The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [80]
Second and more important, Van Meegeren knew that baking his painting would make it brittle, whether or not it produced the craquelure he hoped for. For a picture that needed cracks, brittleness was all to the good. Van Meegeren exploited it fully. When he slid Emmaus out of the oven, he applied a coat of varnish and set the picture aside to cool. Then came the crucial two minutes. After all the fastidious preparation, this last step in producing a beautiful craquelure was almost laughably low-tech. Van Meegeren took his brittle painting and bent it over a table’s edge or across his knees. Then, pushing gently but firmly with his hands, he cracked it. To make sure that the cracks formed at random rather than in a telltale series of parallel lines, he turned the painting at an angle and repeated the process.
Van Meegeren would later claim that, as he prepared Christ at Emmaus, he precisely controlled the craquelure pattern by rebaking the painting each time he added a new layer. In this way, he said, he replicated the authentic craquelure from the ground layer over and over again. Stevenson and other experts scoff. There is no way of predicting how cracks pass from one layer to another, they insist, and in any case no canvas could stand up to repeated baking. Canvas is a natural product. Bake a three-hundred-year-old piece of linen repeatedly and it will grow so delicate it will break under a brush’s pressure.
In creating a new kind of paint, Van Meegeren really had displayed technical wizardry. Despite his stories, his method of creating craquelure was nowhere near as impressive technically. No matter. By far the most important feature of Van Meegeren’s craquelure was its appearance, and its appearance was ideal. That was an unexpected bonus. Van Meegeren’s years of experimenting with Bakelite paint had been directed at another problem entirely. He had labored to devise a paint that would pass the alcohol test. It was a gift from the gods that paint formulated to pass that test also happened, when baked and bent across a knee, to break up in a spidery network that precisely replicated the look of a seventeenth-century painting.
VAN MEEGEREN WAS an ingenious man and a high-stakes gambler, and he must have gotten a kick out of a nervy little game he played to finish up his fake. The last step in creating a convincing craquelure was to darken the cracks so that they looked as if they had been accumulating dirt for centuries. But how could anyone tamp down dirt into a complex network formed of thousands of ditches each only a tiny fraction of an inch deep?
Van Meegeren’s solution was to use not dirt but India ink. If he could somehow spill ink into the cracks, and nowhere else, he would achieve exactly the spider’s web look he was after, and he would avoid all the shoveling-and tamping heartache. This was a colossal gamble—if anyone tested the “dirt” with a microscope, the game would be up in an instant. Van Meegeren, so prudent in some steps of the forging process and so reckless in others, shrugged and pushed all his chips into the center of the table.
The question was when to spill ink onto the picture. Should the ink go on the painting before the varnish, or after? It would have been disastrous if some ink found its way into the painting itself, rather than into the cracks. Van Meegeren’s plastic paint had hardened as it cooked, but it could have been slightly porous nonetheless. Even the hardest substances, such as rock and bone, can be porous. Ink shouldn’t be