Gallery’s portrait of Michelangelo is 1950s fake, claims expert

A portrait displayed as part of the National Gallery’s critically acclaimed Michelangelo exhibition is an obvious fake, probably painted in the 1950s, an eminent art historian has said.

The image of the artist is described by the gallery as “probably by” Sebastiano del Piombo, a protégé of the Renaissance master.

However, Charles Hope, former director of the Warburg Institute at the University of London, said that the attribution was far too optimistic. “Everything suggests that it is a modern fake, probably dating from just before its emergence in 1960,” he wrote in an essay on the exhibition in the London Review of Books.

Professor Hope noted that there was no visual evidence of the painting prior to 1960, when it was recorded as being part…