John Brewer: Art and Science: A Da Vinci Detective Story

This event was digitally recorded and is available for viewing on the Caltech Theater site.

In addition, a PDF version of the accompanying article in Caltech's Engineering & Science magazine is available.

In 1920 the art dealer Joseph Duveen dismissed an alleged Leonardo da Vinci, "La Belle Ferronniere," as a copy or a fake. His opinion initiated a decade-long law suit and courtroom drama dubbed "the battle of the experts," in which the art connoisseur's eye and the tools of modern science were locked in conflict. Using this case and others, Brewer looks at the changing relationship between technology and the human eye in the task of identifying and attributing great works of art.

Dr. Brewer,the Eli and Edye Broad Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor of History and Literature at Caltech, is the author of, among many other works, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century and A Sentimental Murder: Love and Madness in the Eighteenth Century.

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