The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [78]
TO REMIND HIS audience that it was in the presence of greatness, Van Meegeren had thrown in an array of touches meant to evoke the beloved Vermeer. Some were generic, trademarks of a sort, like the blue and yellow of the robes or the light streaming from a window in the left-hand wall. Others were allusions to specific paintings. The jug on the table is a near copy of one that Vermeer painted again and again, in such works as The Music Lesson and Girl Asleep at a Table and The Glass of Wine. Generations of museumgoers have marveled at the way the light in The Milkmaid skitters across the loaf of bread; the pointillé, the dots of light on the bread in Emmaus, come straight from The Milkmaid. The disciple clutching the table has more than a passing resemblance to Vermeer’s astronomer. Beyond a doubt his left hand and arm come directly from The Astronomer, though Van Meegeren botched what Vermeer rendered splendidly.
The signature, a neat “IV Meer” in the painting’s upper left-hand corner, is a stroke-for-stroke copy of the one that appears on such Vermeers as Lady Seated at a Virginal. Van Meegeren liked to go on about that signature. “Do you know how long I practiced?” he asked. “Think of that, writing that signature a few hundred times a day, and then finally finding the courage to do it on the canvas itself! For days I dreaded it.”
But that was just storytelling fun. In truth it would have been far harder to forge an ordinary signature scribbled on a piece of paper. When he took brush in hand, Vermeer painted his name with great care, each letter separate and distinct. Van Meegeren had no great difficulty forging his predecessor’s name.
35
UNDERGROUND TREMORS
Once Van Meegeren had finished painting Emmaus, he needed to harden his Bakelite paint. That meant sliding the picture into the oven, setting the thermostat to 250 degrees Fahrenheit, and closing the door for two nerve-racking hours.* But the six months at the easel, and then the two hours of baking, would all have been wasted unless the two minutes after that went as planned.
Look closely at an old painting and you see a delicate network of ever-so-shallow cracks that join and crisscross seemingly at random. Like wrinkles in a person’s face, cracks are a sign of age. Forgers pay careful heed to that craquelure, as the cracks are known, because they have learned that authentic paintings from centuries ago will almost certainly show these signs of time’s passage.
Shallow as the cracks are, they fill with dust and dirt as the Decades pass. (It will turn out to be important that this debris, when examined under a microscope, is just as heterogeneous as the litter—old shoes, paper cups, hub caps, plastic bags—that accumulates in a roadside ditch.) In time the cracks take on the appearance of spidery black lines. In the lighter areas of a painting—on a pale cheek or a white tablecloth or a milky sky—they are particularly easy to spot.
Van Meegeren had to replicate those cracks, and the task was harder than it sounds. The oven was unlikely to solve the problem for him. The heat would produce cracks, but not just any cracks would do. Restorers, who have scrutinized countless paintings and learned to recognize the signs of aging, are the great authorities on craquelure. To listen to them talk about age cracks in paintings is like listening to makeup artists talk about crow’s feet and puffy eyes. A poor imitation of craquelure is as unconvincing as a bad face-lift. Emmaus would have to fool these savvy pros.
Mauritshuis, The Hague
Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring, detail
Exactly what they look for restorers have difficulty putting into words, but they offer a few hints. In seventeenth-century paintings, for example, cracks are typically sharp-edged and divide a painting’s surface into discrete, tiny “islands.” The surface of a seventeenth-century painting, magnified, looks like a dried-up mud puddle. In works from the nineteenth century, the cracks are often rounded and more delicate. A close-up of a nineteenth-century painting calls to mind an alligator