  Schapiro wrote to Heidegger to find out where and when he had actually seen Van Gogh’s painting; Heidegger, then nearing eighty, recalled having seen an exhibition in Amsterdam in 1930, so Schapiro cross-referenced all the works that could possibly have been exhibited there with Heidegger’s own descriptions of the painting in his essay. In the end, Schapiro concluded not just that Heidegger had melded several paintings together in his memory but that, in so doing, Heidegger had mistaken as the shoes of a female farmer shoes that in fact belonged to Van Gogh  himself.[90] The significance of Schapiro’s famous criticism has been hotly debated ever since. Art historians have typically taken Schapiro’s claim that Heidegger mistakenly attributed Van Gogh’s own shoes to a farming woman as a devastating objection that pulls the rug right out from under Heidegger’s interpretation of the painting, whereas philosophers sympathetic to Heidegger often conclude that Schapiro’s objection simply misses Heidegger’s  point.[91] (These philosophers thus treat Heidegger’s apparent error of attribution as if it were of no more philosophical importance than the remarkably similar fact that the work Heidegger attributed to Don Scotus in his Habilitation thesis was shown subsequently to have been written instead by Thomas of  Erfurt.)[92]