September 2019 LSAT lr #24

Hi @kenken, Thanks for the question! So the argument is saying that the artist who painted the self-portrait is also the one who painted this one battle scene. Now we’re looking for a weakness in this argument, and (E) says that the historic battle that’s the subject of the painting took place a number of years before the artist who painted the self-portrait was born. This might sound like it weakens, but remember, paintings aren’t like pictures. You can paint yourself into whatever you want. It doesn’t really weaken the argument to say that the artist was born after, since the painter might have just decided to paint the battle that happened before since they knew about it, and paint themselves into it. Kind of like if someone nowadays painted themselves into a scene from the Vietnam War or something like this. (E) doesn’t weaken as well as (D), and so we can’t pick it. Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any other questions that you might have.

but D is the correct answeer??

I think Sunhe was saying that E is worse than D, so we cannot pick E