The Illusion of Knowledge

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Nothing is quite as impressive to would-be investors as the glossy catalogues put out these days by auction houses in their anxiety to whip up business by attracting new customers.

Written in a professorial style bristling with technical words, the entries make you feel that these fellows really know what they are talking about. Not for a second would outsiders doubt that the authors of the catalogue may have not done their homework. Sadly, what is actually known often boils down to vague generalities and conjectures. Luckily for the auctioneers, the scholarly tone and the reproductions, backed up by illustrations of comparative or supposedly comparative material, create the illusion of knowledge. In some fields, this intellectual marketing is elevated to an art form.

Consider "antiquities," a denomination so broad as to be meaningless. In the Bonhams catalogue of an auction held in London on April 29, this covered anything as early as the art of pre-dynastic Egypt toward the end of the 4th millennium B.C. to works as late as the costume fittings left in the wake of the Germanic tribes pouring down Western Europe between the 4th and late 7th centuries A.D.

Looked at carefully, the characterizations of some Egyptian objects amounted to an admission that nothing much is known about them aside from their geographical provenance. An "Egyptian greywacke palette Predynastic Period, circa 3200 B.C." described a flat object 105/8 inches long, which was the stylized representation of a bird. Sophisticated in its seemingly simple rendition of the animal, the piece came close to abstraction and would fill many contemporary artists with jealousy. On no specific evidence, the catalogue dated it "circa 3200 B.C." What artists produced such objects, and in which context, escapes us. Perhaps the reduction of the bird to near abstraction proceeded from the same intellectual approach that led to the invention of hieroglyphic writing — some of its figural signs also reproduce birds in profile. But we don’t know for sure, and the emergence process of the hieroglyphs remains shrouded in mystery. The piece, irresistibly attractive, nevertheless made £7,200 ($11,900).

Even when Egyptian art belongs to periods well charted by countless discoveries, the vagueness borders on the absurd. The date put forward for a remarkable wooden mask that once formed part of a sarcophagus read "New Kingdom Third Intermediate Period circa 1550-702 B.C.," leaving an error margin of more than 800 years. Did some repainting inhibit bidders or was it the uncertainty hovering over its precise age? The modest price, £3,360 ($5,600), did not do full justice to this masterly ancient portrait.

At least there was no question about the geographical provenance of the piece. This could hardly be said about most objects made during the two or three centuries that followed the collapse of Roman domination over Western Europe.

Two costume fittings in gilt silver were catalogued as "Merovingian Fibulae, circa 5th-7th centuries." The Merovingian dynasty arose from the Franks, the Germanic group to which France owes its name. They ruled the country until the dynasty was toppled by another Germanic clan, which gave rise to the Carolingian empire. Written sources yield skeletal information about the Merovingians and shed no light on objects from that period dug up across Europe in chance finds since the 19th century. The two costume fittings could have surfaced almost anywhere between Belgium and Spain. With a £1,200 to £1,500 ($2,000-2,500) estimate, which should have been lower by a third or more, they stood no chance to sell.

The artistic production of entire cultures from the distant European past is perceived in equally hazy fashion. The Celtic world, which spread across much of Western Europe, left no written sources. Roman occupation succeeded in eliminating its languages, but it did not wipe out its highly original art. Small copper objects with abstract cloisonné enamel decoration have been emerging for the past 150 years, over vast stretches of Europe, but the context is almost always unknown and a chronology has yet to see the light of day.