Could a tour guide, someone regularly working close to great works of art, really solve a puzzle that had defeated other scholars? This was the challenge facing Christine Cluley, one of the long-term “experience interpreters” who takes visitors around the collection at Compton Verney in Warwickshire. Now the detective work of the aptly named Cluley has narrowed the hunt for a mysterious unknown painter famous for creating a 500-year-old altarpiece. The work, which is to be displayed in its entirety this Thursday, has been reassembled for the first time in 30 years.
Cluley had always admired the two “wing” panels of the anonymous German work known as the Lamentation Altarpiece that are kept at Compton Verney, and she has spent 14 years unravelling its riddles. Chief among the mysteries is the identity of the painter, thought to have been born around 1472 and to have died in 1563.
