The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [39]
Nor is the overall look and feel of Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery what we might expect. This is not a subtle, graceful painting where every reexamination reveals a new delight, like the glint of the chandelier in The Art of Painting or the crumpled folds in the carpet flung on the table in The Geographer. Here one texture looks like another, and we cannot quite work out the source of the light. The spacing, too, seems off. In most Vermeers, the illusion of three dimensions is so convincing that many art historians believe they can reconstruct the precise measurements of the rooms in the pictures. In nearly all Vermeers we see immediately where the people are in relation to one another, or how far they are from the nearest wall. (The Procuress is an exception.) But the four figures in Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery seem crowded together, like passengers in an elevator. How close to one another they are meant to be we cannot tell.
Faced with so many surprises, an art lover who knew only such Vermeers as Girl with a Pearl Earring might have had doubts. The experts knew better. The large size of the new painting, for example, did not pose a problem. A View of Delft is bigger than Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery, and so are The Procuress and Diana and Her Companions.
The religious subject, too, had precedents in Vermeer’s work, though most art lovers do not associate Vermeer with biblical scenes. A painting that had been identified as a Vermeer only in 1901—a London art dealer had found a signature that had been hidden by varnish—also depicted a New Testament scene. For the dealer, that discovery was a fluke akin to a prospector’s stubbing his toe on a gold nugget. That suddenly precious painting, Christ in the House of Mary and Martha, had changed hands shortly before, for eight pounds. (It happened to be yet another example of a large Vermeer, too, at a bit more than five feet by four feet.) Naturally the unlikely story of the signature aroused suspicion, but the skeptics had been wrong. Christ in the House of Mary and Martha did indeed prove to be a Vermeer.
And if Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery seemed to have scarcely any connection with such favorites as The Milkmaid or The Lacemaker, it did bear a striking resemblance to a Vermeer that had turned up only in 1937. This was another religious painting, Christ at Emmaus. Bigger in scale than Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery, it too showed four figures cloaked in rough-sewn, solid-colored clothes. The blue-robed Christ in Emmaus seemed a near match for the blue-robed Christ in the Woman Taken in Adultery. On its sudden discovery, Emmaus had been joyously hailed as perhaps the greatest Vermeer of all.
Now, in September 1943, this latest Vermeer had appeared. Hofer, Goering’s scout, had heard about Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery from a shadowy banker and sometime art dealer named Alois Miedl. German (but with a Jewish wife), Miedl had lived in Holland for years and knew everyone there worth cultivating. The chubby and balding Miedl looked innocuous, but his connections made him dangerous. Miedl knew Goering well and had enjoyed the Reich Marshal’s hospitality at Carin Hall. From the earliest days of the occupation, when Hofer had first turned up in the Netherlands looking for art, Miedl had happily taken him in hand.
Miedl hurried to Carin Hall with the new Vermeer. He seemed scarcely to know where the painting had come from, and his asking price was enormous—2 million Dutch guilders, or about $10 million in today’s prices.
Still, a Vermeer