The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [152]
He clung to the paintings…Wheelock, “Two Forgeries,” p. 271.
“A man with a conviction”…Festinger had been studying a group of religious believers who had declared that the world would end on a particular day. His classic account,
When Prophecy Failed, described their response when the world went on as usual. In short, the believers clung to their faith and decided that somehow their calculations had gone awry.
“Even before the war”…Joachim C. Fest, The Face of the Third Reich, p. 59.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX: THE MEN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH
“When you’re certain you cannot”…Teller, “The Grift of the Magi,” New York Times Book Review, Feb. 13, 2005. Teller, the silent half of Penn and Teller, was reviewing Peter Lamont’s Rise of the Indian Rope Trick: How a Spectacular Hoax Became History.
“There are some mistakes”…The remark may be apocryphal. The political scientist Francis Fukuyama attributed it to Moynihan in a television interview. I have not been able to track it to the source. Perhaps Fukuyama had in mind Orwell’s comment, in “Notes on Nationalism,” that “one has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”
Bredius himself compared…In his essay “A New Vermeer,” quoted earlier.
The eminent astronomer Percival Lowell…Lowell, Mars, chap. 4 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1895).
“It’s not as simple”…Jim Steinmeyer, “The Simple Art of Deception,” Montreal Gazette, April 16, 2004. Steinmeyer discusses this question at greater length in his fine book Hiding the Elephant.
In one classic study…Fischoff, Slovic, and Lichtenstein, “Knowing with Certainty: The Appropriateness of Extreme Confidence,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 3 (1977): 552–64. My description follows the account in Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, Inevitable Illusions, pp. 116–20.
“It is therefore most important”…Piattelli-Palmarini, p. 120.
“You know what forgers do”…John McPhee, A Roomful of Hovings, p. 23.
Sir George Hill…Jones, ed., p. 172.
The wine connoisseur immediately recognizes…Max Friedländer, “Artistic Quality: Original and Copy,” The Burlington Magazine, May 1941. (This essay is a chapter from Friedländer’s On Art and Connoisseurship.)
Frédéric Brochet gave fifty-four experts…“Cheeky little test exposes wine experts as weak and flat,” The Times [of London], Jan. 14, 2002.
“When I studied art history”…Author interview, Aug. 26, 2005.
Arabs see a furry…N. R. Hanson gives this example in Patterns of Discovery, p. 19.
Before Van Meegeren was unmasked…Sandra Weerdenburg, De Emmausgangers: een omslag in waardering, Utrecht, 1988.
“Who would have believed”…Quoted in Clara Pinto-Correia, The Ovary of Eve (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 231. This charming history argues that the conventional story of “the little man in the sperm cell” may misrepresent the true, and tangled, story.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN: BLUE MONDAY
The artist’s right hand looks swollen…Diederik Kraaijpoel calls attention to this oddly painted hand in Kraaijpoel and Van Wijnen, p. 32.
The curious result is that…See the discussion in Bailey, Responses to Rembrandt, pp. 73–74.
Bathsheba, “the most beautiful nude”…Simon Schama, Rembrandt’s Eyes, p. 551.
“It is a question of not just how well”…Bailey, Responses to Rembrandt, p. 73.
Kraaijpoel cites specific weaknesses…Kraaijpoel and Van Wijnen, pp. 31–34, and personal communication, Dec. 11, 2005.
The police would later find…Coremans includes a photo of several such objects. See his plate 45. The glasses and pitcher in Coremans’ photo look slightly different from those in Emmaus. Kilbracken suggests that at the time Van Meegeren painted Emmaus he owned the white jug but not the other artifacts. See Kilbracken, p. 46.
“If you have painted two or three thousand”…David Anderson, “Old Masters to Order: Forgery as a Fine Art,