Backers of Yale Italian Paintings Show Lament Loss of ‘Eye’ - NYTimes.com

Seeking the ‘Eye’ for Art

By TED LOOS

NEW HAVEN — A dozen years ago the art dealer Richard L. Feigen attended an auction of European paintings at Sotheby’s in London and found a picture he liked: a richly colored scene of a religious vision, with a hovering saint and four angels, all topped by shimmering gold halos, that was attributed to a minor Italian painter.

Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

Paintings in Mr. Feigen’s collection at Yale include Orcagna’s “St. Benedict,” left, and Daddi’s “St. John the Evangelist.” More Photos »

“It seemed like it was from the third decade of the 15th century,” said Mr. Feigen, 79, who has been collecting art since he was a teenager. “But the perspective and the way some of the spaces were rendered seemed very far out for that moment.”

He picked it up for about $20,000 and a year later asked Laurence Kanter, an expert in early Italian painting and at the time a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for his opinion of the work. Examining a photograph of the painting, Mr. Kanter immediately felt the rush of discovery.

“The way the four feet of the scene’s candelabra sit perfectly, completely, convincingly on the floor, so you can see exactly how the floor recedes — only one artist ever painted like that, and that was Fra Angelico.”

More than that, Mr. Kanter soon realized — after a sleepless night and what he called “a eureka moment, like Archimedes in the bathtub” — that if the four corners of the work, which were hidden in its framed state, turned out to be gold leaf, it could be an Angelico from a famous five-part predella, the other four panels of which resided in institutions.

Bingo. Mr. Feigen had bought Angelico’s “Vision of St. Lucy,” from 1427 to 1429, a work that could conceivably fetch north of $5 milliBackers of Yale Italian Paintings Show Lament Loss of ‘Eye’ - NYTimes.com