The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [96]
Vermeer died in 1675. Van Meegeren finished Emmaus in 1937. Now, in 1938, Hendrik Luitwieler had been entrusted with examining and, if need be, repairing it. As he stared intently at his museum’s newest and greatest masterpiece and scanned it front and back, would he observe contentedly that this three-century-old work looked just as it should? Or would he rise in fury from his workbench and demand to know who dared to pass off this brand-new fraud as an old master?
Luitwieler began by removing the discolored and “aged” varnish that Van Meegeren had applied a few months before. Then he examined the craquelure, comparing it with the mental image of seventeenth-century cracking that he had acquired in his years of work. Was the depth of the cracks right? Did the cracks’ pattern make sense? Had they become filled with the grime of centuries? He studied the rip in the canvas that Van Meegeren had deliberately inflicted on Jesus’s right hand and then clumsily repaired; Luitwieler repaired it properly.
He decided that the canvas needed to be relined, or backed with a new piece of canvas. This was common practice—few seventeenth-century paintings retained their original canvases—but a tense business nonetheless. The relining process was major surgery, roughly akin to a skin graft. Luitwieler began by removing Emmaus from its stretcher and placing it facedown on a piece of paper, to protect its painted surface. Then he heated a pot of homemade glue, probably with beeswax as its major ingredient, and cut a new piece of canvas that matched Emmaus in size. Next he slathered glue evenly across Emmaus’s back, set the new canvas in place, and pressed the new canvas onto the old with strong, careful hands and a wooden tool shaped like a squeegee.
The next step was the most difficult. Luitwieler heated a heavy, metal iron and stooped over Emmaus once again. This was the point when Van Meegeren and Bredius and Hannema—if they had somehow been watching—would have covered their eyes and muttered their prayers. Ironing the two canvases accomplished two things; the heat sealed the canvases together, and it fixed any loose paint flakes in place. But it was tricky and dangerous work, and paint that had survived three centuries could scorch or melt in an instant.
But under Luitwieler’s skillful hands, it did not. He was not yet finished with his work, but his final tasks were routine. He repainted the areas that Van Meegeren had purposely damaged. He built and installed a new stretcher to replace the seventeenth-century original that Van Meegeren had been so pleased to find when he had purchased Lazarus in the first place.
Luitwieler did all this, but what was most surprising was one thing he did not do—he did not sound an alarm. Could he really have been bamboozled so completely?
The museum world is hierarchical even today, and in Holland in the 1930s it was more so. All the men at the top—Hannema and Bredius and the Rembrandt Society and Rotterdam’s moneyed collectors—had declared in public that they had never seen a Vermeer that compared with Emmaus. They had raised a fortune to buy it and proclaimed it a national treasure. Would any mere craftsman, regardless of his private doubts, have dared to speak up, to say, “Excuse me, but this is a fake”?
But if Luitwieler felt himself caught in a crisis of conscience, like some tormented character in Ibsen, he never left a sign. One cryptic photo has come down to us. It shows Hannema and Luitwieler gazing at Emmaus. Luitwieler is in the background, his expression impossible to read. Is he filled with contempt, for