Trust your gut. In art, as in life,thinking is overrated. These are the unexpected messages vibrating from thesurface of a painting that has sparked considerable debate this week: a canvassalvaged from the damp rafters of a house near Toulouse in southwestern France.Sophisticated examinations are being carried out to determine whether thecontroversial painting – which depicts a gruesome scene of decapitation fromthe apocryphal Book of Judith – is likely a lost work by the Italian masterCaravaggio, and therefore worthy of a price tag north of $136million(?96million).Some specialists believe it to be authentic, and an export ban hasbeen placed on the painting to ensure it remains in France.

The rift that the so-called “Caravaggio inthe attic” is creating among experts coincides with the 30-year anniversary ofa dust-up that rocked the art world in 1986, when the J Paul Getty Museum inLos Angeles, California provocatively unveiled a statue that was either atwo-and-a-half millennia-old masterwork or just a fake a few months’ old,depending on whom you believed. Placed side-by-side with the recentlydiscovered Judith Beheading Holofernes, the infamous marble sculpture known asthe Getty kouros offers a timely reminder of the power of instinct over eventhe most gritty and granular of scientific analyses.

Without lifting the crudest magnifyingglass and without plugging in a single piece of cutting-edge reflectographyequipment, one can immediately detect the shared problem with both the Gettyforgery and the attribution to Caravaggio of the recovered canvas fromToulouse: they’re not beautiful. Those who initially defended dating the Gettystatue to “around 530 BC” (thus making the work one of only a dozen suchtreasures to have survived), pointed to the discovery of a calcite crust thathad formed on the marble – a patina that only great age could have wrought.Doubters, meanwhile, admitted into evidence the clumsy counterfeiting ofdocuments (some bearing impossible addresses) that accompanied the purchase ofthe statue for $9million (?6.3million) in 1985 and to the bizarre mish-mash ofstyles that appear to pit the braids of the subject’s hairagainst the contours of his hands and thighs, as if the confused work had beencarved by a tag-team of artists across different eras and regions.

But such deep analyses on both sidesoverlook the obvious: the statue lacks what the Romantic writers John Keats andWilliam Hazlitt called “gusto”: a chameleon power that no gizmo can empiricallymeasure and no amount of research can adequately plumb. A work of art eitherhas it or it doesn’t. The Getty kouros doesn’t. Nor, in my opinion, does theToulouse Judith – at least not to anything like the degree necessary to believethat the painting is by the same brush that slanted the shadows and ignitedwith soulful fire the expressions depicted in the scenes from the life ofMatthew in the Contarelli Chapel in Rome.

The figure of Judith is strangelynonplussed given the unpleasantness of the messy task at hand: the splurtybusiness of sawing through the neck of the drunk Assyrian general Holofernes,whom the widow suspects is plotting to destroy her home. Unlike a known versionof the same scene by Caravaggio in the Palazzo Barberini in Rome, the compositionof the newly discovered canvas is disjointed and casts its awkward actors outof sync. Might it, I hear you ask, just be the work of Caravaggio on an offday? Now that didn’t feel right, did it?