Millionaire - Janet Gleeson [98]
Henry James once wrote that only by living in Venice from day to day does one feel the fullness of its charm. It is, he said, as “changeable and nervous as a woman, and you know it only when you know all the aspects of its beauty.” In 1726, as Law returned for the third and final time to the city of canals, campaniles, and card games, similar sentiments must have struck him. Venice’s artistic riches, its Bacchanalian masqued balls, regattas, pageants, and processions, which had first entranced him and Katherine a quarter of a century ago, were comfortably familiar but captivating still. As time passed, and his affairs in France remained unresolved, the city’s tranquil beauty must also have brought solace from the clouds of disillusionment.
Creditors remained an overwhelming worry. Some were patient in their demands, others made menacing threats against his life and that of his son if they were not refunded. Defenseless in the face of financial demands he could not hope to meet, and desperate to find a surreptitious way to leave something to his family, he began to invest surplus winnings in art and dabble in picture dealing. Katherine may have helped the burgeoning collection by sending some of his paintings from Paris before their household effects were seized. Within two years he had assembled a collection of nearly five hundred works, including paintings by Titian, Raphael, Tintoretto, Veronese, Holbein, Michelangelo, Poussin, and Leonardo.
In exploring the art market Law was again revealing his highly original business acumen. At the time paintings were viewed as symbols of status and signals of good taste rather than as a sound investment. Burges, the English resident (government agent), was typical of the age in failing to perceive the intrinsic value in art, and wrote disparagingly of Law’s dealings, “No man alive believes that his pictures when they come to be sold will bring half the money they cost him.” Law, he felt, had been badly cheated. “I think it is generally agreed he bought his pictures very ill and was horribly imposed on in every bargain he made.” Time proved Law correct. Today such a collection would be far beyond the reach of all but a handful of multimillionaires.
On his return to Venice, perhaps as a memento for Burges or his family, Law commissioned a portrait of himself by the Dutch artist John Verelst. Last seen on the open market in the 1960s and now in an unknown private collection, the portrait is a world away from the image painted when he was at the height of his power. He is plainly dressed in an unbuttoned velvet jacket and white cravat, classically posed, with one arm bent and the other holding a glove. The stance is taken, appropriately, from the great Venetian artist Titian. The face that broods disconcertingly away from the viewer has filled out. The wig, no longer the ripplingly extravagant peruke of earlier days, is in the new shorter style known as a perruque à noeuds, powdered a pale gray suggestive of advancing years. He was now fifty-six. For all that, it is still a face of distinction and allure: the wide forehead, heavy eyebrows, and extravagantly beaked nose are marked as in every portrait of him; the mouth is sensually full and half smiles, as if at some remembered diversion. But the air of placid, well-to-do contentment it conveys is deceiving.
Law’s pleasure was tinged progressively with despair, but until the end, when the façade finally fell, few realized his underlying melancholy. When the celebrated writer and political philosopher Montesquieu came to call a year after the portrait was painted, on August 29, 1728, Law retraced the early days of the bank and company and “pretended that the fall of his system came about because of suspicion with regard to his arrêt (which divided the notes) so that it was revoked, and the public could no longer have confidence in him after he had been flouted in such a way.” Montesquieu was struck by Law’s argumentativeness: “The whole force of [his] arguments is to attempt to turn your reply against you,