Window cleaner in quest to confirm priceless Shakespeare portrait | Hacker News Reader

Window cleaner in quest to confirm priceless Shakespeare portrait

bbc.com

16 pointsrmason17 comments

The article does not make it clear why they think the portrait depicts Shakespeare. I guess you have to watch the tv show for that information?

It talks about comparison to other portraits of Shakespeare, but as far as I know there are no depictions of Shakespeare confirmed to have been made in his lifetime.

Yeah that was my thought exactly. It certainly looks like a lot of other so-called depictions of Shakespeare, which are all based on images we know are not images of him but of other people.

The Droeshout engraving and the Stratford monument don't fit that description, and they were accepted by Shakespeare's contemporaries.

Agreed it's not clear from the article, but I think the reason is the similarity to an engraving called the Droeshout portrait [0]

> It is one of only two works of art definitively identifiable as a depiction of the poet

> ... commentators have used the Droeshout print as a standard by which to judge other portraits alleged to depict Shakespeare.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droeshout_portrait

a starting place to help in determining any and all of these sorts of paintings, would be a complete catelog of evererything in existence related including tools, note books,church records,genetic evidence,clothing, all of it. And have at it, a grand and worthy quest, and as has happened many times, the tinyest details can make or break a theory, and it is the fleshing out of those minutia that brings the past back to life, and that imediatecy is what facinates people And to think of the lovely absurdity of this bloke, growing up, with the bard,himeself, looming just there by the telly.,.

I've never been a fan of classic portraits of people, but by way of watching a lot of Baumgartner restoration videos it's become an interest.

A lot apparently goes into establishing the authenticity of portraits. As a conservator, he does a lot of work in the background that isn't always conveyed in the videos.

Sometimes the outcome of his restoration efforts is to communicate to the client that the painting is either a copy, or may have history but the subject isn't who they thought it was.

No actual comment on this particular story, but the little bit I've learned of the art community is that they put a huge amount of effort into confirming provenance. The history of the painting.

So if a lot of experts in the field are raising doubts, it's probably worth examining their statements.

Like archaeologists, most want to make a major find. It's career making. But that also requires being highly sceptical of new claims.

>Baumgartner restoration

Other conservators are less than complimentary of him and he deleted the PVA video along with a bunch of others.

Title: Window cleaner in quest to confirm priceless Shakespeare portrait

Later in article:

> if it were proven to be the prolific playwright, it could be worth "anywhere from £100m to £200m".

Well done BBC. I still remember when you were different.

Oh, come on. “Priceless” is never not hyperbole. Everything has a price. But for an average person, 100 million pounds is an unimaginable amount of money. Any object worth that much is essentially priceless.

I considered that before posting, and I disagree.

The Crown Jewels are genuinely priceless. Yes, “priceless” is common hyperbole, but the BBC claim to integrity and quality reporting just made me think that they might consider a more accurate title.

We’ve come so far in normalising casual mis-reporting that this argument even needs to be backed up.

I don’t think this portrait is any more or less priceless than the Crown Jewels. After all, the Crown Jewels are only a bunch of precious materials that an artist put together and have been associated with importance and uniqueness by (western) human history. Shakespeare is widely regarded as among the important artists in western history, so a genuine historic images would be important to many.

Now, people from other cultures may just consider both rubbish and melt down the Crown Jewels for the raw materials - or hang the portrait over their fireplace.

Priceless is always in the eye of the beholder.

Right. And if a beholder beholds something with value that simply cannot be captured in a tradeable form (since to have a price implies it is tradable and For Sale) then no price exists for which a trade could exist. It would be literally priceless.

I'm surprised I seem to be in the minority in disagreeing with the idea that "everything has a price", as if it's just a matter of finding a number high enough.

The Crown Jewels are worth between 3 and 5 billion pounds.

Look, if you read “priceless” in a headline about a painting and think it literally means that the painting has a vast, unknown value that can never be determined, that’s on you.

I'll bite.

Suppose an imaginary private buyer was willing to buy the Crown Jewels for £5 billion. It's absurd to believe that the Royal Family would even entertain such an offer because (a) it's not like they would be incentivised by the money and (b) it would be a remarkable act of self-harm to the extent the deal would be so shockingly unpopular that it would only serve to threaten the Royal Family itself. So why on Earth would they agree to that? Responding "OK, how about £10 billion?" does nothing to resolve that calculus. In that sense, no price exists for which they could be sold - they are literally priceless.

The idea they "are worth between 3 and 5 billion pounds" is so daft that I'm pretty sure you just got that from ChatGPT.

Actually for fun i just asked: I got a material valuation of the stones at "several billion pounds if assessed purely by their material worth" (so about the same as your claim), but that "their true worth is incalculable".

What's another word for a price that's incalculable?

Call me old-school, but I actually relied on the good old-fashioned media: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/how-much-crown-jewels-wor...

It is priceless in the sense that its value is an unknown and unset. If it were a true depiction of Shakespeare of the era then it would almost certainly become one of the most valuable paintings in the world. What is that price? Who knows. Whatever someone would be willing to pay. Might be 50 million might be a billion. Nobody knows. Any attempt to price it is just a guess. Therefore it is priceless. Its value has no upper bound.

A price that is unknown is simply "unpriced".

Every sale is between two parties, the price is simply any agreed value that would result in a sale. So it's not just what someone is willing to pay, but also what someone is willing to sell for. If both those ranges don't overlap, no sale.

I would argue a better definition of priceless is one in which no value could ever be discovered for which a sale could exist. Not because it is too high, but because there are constraints to that price equation (as governed by both parties) that overlap in such a way as there is simply no solution.

Examples are obvious, but in the case of the the Crown Jewels, they are priceless because of their identity and their inseparable significance to the United Kingdom. There is no price for which decision makers could agree on and keep their jobs (or their head), to the extent that a sale could ever exist. In the eyes of the public, the Monarchy itself would be at stake. In that sense the Crown Jewels are priceless, literally without price.

If this painting were genuine i don't think there's anything that would stop the seller from being able to agree on a price that would enable them to sell it.

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