Riddled

The National Gallery has a cluttered little basement where they store the really crap paintings in their collection, like this one: "Scenes from Tebaldeo's Eclogues", by Andrea Previtali (attrib.; about 1505).

At first I assumed that they'd acquired it as part of a bequest that they couldn't turn down because it also contained some decent art... but no, they actually paid real money for it.

I couldn't find out much about Andrea Previtali on the Intertuba, so I am free to imagine him as a Mafia Don who turned his hand to painting as part of an elaborate scheme to convince the 16th-century Florentine Justice Department that he was mentally as well as artistically incompetent and in no state to stand trial on the various charges brought against him, mostly involving contraband incunabula and Lucrezia Borgia. Nor is there a great deal of information available¹ about Tebaldeo's Eclogues.² But I digress.

This sinister absence of information is evidence of a conspiracy on the face of it, or prima facie as we say when we're playing at scientists. It is a COVER-UP. Someone has been flushing the FACTS down the memory hole, and inevitably an inconvenient fact gets blocked in the S-bend, and then there's dirty data backing up on the floor, and the earliest the memory-hole plumber can come is on next Tuesday and even then he charges $80 just for the call-out charge and you sit around all day waiting for him even though he might not turn up at all.

Exhibit B is this other painting, lodged at the New Tate on the other side of the Thames. The formal similarities make it clear that this is the same painter -- even though this one is dated to 1928. So there are two possibilities. Perhaps "Previtali" has managed to extend his lifespan far beyond the natural bounds, through some arcane process that has been lost in the contemporary world where artificial barriers now exist -- in contrast to the free-and-easy Renaissance mentality -- between the fields of biology, alchemy, tinkering with elaborate clockwork mechanisms, and inflicting gratuitous pain upon cute animals in the name of vivisection. The other possibility is that an artist of the 20th century had access to time-travel technology, but that's just silly.

Either way, all the ingredients are in place for a blockbuster novel, and I am confidently waiting for a positive response from the publishers to the plot outline I sent them. I am not at liberty to divulge further details, except to say that Sir Francis Walsingham makes a cameo appearance, and that I visualise Mads Mikkelsen -- or if he's unavailable, Udo Kier -- in the role of multi-talented perceptual psychologist "Smut Clyde" who is drawn into the whole century-spanning conspiracy.

UPDATE: The public no longer enjoy access to the National Gallery basement. This could be for security reasons, or because too many crap artists were smuggling in their crap art and surreptitiously mounting it on the walls where the curators don't notice it among all the other crap art, but I prefer to see it as part of the ongoing SUPPRESSION OF EVIDENCE.

¹ For values of "available" that include "Free and easily Googled".

² "E-clogue" was of course the name of a shoe-shopping web company set up in Yorkshire during the buoyant, optimistic days of the dot.com bubble, only to disappear in an acrimonious wrangle of lawsuits and countersuits when the company went tits-up and its safe-deposit boxes were discovered to contain a lot of muck but NO BRASS AT ALL.