The Messiah: is it real?

"[Stewart] Pollens, the 51-year-old conservator of musical instruments at the Metropolitan Museum, has ignited a most undignified firestorm of rancor and name-calling in this insular area of collecting. He did so by uttering the worst kind of blasphemy: He suggested that arguably the world's most celebrated Stradivarius violin is a fake. This so-called Messiah, or Le Messie, is housed in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University and estimated to be worth some $20 million."





Read on here...