The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [110]
The experts saw clearly that Vermeer had made mistakes in Emmaus, and prominent ones, too. The most glaring of all, for it is front and center, is the left arm of the disciple in the yellow robe. Look at the disciple’s hand, resting on the tablecloth, and then follow his forearm as it disappears into a voluminous sleeve. After several inches, the forearm simply stops; it is impossible to imagine how to extend it so that it meets the rest of the disciple’s arm. Once the forearm catches your eye, it comes to look like a Halloween prop, a severed stump jammed into a sleeve.
That hand seems even less plausible when we compare it with the model that surely inspired it. Look at the left hand of Vermeer’s Astronomer. That hand, too, rests on a table’s edge, with the fingers separated in the identical fashion and the hand vanishing into a roomy sleeve in just the same way. But in the genuine Vermeer, the arm makes perfect sense—angled up from the table, arm meets body so naturally and convincingly that we linger over it only to marvel, not to cringe.
In Van Meegeren’s version, the layman might think that we have a dealbreaker—a job so mangled that it could not have been the work of an artist with Vermeer’s mastery of technique. But the experts knew better. Look at Vermeer’s Woman and Two Men, beyond dispute an authentic work.
Museum Boymans-van Beuningen
Van Meegeren, Emmaus, detail
Louvre, Paris
Vermeer, Astronomer, detail
The painting depicts a man flirting with a woman who is meant to be laughing coyly. Something has gone dreadfully wrong with her mouth. Her proportions, too, seem out of kilter. The distance between waist and knee seems to extend forever. If she were to stand up, she would almost scrape her head on the ceiling.
Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Brunswick
Vermeer, Woman and Two Men;detail
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Vermeer, The Art of Painting, detail
Or look at The Art of Painting, one of Vermeer’s most acclaimed works. The artist’s right hand looks swollen and shapeless, as if the poor man had been stung by bees.
One of the controversies embroiling the Rembrandt Research Project involves paintings traditionally assigned to Rembrandt but marred by clumsy passages. One group of scholars contends, in effect, that Rembrandt could do no wrong; any flawed painting supposedly by Rembrandt must be the work of a follower instead. But a rival group maintains that Rembrandt liked to experiment, which made for some misfirings, and that at other times he simply lost interest in what he was doing. The curious result is that some scholars contend that an awkward patch or two in a disputed painting counts as evidence that Rembrandt did paint it.
Look at Rembrandt’s Bathsheba, “the most beautiful nude of Rembrandt’s career” in the judgment of Simon Schama. Bathsheba, who was married, had the bad fortune to have caught King David’s lecherous eye. In Rembrandt’s painting, in her right hand she holds a letter from the king commanding her presence. Both hand and letter, which are at the artistic and storytelling center of the painting, are beautifully done. But Bathsheba’s left hand seems like an afterthought. It looks “like a limp crab…painted with almost incomprehensible cursoriness,” one critic complains, “and does not even come close to anatomical accuracy.” Look closely at Bathsheba’s left thumb. How does it attach to her hand?
Louvre, Paris
Rembrandt’s Bathsheba, top details, bottom and center
For Rembrandt scholars, says Bob Haak, one of the most eminent among them, “It is a question of not just how well he could paint, but how badly.