The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [75]
Van Meegeren knew from the time he started work on Christ at Emmaus that it would be the most ambitious, most difficult forgery he ever undertook. Nearly all the dates in the Van Meegeren saga are hard to pin down, but probably Van Meegeren began to paint Christ at Emmaus a month or two before Koomen’s article appeared. Even without Koomen’s broad hint, that is, Van Meegeren had decided that his greatest forgery would be a “Vermeer” modeled closely on a Caravaggio. Not for the first time, he had gauged the mood of the day perfectly. In December 1935, at precisely the moment of Koomen’s public plea for a new Vermeer, Van Meegeren had begun to paint the very picture that the experts hoped to find.
NEARLY ALL THE artists who painted versions of Christ at Emmaus focused on the most dramatic moment—the instant of Jesus’s revelation or its immediate aftermath. Rembrandt depicted the awed disciples gaping at an empty chair. In Caravaggio’s first version, Supper at Emmaus, which today is one of the treasures of London’s National Gallery, a clean-shaven, red-cheeked, robust Jesus makes his startling announcement, and the excitement nearly undoes the two disciples. One clutches his chair, as if he is about to leap up. The other, whom we see in profile, flings his arms apart in shock and bewilderment. His left hand, a tour de force of foreshortening, thrusts straight at us. It seems almost to burst out of the canvas and materialize before us, larger and more powerful than any hand in the ordinary world.
But Vermeer would never grab us in a meaty paw to get our attention. And just here Van Meegeren did something brilliant. He decided to model his version of Emmaus closely on Caravaggio’s Emmaus, but he chose Caravaggio’s second version of the painting rather than the first. If Van Meegeren’s choice of Caravaggio as a model was clever, this choice of Caravaggio’s second version of Emmaus was inspired.
The second painting shows a close kinship with the earlier version—in 1606 as in 1601, Caravaggio focused tightly on the table, with Jesus in the center, facing us. In both pictures, one disciple sits facing Jesus, his back to us, and one sits at Jesus’s left, his profile toward us. Both pictures feature Caravaggio’s intensely focused light and an astonishingly rendered array of shadows, though the later painting is darker and quieter.
In the 1601 Caravaggio, Jesus is rosy and youthful. In 1606, Caravaggio depicted a more familiar Jesus, bearded, careworn, and weary. But a far more important difference between the paintings is the moment Caravaggio has chosen to represent. In 1606, Caravaggio painted the moment before Jesus’s revelation; in 1601, he had painted the moment after. The subtler 1606 version is the painting that Van Meegeren took as his model. An instant from now, the light will dawn—almost literally—but we are not quite there yet. The disciple with his back to us is on the brink of understanding; he has just begun to lift his hands in surprise. But at this instant everything is still pending. The mood is quiet, intense, watchful, subdued.
The moment, in other words, was exactly the one Johannes Vermeer would have chosen had he set out to paint Christ at Emmaus.
33
IN THE FORGER’S STUDIO
Van Meegeren began to work on Christ at Emmaus in the fall of 1936, soon after he and his wife returned from the Summer Olympics in Berlin. These were the famous “Nazi Olympics,” a carefully choreographed spectacle starring Adolf Hitler and meant to show the world the superiority of “Aryan” athletes. Leni Riefenstahl made a famous propaganda film documenting the pageantry and the splendor of the competitors. Jesse Owens, the black American track star, spoiled the storyline somewhat by winning four gold medals.
After he put the hubbub of Berlin’s roaring crowds behind him, Van Meegeren settled into the solitude of his Roquebrune studio.