Today, Wednesday 16 September 2009, CODART member Dr. Anna Tummers successfully defended her dissertation in the Aula of the University of Amsterdam. Her dissertation, The fingerprint of an Old Master: on connoisseurship of seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings: recent debates and seventeenth-century insights, deals with the relationship between modern views on connoisseurship and authenticity of paintings and the ideas about these issues in the 17th century. Last week Anna received considerable press attention with the epilogue of her dissertation, in which she compared modern ideas about a painting by Rembrandt with contemporary ideas about the same painting. The 20th-century de-attribution proved to be problematic in the context of the way contemporaries would have viewed the painting.

CODART congratulates Anna with her accomplishment and compliments her with her thesis, which treats a subject which will be of great interest and appeal to all CODART members