The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [102]
Later, when the truth came out, they could muster no better explanation than to say they had been caught in a wave of hysteria. Centuries before, “tulip mania” had swept through Holland, and men spent more on a single bulb than it would have cost to buy the grandest house in Amsterdam. After Emmaus, connoisseurs talked as if they had fallen under a similar spell.
Hannema had declared that “a nobler creation has, perhaps, never been rendered in art.” His enthusiasm for Emmaus was entirely predictable, but scholar after scholar delivered similar judgments in hushed and reverent tones. Many connoisseurs noted the links between the new “Vermeer” Emmaus and Caravaggio’s Emmaus, and more than a few preferred Vermeer. The comments of one art historian will stand for those of many others. “After a comparison of both works,” wrote J. L. van Rijckevorsel, “the greatness and the individuality of the master from Delft is even more apparent.” To Dutch eyes, Caravaggio was perhaps a bit boisterous. “In contrast with Caravaggio’s loud realism, we respectfully offer Vermeer’s devout modesty.”
Both the public and the critics fell so hard partly because Emmaus was perfectly suited to the times. Albert Blankert argues that in 1938, with war and invasion looming, Christ at Emmaus offered the beleaguered Dutch exactly the solace they craved. “Amidst the anxious and seemingly hopeless events of the late 1930s,” Blankert writes, “the quiet and peace of Vermeer exercised magic on men’s minds.” Emmaus overflowed with what Blankert calls “elevated pathos.” The same mood permeated the paintings Van Meegeren made in his own name. In pictures by a nobody called Han van Meegeren, Blankert observes, that pathos struck viewers as saccharine and overdone. But when the same sentiment was sanctified by the magical name Vermeer, what had been sickly and maudlin became moving beyond words.
In December 1944, as an exhausted Europe struggled through a war that had begun five long years before, a New York Times foreign correspondent contemplated the Dutch landscape. “Because Holland was so sturdy and self-respecting, so triumphant over nature,” Anne O’Hare McCormick wrote, “it is in some respects the saddest battlefield of all. Nearly a fifth of the land salvaged with infinite effort from the sea is already flooded. Scores of her neat smiling villages lie in ruins. Tulip fields are mined and trampled.”
In the midst of such gloom, McCormick had witnessed something that brightened the soul. The world above ground was little but “mud and blood” and “roads crowded with endless lines of men and lorries moving forward and ambulances moving back.” But beneath the ground, all was light.
McCormick had been allowed underground into an enormous sandstone quarry outside Maastricht, Holland, where she had passed through several sets of gleaming steel doors and entered “the best art gallery in all of Europe.” Here Holland had hidden its most priceless works of art. McCormick was an old pro—she had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937—but she found herself overwhelmed. “It is difficult to convey the sense of life flowing out of the glowing color and exuberant vigor of these immortal works of art,” she wrote. There were eight hundred paintings in all, including Rembrandt’s Night Watch (rolled up like a dorm-room poster). McCormick also had the great privilege of seeing “two early Vermeers, Diana with Nymphs and Pilgrims at Emmaus, quite unlike his later pictures.” Glorious and immortal, the treasures hidden in the quarry “might have been painted yesterday if anyone alive yesterday could have painted them.”
IN A TROUBLED time, a work of art that provides consolation will win admirers by the thousands. In our own day, the critic and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn has looked at the astonishing success of the recent novel The Lovely Bones. His analysis of the novel throws light on Emmaus’s success, too.
The Lovely Bones was released in June 2002 with only middling expectations. Three weeks after its appearance, nearly