Portrait of a Man (Le Condottière)

by Georges Perec

  Questa maniera di colorire accende più i colori, né altro bisogna che diligenza et amore, perché l’olio in sé si reca il colorito più morbido, più dolce, e delicato e di unione e sfumata maniera più facile che li altri …

  Antonellus Messaneus me pinxit … From his eternally frozen haughtiness the Condottiere gazes on the world. His mouth is slightly curved: it’s not a smile nor a pout, but perhaps the expression of an unconscious or self-accepting fierceness. Footnote. The Condottiere is not moving: you cannot guess what he might do next, you cannot imagine anything more, or add anything to his sheer presence. Cranach’s Philipp Melanchthon is alternately an intelligent gaze, a cunning smile, and firm hands: he is a proper politician. Memling’s subject is a praying bull, a mop of hair, a thick neck. Holbein’s Robert Cheseman only has the nobleman’s superciliousness, the luminous splendour of his costume, and the alertness of a huntsman. The Condottiere is always more than that. He is gazing at all three of them. He could look down on them, secretly or openly. Some day any one of them might have need of him. He does not despise them, that would be beneath him, he is in a stronger position than that: he deals on equal terms with princes, kinglets, bishops and ministers. He goes from town to town with his troopers in tow. He has nothing to lose: no friends, no enemies. He is brute force.

  But brute force can be anything. Serenity is not enough. Certainty is something they all have. Any portrait, any man is always the achievement of some kind of certainty. The Condottiere is beyond that: he has no need to reach towards anything; he’s not trying to understand the world, he does not need to understand it. He is not trying to master the world, he already does. He already did. He is The Condottiere. Where is his stance to be found? Nowhere. But it is there, signalled by a look in the eye, by a jaw, by a scar. I am that I am. He is bare. And that is enough. Goya’s Don Ramón Satué, in the Rijksmuseum, needs a broad and open shirt collar and a proud yet vaguely approachable posture with his arched back. Chardin needs his spectacles, eye-shade, turban and scarf, with a sharp turn of his head and a cheeky, ironical and penetrating gaze to challenge the fops who stare at his work and provide him with a living. Never will the Condottiere make the slightest movement of that kind. He has understood. He knows. He is in charge. In charge of a world that is collapsing and falling apart, a world of minute size. But that does not matter. He travels the land on horseback. He only stops in princely courts.

  Such instant victory is a myth. Yet nobody can resist it. The ineffable Baldassare Castiglione, apparently the greatest Humanist of the Renaissance, has come down to us only in the conventional garb of the wise man: fur bonnet, a fine beard, a brooch and lace doublet. His hands are crossed in a way that suggests understanding. What brings you here, my good man? Cupped hands, one thumb resting on the other. Not yet a Jesuit, but already two-faced; he knows the arts and sciences, mathematics and philosophy. He is on the verge of winking at you. The Condottiere’s eyes blaze at him. All he knows of the world is his little scar: see how well I fight …

  No question that he is what he wants to be – a bad boy. Beside him Botticelli’s young man looks almost sickly: a metaphysician tortured by being a virgin. The sole result of immersion in a mystical brine. The Condottiere has no passion, not even for power: that is a game at which he wins every hand. It is not even worth cheating. Not even worth pushing yourself. It is all set up. He is only barely a warlord. Certainly not a madman. Nothing like Saint-Just or Aleksandr Nevsky or Tamerlane. He is neither a Napoleon or a Machiavelli. Nor all in one, because he has no need to define himself. Unity or contradiction. His fate is perfectly laid out. His freedom is entire. He hesitates not at all. His life is an arrow. No ambiguity, no two sides to it. Has he ever had to wonder about anything? No. No trickery. His place was laid down in advance, in a society where the conduct of all men of substance, be they bankers, princes, bishops, patrons, tyrants, or traders, requires the direct intervention of such a man, an independent but obedient instrument who can settle problems for other people, problems that are not and cannot be his own, and who therefore lives his life with a conscience that is entirely adequate to his utter neutrality and completely inaccessible, acknowledging only the law and rights of the one who pays him best … Political clashes, economic contradictions, religious tensions and struggles all converge on him, end up with him, and are resolved by him. He is paid to be the scapegoat. He pockets the money. But he has nothing at stake. Why go into battle for business that is not his? Halfway between Venice and Florence, at a meeting that is more comradely than hostile with the chief of another band of marauders who happens to be an old friend, a handshake abolishes the centuries-old stand-off between the Medicis and the grandees of the Signoria. Why should there be a fight? A faked skirmish allowed the two mercenaries to decide, in the light of the politics of the day and their personal interests, which side would be the winner and which would be instantly granted the benefit of a heroic defeat, so as not to damage his career prospects …

  Was that the source of the irony in his eyes? The Condottiere takes all and gives nothing back. Never committed, never betrayed, never caught off guard. Was that what he had wanted to be? A paradoxical artisan of reconciliation, a geometrical intersection? The man who won every hand?

  Why want the Condottiere? Who was the Condottiere? A picture of triumph, or the triumph of painting? Who had set it all out, who had made it perceptible? Antonellus Messaneus me pinxit. And there he is, nailed down on the panel, labelled, defined, at last bounded, with his strength, his serenity, his certainty and impassibility. What was art if not that approach, that way of giving a perfect definition of an era, transcending and explaining it at the same time, explaining it by transcending, and transcending it by explaining it? The same movement. Beginning who knows where, perhaps just in the requirement of coherence, and ending up in the total, brutal, decisive mastery of the world …

  And that was why he was once again a man in pursuit of that portrait as Chardin and Modigliani had been before him, as had Ingres and David when he’d sketched in an instant as he leaned out of a window the face of Marie-Antoinette on her way to the scaffold, or like any one of those ancient Cambodian sculptors who in his own time and society had also been in pursuit of the essential, to express his own forward path and his ideal as he looked on that amazing chaos – the world – with a perfectly serene, appropriate, lucid, critical gaze …

  Was that what art was? To summon forth rigour, order and necessity? Exactly how did that come to be his business? How did that justify him? What you did in Split …

  Gaspard the forger. A trap just too well sprung. It was obvious. The deceptive impression of security. As tempting as a second home. The world kept out. Refusal pure and simple. What had he done in twelve years?

  The forger’s art is all in pretence. The Hoard of Split was just a few blows of a wooden mallet on sheets of gold and silver, some bronze and copper coins and a coin-punch. Becker had done it better. The slave-smith was a clumsy pretence, a pretence of skill, based on a rough knowledge of the events of the period and approximations of chronology, calendars, gods, and genealogies. The dawn of art … What he knew were the assembly instructions. Gesso duro. Plaster of Paris, Meudon white, and fish glue. What then? Nothing …

  *

  And then Madera died. Perhaps certainty had no meaning until after an uncertain step? His victory? It was certainly not an instant triumph, in sublime and satisfied serenity – the triumph of a Condottiere – but it was perhaps a new awakening of confidence, wrested from the passage of time in obvious alarm at the possibility of a relapse and in the unknown, misapprehended and finally acknowledged danger of mistakes and missteps, a new assertion of his life, the ultimate wager abolishing chance, tipping the scales, overfilling the cup, in a gigantic collapse of doubts and fears. A first autonomous action, the first act of freedom, the first evidence of a conscious mind …

  A response? A proof? Not quite, not yet. Maybe. Maybe not maybe. Definitely maybe. Not an elucidation
or an explanation or an illumination. His mistake had been to believe that a merely spontaneous and misunderstood act of rebellion could give rise to certainty. That the life he’d denied would magically spring forth from a mere gesture. Years past were dead, and nothing from them would survive henceforth. Because he was not yet dead, what had foundered and gone to the bottom whole and entire was his own past. Perhaps Madera had not had to die, but once he was dead, his own action had to go beyond itself, and become the unavoidable conclusion, the self-evident outcome of a meaningless life. His was the head that had to fall …

  A wave of panic and sudden mindlessness, by the grace of that other face slowly coming to life on the panel. In the laboratory he had left behind, the failure had been complete. His life, in his own hands. His actions. The ringing of the telephone in the Belgrade studio. All around the globe … His desperate flight through the streets of Gstaad, running like a shadow, peeling the walls, a black shape in the black night … Little by little, found guilty with no right of appeal. All hands raised, bar one. His own …

  “I had three rather odd days. I went back to Dampierre and returned to the studio downstairs. I was supposed to finish it all off. I’d asked Madera for a week. We hardly spoke to each other. He left that evening to spend the weekend in Paris. He came back on the Monday at eleven in the morning and I killed him at three. While he was away I’d meant to get back to the painting but I couldn’t do it. He’d had every drop of alcohol cleared out of my refrigerator; otherwise I think I would have started drinking again. On Sunday I got hold of a car and went to Paris. Yet again I was on the verge of not going back. I don’t know why I did go back…”

  “What did you do in Paris?”

  “I dropped in at my apartment. There was a letter from Rufus saying he would be coming on the Monday. I phoned him in Geneva, where he’d been since a few hours after I left Gstaad, to tell him to come down to Dampierre on Tuesday. I wanted to let him know it was a mess but I didn’t dare. I told him it would be finished by the time he got there. He didn’t say anything and hung up very quickly … I went out and bought some detective novels from one of the booksellers on the quais; I went to the Louvre, to the seven-metre gallery, to look at the Condottiere. I stood in front of it for a few seconds, then left. I fetched the car and drove to Versailles and took a walk in the grounds. There was hardly anyone about. I got back in the car and drove to Dreux for dinner. Then back to Dampierre. I read detective stories all night long. I smoked three packs of cigarettes. At six I took a bath. Otto was awake; he asked me if I needed anything from Dreux because he was going over there that afternoon. I told him I didn’t need anything. I had some coffee. I took off the canvas frame and looked at the panel for two hours. Then I put the cover back on for the last time. It must have been around ten o’clock. I lay down on the bed, opened another pack of cigarettes and the last of the detective novels I’d bought in Paris. At eleven Madera came back; he called me and asked where I was up to. I told him I would have finished by the evening, that I’d been to Paris the day before, that I’d had a letter from Rufus and that Rufus would be there the next day. He asked me to come up to see him in the afternoon …”

  “Why?”

  “He didn’t say … It couldn’t have been anything very important …”

  “Did he often summon you by telephone?”

  “Now and again … He would come downstairs sometimes, in the evening … He spent almost every afternoon in his office, presumably to deal with business matters …”

  “Didn’t he have a secretary?”

  “He had a secretary in Paris but I never saw him … I only found out he had an apartment in Paris late in the day … And a dozen others dotted around …”

  “While you were doing the Condottiere was he regularly in residence at Dampierre?”

  “About three-quarters of the time, yes … He occasionally travelled …”

  “And Otto?”

  “Otto stayed at Dampierre all the time. He’d been there five years. He looked after the house when Madera was away …”

  “What about his other houses?”

  “I suppose he had other housekeepers …”

  “How long had he been selling fakes?”

  “Since 1920. He was barely twenty-five at the time. Rufus had only just been born. Jérôme was only about twenty, too.”

  “How did it come about?”

  “Jérôme was the pupil of Joni Icilio, who was still called Federico. He died in 1946. He was quite clever, but it was an open secret that he did pastiches and he worked mainly as a restorer. I never found out how Jérôme came across him. Apparently around 1920 Jérôme was on the lookout for a fence to handle his work and he stumbled into Madera …”

  “Where did he come from?’

  “No idea … For years I thought he was Portuguese. They started with the Impressionists, Sisleys and Jongkinds that they made and stored in the villa that Madera owned in Tangier, and which then left for Australia and South America in false-bottomed trunks. Over time they perfected their system, taking on intermediaries, salesmen, agents, guys like Speranza and Dawnson, they were so to speak heads of department in charge of a whole network, sometimes a whole country – for instance, Nicolas had Yugoslavia – and they were to be seen in auction rooms, exhibitions, antique dealers, museums, editorial offices, reading all the specialist periodicals. It was fairly simple. When someone was on the look-out for something – a twelfth-century Madonna, a rare stamp, a Cambodian head, a Bantu fetish, a Corot, a Daumier, an anything – then one of the innumerable second or third fiddles dotted around the world would send a note to someone higher up who would pass it on to Madera. The order was placed. A few days or a month, or for larger works a couple of months later, the art lover would be offered a unique opportunity to acquire …”

  “And the certificate of authenticity?”

  “They had them. I never knew where they got them, or whether they were fakes too or whether they had an official authenticator on their books.”

  “Even for paintings?”

  “Even for mine …”

  “How did Jérôme manage with so many orders?”

  “There weren’t so many … On average, one a month. When there were two, they chose the more interesting one …”

  “Did it provide a living for the whole organisation?”

  “I don’t think so. But most of the salesmen did it on the side. I think they got around fifty thousand for each order they placed. There can’t have been many guys whose entire income came from Madera.”

  “And the police never found out anything?”

  “Not as far as I know …”

  “But Madera must have had some way of accounting for his wealth.”

  “I never knew how he managed that side of things. Rufus didn’t tell me …”

  “When did Rufus come into the picture?”

  “In 1940. He was about twenty years old, and had just inherited an art gallery in Geneva, where Jérôme and Madera had taken refuge. At the start I think Madera bought or bailed out the gallery which was on the verge of bankruptcy, and subsequently used it as a front.”

  “And you became involved in 1943.”

  “I started my apprenticeship then. I didn’t become a forger until 1947 …”

  “So how many fakes did you do in all?”

  “A hundred or more … A hundred and twenty, a hundred and thirty … I stopped counting early on …”

  “Did you always like doing it?”

  “What an odd question to ask … Yes, I always liked doing it …”

  “Why is it an odd question?”

  “It just is … Because you know the rest of the story … If I’d stopped liking it straight away, then I think I could have stopped doing it … But once you get a taste … It turned into a kind of habit … a way of life, something perfectly natural … like breathing or eating. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, I understand …”

  “Even when I knew it was
a betrayal, an expropriation, it was nothing to me, it was not my business, because I was no more than a sort of perfect memory, a resurrection …”

  “Didn’t you ever try to paint … I mean, to paint for yourself?”

  “No … never … except for the Condottiere … right at the end …”

  “Why don’t you say that you knew where you were going when you started the Condottiere?”

  “Because it’s not as simple as that. I knew and didn’t know at the same time. I wanted and didn’t want … Same old story … Safeguards on all sides … If I managed it, it would have been what I wanted, I would have cleared the table at a stroke and established the situation; if I failed, it would have been because it was too hard … Only it didn’t fail in the way I would have preferred …”

  “Yes …”

  “Do you see? I did succeed in painting my own portrait … I got my own face … If I’d tried for the portrait of Dorian Gray I couldn’t have done better … That’s all. He died of it. I did too … in a different way.”

  “The forger in you died …”

  “The forger is dead, long live Gaspard … Sure … In a few years, perhaps … In a few generations, when all the world’s art critics have re-established the truth … That’s what’s hardest, that’s what’s the most surprising … The absence of my life … I can’t say: the small Madonna of Sienna, that everybody thinks is from the school of Jacopo della Quercia, well, what do you know, it isn’t …”

  “Do you need your past to go on living?”

  “The same as everyone else …”

  “Not everyone demolishes their past the way you did …”

  “Not everybody has a past like mine …”