The project "How to Make A Fake: The Story of How Technical Art History Revealed The Hand of A Forger" presents the results of expert connoisseurship and technical analyses, conducted by Maryan Ainsworth and conservators at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, of the Virgin and Child with Donors triptych in the permanent collection of the Palmer Museum of Art at The Pennsylvania State University.
"How to Make A Fake" was developed, in collaboration with the curatorial department at the Palmer Museum of Art, as part of an initiative to support digital scholarship and pedagogy advanced by the Visual Resources Centre of the Department of Art History at Penn State. The site welcomes museum visitors to engage with the triptych through an interactive exhibit, which offers an opportunity to explore the stylistic and compositional characteristics of the triptych that arose the suspicions of curators and connoisseurs.
Emily Hagen is a graduate student in the Department of Art History at The Pennsylvania State University, where she works as a Digital Art History graduate assistant in the Visual Resources Centre. Emily and her colleague Keri Mongelluzzo developed and led a series of digital humanities workshops in the fall of 2018 to introduce graduate students to concepts and tools for digital scholarship in art history. Engaged in digital art history projects with the VRC and also with the Center for Humanities and Information of the University Libraries, Emily hopes to continue to advance the digital art history initiative at Penn State.
Special thanks to Catherine Adams, Yadin Flammer, Carolyn Lucarelli, Elizabeth C. Mansfield, Patrick McGrady, Dan Meehan, Keri Mongelluzzo, and John Russell.