‘It’s a Beatle haircut’: historian claims 15th-century portrait is from the 1960s

Dalya Alberge: The Guardian

To the National Gallery, the man depicted in the masterpiece that hangs in its gallery of 15th-century treasures is a holy man, possibly a saint, reading a legal text. And the portrait is believed – at least by the gallery’s experts – to have been created in the workshop of the Netherlandish painter Rogier van der Weyden.

But to one leading art historian, it is nothing of the sort. Instead, it is a 20th-century fake, of an unknown man sporting a Beatles-style haircut and reading a paper containing nothing more than nonsense. …Read More

Pictured: A Man Reading (Saint Ivo?), attributed to the workshop of Rogier van der Weyden and, right, Eric Hebborn Composite: National Gallery/Rex