The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [40]
Unwilling to meet the price but unable to part with the painting, Goering kept it on view at Carin Hall while he dithered. Months passed. On every tour of his new acquisitions, a ritual that Goering imposed on every visitor, Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery was a mandatory stop.
Finally, in the winter of 1943, Goering found a way to hang on to his prize while still indulging his greed. Resorting to barter rather than sale, he “purchased” the Woman Taken in Adultery from Miedl by trading it for other paintings in his collection. In exchange for this one Vermeer masterpiece, Goering handed Miedl 137 paintings.
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VERMEER
Since his rediscovery in the mid-1800s, Vermeer has been treated with a degree of reverence that would be hard to exaggerate. “It now seems uncontentious that Vermeer has overtaken Rembrandt as the supreme Dutch artist of the seventeeth century,” one scholar noted recently, as if so self-evident a claim did not call for the bother of demonstration. The art-loving public espouses the same view. The best of Vermeer’s paintings, writes John Updike, are “perhaps the loveliest objects that exist on canvas.”
The Nazis admired Dutch painters in general, and Vermeer in particular, for half-baked reasons having to do with the artists’ supposed “Germanness.” Goering’s eagerness for a Vermeer had even less to do with aesthetics. For the Reich Marshal, “Vermeer” was a brand name even better than “Rolls-Royce” or “the Ritz.”
For the Dutch in the bleak years of World War II and the anxious years leading up to it, admiration of Vermeer took on a new dimension that had little to do with his marquee value. Art historians and ordinary art lovers alike saw embodied in the great painter the very qualities that Goering and his ilk had put most at risk. The Dutch embraced Vermeer as an emblem of sanity and levelheaded virtue. Shortly after the end of World War II, the great Dutch art historian P.T.A. Swillens published a quiet and scholarly book on Vermeer. In the preface he allowed himself a few sentences to speak personally. He had begun work on his book Decades before, Swillens wrote, during the First World War. “In 1940,” he went on, “when right was once more trampled on by foreign invaders and spiritual values were crushed, my manuscript was almost finished.”
Then the Nazis had invaded Holland, and Swillens had been obliged to put his nearly completed book aside. His memories of Vermeer’s work consoled him in those dark times: Vermeer “stayed with me, his happy wisdom reached me amongst the orgies of idiocy and barbarism, and I enjoyed the purity of his character when lies and deception held high revel.”
THREE CENTURIES BEFORE, Vermeer had come to know barbarism and bad fortune for himself. He had lived not in a dreamy Dutch idyll but in a time of war and economic collapse and waves of mysterious, unstoppable disease. In 1656, when Vermeer was a young man, plague swept through Amsterdam amd claimed eighteen thousand lives. Even Vermeer’s seemingly tranquil hometown, Delft, proved no haven from the world. Earlier, in 1654, an explosion in a gunpowder arsenal had leveled half the town and killed hundreds of its citizens.* (The simple fact that Delft kept ninety thousand pounds of gunpowder at the ready shows how unsettled the times were.)
Perhaps the modern-day Dutch, beset by Hitler, felt so close to Vermeer because they sensed how their plight carried echoes of the artist’s own. Holland’s modern history began in blood, in 1568, in a rebellion against Spanish rule that continued intermittently over the course of Decades. This was the era of the Spanish Inquisition, when mighty Spain ruled tiny Holland. Arrogant, abstemious, intolerant as a matter of policy, Spain’s King Philip II believed God had commanded him to stamp out the heresy that seemed to thrive in Holland. He pursued that goal with zeal.
“Everyone must be made to live in constant fear of the roof breaking over his head,” the Duke of Alva, the leader of the Spanish army, wrote to his king. And so they were. Thousands of Dutch citizens were