The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [77]
X-rays posed another danger, too. If an X-ray of a forgery revealed a hid den painting that someone could identify, that clue might point the way to a dealer and a buyer and eventually to Van Meegeren himself.
And so Van Meegeren set to work scraping. Now the hardness of oil paint, which he had devoted so many months to imitating, came to bedevil him. Hardened paint is extraordinarily tough, far sturdier than canvas, especially centuries-old canvas. In its first year or two, oil paint might yield to turpentine or even soap and water, but when a painting is older than that, scraping and patience become the only options. With pumice stone and putty knife in hand, Van Meegeren would have set to work, picking away at the tiny fracture lines that lace the surface of old paintings one paint fleck at a time. The canvas in front of him measured sixteen square feet.
When, finally, he had obtained a clean canvas, Van Meegeren had only to clamp the loose canvas firmly to a board and set to work. With brush and Bakelite paints, he retreated to the seventeenth century.
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CHRIST AT EMMAUS
For the seven years between 1938 and 1945, Van Meegeren’s Christ at Emmaus was the most famous and the most admired Vermeer in the world. It was the picture that popped into every art lover’s mind when someone said “Vermeer,” just as The Night Watch was when someone said “Rembrandt.”
The actual painting took Van Meegeren six months. The artistic challenge was formidable, for even Vermeer, with all his skill, worked from human models. Van Meegeren, painting in secret, had no such luxury. The picture shows four large figures crowded around a small table. Jesus, in a blue robe, faces us. Opposite him, with his back to us, sits a figure in gray; at Jesus’ left, with his left side turned toward us, sits a second disciple, in yellow. A serving girl, in a brown robe, stands between Jesus and the yellow-robed disciple.
The arrangement is virtually identical to Caravaggio’s 1606 version of Emmaus. Even in the details of Jesus’ pose, right hand raised in blessing with index finger extended, Van Meegeren followed Caravaggio. The only substantial difference in layout is that Caravaggio included two servants, Van Meegeren only one.
But though the figures in the two paintings are in similar poses, Caravaggio painted men and women who were unmistakably creatures of flesh and blood—too much so, in the eyes of many of his shocked contemporaries. Even in his depictions of Christianity’s holiest figures, Caravaggio’s favorite models were prostitutes and barflies. He knew their gritty world well. In 1606, the year of Emmaus, Caravaggio killed a rival in a street brawl and was nearly killed himself. With a death sentence looming over him, he ran from the authorities. No one looking at a Caravaggio would have trouble recalling that Jesus and his disciples were laborers who worked with their hands and sweated to earn a living.
Not so in Van Meegeren. “He did not copy Caravaggio’s rather robust Christ,” observes the painter and art historian Diederik Kraaijpoel. “He needed someone more pathetic. Instead, he invented a zombie Christ in the hope that this sad figure would move his spectators.” And so it did. In Van Meegeren’s Emmaus, not only Jesus but the disciples and the serving girl are pale and sickly, and all three men have long, limp, greasy hair. (The girl’s hair is hidden under a hood.) Van Meegeren’s Emmaus, says Kraaijpoel, “threw the pious Dutch art audience into rapturous convulsions.”
The critics fell under the same spell as the art-loving public. They marveled at the painting’s “serenity” and its “melting light.” They stared entranced at the “infinitely soft” faces, as beautiful as those in the famous domestic interiors but with “a higher and more sacred significance.” They basked in the contemplation of Emmaus’s “elevated peace.