away. From one photograph to the next, Biro said, “the smudge becomes clearer.” Still, it was not clear enough. His next step, he said, was “proprietary.” Using advanced image-processing software, he subtracted the background noise from each image, until only the clearest parts of the fingerprint remained. Finally, he said, clicking on another icon, “You get this.”
The smudge had been transformed into a more legible print: now, at least, there were the outlines of ridges and bumps. When I asked Biro if he worried that his method might be flawed, he said that during nearly two decades of fingerprint examinations he had “not made one mistake.” He added, “I take a long time and I don’t allow myself to be rushed.”
In other words, if you look at enough multi-spectral images in the right way, there's a danger you can end up seeing what you want to see. Regrettably, Biro's results made it into the book heralding the 'Bella Principessa' as a Leonardo, somewhat undermining the whole project. The book was published in March 2010. I remember reading the fingerprint chapter, and thinking it was all extremely speculative, and very far from anything like a convincing match. But it was greeted at the time as a great discovery, mainly because Biro was a 'forensic' investigator, and the fingerprint was found using whizzy new scientific imagery. I'm afraid the whole saga is just more evidence of the tendency (as discussed below with the recent Mona Lisa story) for us to believe any art historican pronouncements if they're made by scientists, or even pseudo-scientists.
I have have a fear that if it hadn't been for the New Yorker's excellent article, Biro's methodology and questionable results would have proceeded almost unchallenged. I remember discussing his techniques with people at the time the Bella Principessa book was launched, and being surprised by their conviction that such 'forensic' methods would become a mainstay of 'modern connoisseurship'. I can sort of understand why - for fingerprinting is infallible in the criminal justice world, and its translation into art authentication seemed difficult to challenge. Biro was being hired and consulted by people's whose opinions count in the art world, and the 'Turners' and 'Picassos' were all beginning to enter the system. So - thank goodness for David Grann.
