THINGS did not go as well as the painter Benjamin West hoped when he unveiled “Cicero Discovering the Tomb of Archimedes” at the Royal Academy exhibition on April 28, 1797. Painted using what were said to be the long-lost methods of Renaissance masters, the work was the centerpiece of the show. Instead of receiving accolades, West soon found himself mocked by critics and satirists alike.

In “Benjamin West and the Venetian Secret,” an exhibition opening Sept. 18 at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, the story of West’s great professional embarrassment through a scandal involving fine art, ancient manuscripts, all-out fraud and a whisper of sex is illustrated with “Cicero” and other art and artifacts from the era.

The show could very well be titled “Raiders of the Lost Art.” By 1795 the American-born West had already taken several commissions from George III and was president of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. He was known for contemporary history paintings like “The Death of General Wolfe” (1770). But a topic that fascinated him  and several of his colleagues  was the supposed secrets used by Titian and other 16th-century Venetian masters to attain distinctive color and luminosity in their works.

Image Benjamin West, at far left in an 1810 portrait, was caught up in a hoax that inspired the caricaturist James Gillray to create Titianus Redivivus  or the Seven-Wise-Men Consulting the New Venetian Oracle,. Credit... Yale Center for British Art

So when an artist named Ann Jemima Provis and her father, Thomas Provis, approached West and told him they had found a copy of an old manuscript that explained how the Venetians achieved their distinctive style of painting, he jumped at the chance to learn more. Eager to incorporate the methods in the manuscript into his own work, West began experimenting with them.