"Stylistically, it was all wrong," she says. "As an object, it had no presence." By contrast, she notes, "Even at a distance, in a museum, when an object does have a presence, I feel like crossing myself like a Greek Orthodox, because it is almost religiously valid." Instead, she explains, when she encountered "Samson and Delilah" up close, "There was just this piece of dead timber lying on a blockboard; it looked like it had been ironed on. It had no texture of oak whatsoever."

(More recently, Doxiades became aware of a document issued by the Oxford Dendrochronology Laboratory, an independent tree-ring dating organization in England. It referred to the disputed painting's wood support as lacking essential sapwood elements that would make for a more accurate reading of its age. The laboratory noted that, as a result, the work could "just as easily" have been painted as late as 1620 or 1630. Physical age alone, such remarks seem to suggest, may not precisely determine if the picture is a Rubens or not.)

Among several stylistic aspects of the painting, Doxiades also noticed that, at the lower right edge of the picture, Samson's stretched-out right foot was truncated -- and that it had intentionally been painted that way. That detail, she says, appeared inconsistent with Rubens' usual compositional practices and with two well-known copies of the image that had been made during Rubens' lifetime. One was a detailed engraving of his "Samson and Delilah" made by Jacob Matham just a few years after Rubens completed his picture. On his engraving, Matham even included a written dedication to Nicolaas Rockox, calling attention to the precision with which he had copied the Rubens original. A second copy of the Rubens work was actually a painting within a painting; it appears above a monumental mantelpiece in "Supper at the House of Burgomaster Rockox" (circa 1630), a view of the sitting room in Rockox's Antwerp home where the Rubens picture had been installed. Although less detailed than a full-scale copy of the original would have been, the composition of the painting, by the Flemish artist Frans Francken II (1581-1642), clearly matches up with that of Matham's engraving. (Today, Francken's painting is in the collection of the Alte Pinakothek.)

Among numerous critical points or discrepancies mentioned on the AfterRubens.org Web site or in the 1992 analysis paper written by Doxiades and her colleagues is the fact that Matham's and Francken's "Samson and Delilah" copies show only three Philistine soldiers lurking in a doorway on the right side of the picture, whereas the National Gallery's picture depicts five. (Delilah, accepting a bribe from the Philistines, conspired to cut her Jewish lover's hair, the source of his strength, while he was sleeping, then turn him over, powerless, to the military men.)

The Web site also criticizes the "hack-illustration" quality of the drawing of the face of an old woman who appears next to Delilah, holding a candle, and of the rendering of Samson's face and head (with its "abandoned, half-drawn curls" and "formless jumble of smudged browns" for a beard.) It also calls attention, most obviously, to the same old woman's uplifted right hand, which displays none of the masterly foreshortening and understanding of anatomy that seem so effortless in much of Rubens' other work, like another old woman's outstretched hand in "The Massacre of the Innocents."

The criticism of the National Gallery's "Samson and Delilah" also raises questions about its provenance, which becomes murky and hard to confirm after Rockox's death in 1640, when it was auctioned off with the rest of his estate. Thereafter, as far as existing official records are concerned, it disappeared. In 1674, in the records of the collection of the prince of Liechtenstein, a reference does turn up to a work titled "Caritas Romana," attributed to "Joan Hoek." (That would be Jan van den Hoecke (1611-51), a student of Rubens who became a well-known Flemish painter in his own right). Much later, as its subject matter became better understood, that painting became known as "Samson and Delilah" instead. However, as the former director of the Liechtenstein Collection explained in writing to Doxiades, no one knows exactly who figured out what the picture depicted and renamed it accordingly. He also confirmed that, in contrast to the usual practice, the artwork bore no royal seals designating it as the former property of the Liechtenstein Collection.

That same painting was sold in Paris in 1881, possibly to an independent art dealer. It was then acquired by a German industrialist. (Why it was put up for sale remains unknown. That curious fact prompted the AfterRubens.org Web site to note: "[W]e must accept" that, for nearly two centuries, "successive generations of curators at the Liechtenstein Collection had failed to realize that they were in possession of a masterpiece.")

The painting resurfaced in Paris in 1929, and soon thereafter was attributed to the 17th century Dutch artist Gerrit van Honthorst before being declared a real Rubens by the Rubens expert Ludwig Burchard. At this point, too, Burchard first indicated in writing that the picture had once been part of the Liechtenstein Collection (a claim that the 1980 Christie's sale catalog would later make again).

Supposedly, the painting that the National Gallery purchased at auction, which was sold off by the German industrialist's heirs, was the same work that once had been in Liechtenstein. However, AfterRubens.org points out, "[T]here is no evidence whatsoever to show that the National Gallery painting, which appeared in 1929, is the same object as the Liechtenstein Collection painting which was sold [to the German industrialist] in 1881." Thus, the question remains: After Rockox died, whatever happened to the painting Rubens had made for the good Antwerp burgher? To date, no clear, firm answer has emerged.

The Belgian painter, writer and filmmaker Harold Van de Perre, who has written a book about Rubens and authored a screenplay for a film about the artist, writes on the AfterRubens.org Web site that he has personally visited all the major museums in the world that display works by the Flemish master. "A trained eye ...," he states, "can see that the 'Samson and Delilah' is clearly a copy" because "what makes Rubens unique and the thing that constitutes his signature, namely his powerful brushstroke, is just not present."

Jane Pack, an American painter who has taught for nearly 20 years at the Aegean Center for the Fine Arts, where Euphrosyne Doxiades has been her colleague, and who has followed the Greek artist's critique of the National Gallery's painting, specializes in the kinds of classical painting techniques that Rubens employed. These techniques include glazing, or the building up of watery layers of transparent oil paint that can give a painted image a distinct luminosity. As Pack sees the disputed "Samson and Delilah," one of its most obvious discrepancies is that it was "painted with a post-impressionist mindset, although it's meant to be a baroque painting."

Rubens was known for "starting with a transparent lay-in of shadow areas" and then "building up opaque paint in the lights, which he applied quite heavily," Pack explains. "He manipulated these opaque lights" in his work, she says, "with quite a heavy hand, making a kind of bumpy surface," but thereafter he was "very careful about differences between transparency and opacity." This is where the glazing technique came in, "giving that golden glow that is typical of Rubens." Typically, she adds, in the Flemish master's work, "the glaze looks like it is held in all the crevices" of a painting's surface, but in the disputed "Samson and Delilah," "that is not at all evident; in fact, you don't ... see any evidence that it has been glazed at all."

Pack explains that the baroque artist's bag of painterly tricks included a skilled use of glazing -- which can also be thought of as an optical layering on of color -- to achieve spatial effects and the contouring of forms, and to give a convincing sense of where light fell on the subject matter he portrayed. By contrast, she says, the National Gallery's painting appears to be the product of a more modern hand, since its colors appear to have been physically mixed instead of constructed through glazing; that is, instead of building up transparent layers of color to suggest forms and shadows, its maker appeared to have taken the post-impressionist approach of placing different kinds of lighter or darker colors side by side to suggest three-dimensional modeling and the play of light. The touch and the appearance of that more modern kind of painting feel and look inherently heavier and less nuanced.

"Post-impressionist painters never deal with transparency and opaqueness very much, and they never glaze," Pack says. "They're more likely to try to mix colors directly and ...to play with where they are placed in space. That's what you see in the National Gallery's 'Samson and Delilah.'"

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