He grinned and nodded like he was acknowledging a dull but willing pupil. “Yes, that’s true, and he used a lot of it. We were able to locate a store of very old red cloth, and we extracted the dyestuffs with alkali. Spectrographically they’re from cochineal and lac, which is consistent with what your man used, and the carbon isotopes should give us no worries. The same for the blacks. We used charcoal from archaeological sites. They burned a lot of buildings in the Thirty Years’ War, and a lot of people too. And they can date white too, you know.”
I didn’t know, except that you had to use lead, not zinc or titanium, I knew that much, and he said, “Yes, of course, we use lead white, the so-called flake white, but now they can analyze the ratio of various radioisotopes in the lead and can date when the lead was smelted from the galena ore. Therefore we have to make our flake white from seventeenth-century lead, which we have done. The museums of Europe are full of old bullets and the churches are roofed with old lead. It is not so difficult. In the cellar there is an earthenware vat where we corrode the lead with acetic acid to make lead carbonate. We use electric heaters instead of burying the vat in dung, but that should not affect the authenticity. The pigment is a little coarse, but you can use that to good effect, as Velázquez did. Extremely poisonous, of course, signor, you must not point your brushes in your mouth. And as for these brushes, I think you’ll agree we have done well.”
He held up a jar with a dozen or so brushes of all sizes. I’d never seen any like them before; the handles were heavy, dark wood, and the hairs were tied into the ferule with fine brass wire.
Baldassare said, “These are on loan from a museum in Munich. Genuine seventeenth century, in case a tiny hair should slip out into the painting-we don’t want someone to say, oh, this badger died in 1994.”
“On loan?” I said.
“In a manner of speaking, signor. They will be returned when we are done with them.”
“Who did they belong to?”
“Attributed to Rubens, but who knows? Perhaps they are forgeries too.” A big smile, just like Franco’s, but with fewer teeth. Smiles all around this place, and it made me nervous.
He showed me the divan where I was going to pose my model, with the velvet draperies and bedclothes in the approximate Velázquez colors: red, a greeny gray, and white, all as naturally fibrous as could be. A heavy wood-framed rectangular mirror was standing against the wall.
“You have the model too,” I said.
He shrugged. “We have Sophia. And her boy. We can get another, but we would prefer to keep all of this work in the house, as a matter of security.”
So I asked, “Who’s Sophia?” and he looked surprised and said, “She served you your risotto this afternoon.”
“Oh, the waitress,” I said, and I honestly couldn’t recall what she looked like.
“Yes, she helps her mother, but she’s an artist. Like you.”
I said, “You mean a forger.”
A nod, a smile, an Italian gesture of the hand. “A forger is an artist. She does antiquities and drawings, small things, very good quality. The boy will pose too, you know, with the mirror. The Cupid. Naturally, in the faces you will use your imagination, we don’t want someone to say, you know, I saw that woman with that little boy on the Number Fourteen bus.”
I agreed that would be embarrassing, and then for the rest of the afternoon I watched him rub out the crappy Flight into Egypt.
He used flame and turpentine-and not just any turps, he used the kind I’d be using for the painting, real Strasbourg turpentine made from the resin of the Tyrolian silver fir. Terrific smell, a little Pavlov in there; when it hit my nose I couldn’t wait to get back to work. Fresco is neat but there’s nothing like oil, just the feel of it down the brush to your hand and the way it shines, rich and sweaty, and of course that smell. Baldassare was talking about varnish, how we’d use real mastic from Pistaccia trees, the finest Chios grade, prepared with that same turpentine.
“How are we going to age it?” I asked him, and he stopped cleaning and made that gesture of the finger to the side of the nose, indicating a secret.
“You will see, but first we do the painting, okay?”
The cleaning and the drying of the canvas took a couple of days, during which I wandered around the city, on foot and by public transportation. Franco offered to drive me anyplace I wanted to go, but I preferred to mooch around the city myself. I hadn’t been in Rome since I came with Dad at age ten. Obviously, it’s changed, becoming more like everywhere else.
I looked at a lot of pictures but I kept coming back to the Doria Pamphili and Velázquez’s Pope. Joshua Reynolds thought it was one of the best portraits in the world. Second that. The first time I ever saw it I was terrified and had nightmares about it for weeks afterward. “Innocent, my ass!” is what my father said, before giving me his usual close reading of the work. He was always going on about the inherent superiority of an oil portrait to a photograph, especially when the image was literally as large as life, as here. You don’t see many life-size photographs, and even when you see actors on the screen, larger than life, as the saying goes, it’s still not the same. There’s something about the human scale that finds a trigger in our brains, and this painting has the usual legends attached to it, of servants coming into a room where it was hanging and mistaking it for the actual man, bowing and so forth.
But its power comes from a lot more than scale, because a life-size Kodachrome print would be a joke. It’s not mere illusion, has nothing to do with those fussy little nature mort or trompe l’oeil paintings you see in the side rooms of museums, it’s its own thing, the life of two men, artist and subject interpenetrated, coming alive, the vital loom of a life in a moment of time-no wonder the servants bowed. And technically, the handling of the satin of the camauro and the manteletta and the dense fall of the rochetta, white but made of every color but white, and the rendering of the damp flesh of a living man-you can look at it for hours and digitize the fucking brushstrokes and penetrate it with X-rays, yet still at its heart there’s a mystery. All the balls he had to keep in the air at once, every brushstroke in balance with every other-and what strokes, exactly right, each one, and all perfectly free, loose, and graceful. I must be insane to pretend I can do this, is what I was thinking, to be absolutely honest, raving mad. And for gangsters too! I was starting to feel like the queen in Rumpelstiltskin: oh, sure, king, honey, I can spin straw into gold…
And at that point it struck me that the obscure names for his ecclesiastic garments had popped into my head as I studied them, and I was sure I had no idea what a rochetta was when I walked into the museum. I felt the hair stand up on my neck, and I left in a hurry, with a funny sense that something was on my heels.
I needed a drink after that and I found a café in the Corso and had a grappa. As I was drinking a beer to wash away the taste, I called Mark in New York and asked him to send the money from Castelli, minus commission and expenses, to Lotte. He said he would and he wanted to talk about what I was doing and how the you-know-what was turning out, but I didn’t want to talk to Mark and I got off the phone as soon as I could.
Then I made the call I’d been putting off, my guilt call to Lotte at home. It was nine or so in the evening there and she sounded sleepy and irritable.
“So you finally decided to call us,” she said. “Honestly, Chaz, what are you thinking?”
“I’m sorry,” I said lamely. “I’ve been working really hard.”
“Yes, that’s always been your excuse. You think you can treat people any way you like and it will be all fine because you are being productive.”
“I said I was sorry, Lotte.”
“That’s not enough. I have been worried sick about you. You have some kind of psychotic break, you are arrested and sent to Bellevue, and then, instead of getting help, you run away to Europe-”
“How are the kids?” I said, hoping to change the subject to the safer one of our mutual parenthood, a ploy that had often w
orked in the past.
“Oh, yes, the kids! Their father has disappeared without a word of good-bye, after they saw him with a bloody face in the Post being taken by the police-how do you think they are?”
And more in this line, and I listened without fighting back or interrupting, and at last she wore it out and I smoothed things over with the lie that I would seek psychiatric help in Europe. We eased back into our usual conversational mode and I asked about the children again, and this time she said, “Oh, well, we had a small crisis the other day. Rudolf is no more.”
“Finally. He was old for a hamster. What did he die of?”
“Of death, as Rose says with great solemnity. She took it very well, I must say. We all dressed in black and had a funeral in the back garden. Milo played the march from Saul on his flutophone and Rose did a eulogy that would have made a cat laugh. It was amazing that Milo could keep playing. She described hamster heaven in some detail. Apparently Baby Jesus visits it every day, before his bedtime. She’s constructed a shrine, with one of her shredder collages-Rudolf escorted into said heaven by St. Peter and the angels, with an altar cloth made of shredder waste. It’s killingly funny, and Milo is under strict orders not to mock.”
“How’s he doing?”
“Fine, except the new drug makes him itch and he says he has no energy. I wish I trusted them more, but what can we do? At the end of the day our boy is a guinea pig, and that’s what we must put up with to keep him alive.”
I said, “You don’t have to worry about money for a while anyway, because I just told Slotsky to send you the proceeds from my restoration job. It should come to a little under two hundred grand.”
A small silence while she absorbed this, and then she said, “But, Chaz, what will you live on if you give us all of it?”
“Oh, that’s what I’m calling about, really. It sounds funny when you actually say it, but I have a patron.”
“A patron?”
“Yeah, like in the old days. A rich guy, a pal of the man I did the restoration for, he saw it and we got to talking and I sort of told him my sad story, and he said something like there’s no reason for an artist of your ability to have to grub in the marketplace, and he had a studio I could use rent-free and he’s promised to pay me a regular stipend and take everything I paint.”
“Who is this man?” she asked me, suspicion in her voice, warranted obviously; can she really tell a porker over the telephone? But not really a lie when you think about it; Krebs really is a patron and possibly less of a gangster than the old kings of Europe, considering the kind of shit they pulled as a matter of course-Krebs never sent his boys to burn a city and rape its women and burn people at the stake.
“His name’s Krebs,” I said. “He’s a German art dealer and collector. Mark set it up, but I’m not working through Mark. This is all directly for the collector.”
“That’s ridiculous. No one sells paintings like that. What will happen when your work is sold? Will you share in the proceeds?”
“Not clear, and I don’t care. I’m getting paid top dollar to please a single connoisseur who loves my work. Every artist in Europe had that arrangement before the modern period. Lotte, I’ve been looking for this all my life. And you’ve been yelling at me for years to do the best work I can, not jokes, Lotte, no more jokes. And the money…the money is fantastic. It means a completely new life for us.”
“As for example…”
“He’s going to give me a million for the painting I’m doing now.”
A longer pause here and a long, sad sigh. “Oh, Chaz,” she said,
“why do I even talk to you? I don’t know what to do.”
“What?”
“You are out of your mind, you are still in some kind of fantasy world. I’m sorry, I cannot do this-”
“Listen, it’s not a fantasy, Krebs is real. Ask Mark.”
“I don’t trust Mark. He’s perfectly capable of encouraging your insanity for his own purposes, and in any case, what you describe is impossible! No one could realize that much on your work in the market-”
“Lotte, there’s no market. That’s the point. He’s an eccentric zillionaire. He’s got private jets, private yachts, he can afford to have a private artist, just like Lorenzo the Magnificent and Ludovico Sforza and the rest of those guys.”
A long silence, and at last she said, “Well. Then I congratulate you. Honestly…I’m sorry if I sound doubtful, but it all seems like…I don’t know, some impossible and grandiose fantasy. You used to have them all the time when you were taking drugs, if you recall, so perhaps you’ll forgive me if I am not just now breaking out the champagne. By the way, my father rang and said he’d seen you and that you looked well.”
“So you know I’m not doping,” I said, maybe a little acerbic tone there, because she said, “I didn’t mean to imply any such thing. But, you know, it is my business-everyone is suspicious, the artists think they’re being cheated, the customers think the same, haggling, always haggling. No one comes in the door and says, I love this work and here is a check for what it says on the card. It’s always, if I buy two can I have twenty percent off? And I sell a work and then the artist sees it at auction and it sells for twice what he got, and he yells at me for undervaluing his work.”
“So quit. We don’t need the money for the gallery anymore.”
“Yes, your new fortune. I tell you, Chaz, I would like to meet this man and see with my own eyes what you have gotten into. Then maybe I’ll believe it.”
“Blessed are those who have not seen and believed.”
That got a laugh. “Well, if you quote the Bible I suppose I must become a little excited.” She sighed. “Ah, if only it were true! There are clinics in Switzerland that have had wonderful successes with children like Milo, where a month costs what I take in, gross, in my best year.”
“It’s covered. I’m telling you, Lotte, it’s a new world. Look, the other reason I called-I want you to come over here.”
“What, to Venice?”
“No, I’m in Rome. That’s where the studio is. I’ll send you first-class tickets, you’ll come, we’ll stay in a swanky hotel. When was the last time we did something like that? Never is when.”
“But the gallery. And the children-”
“The girl can handle the gallery for a few days and the kids’ll be fine with Ewa. Come on, Lotte, you can spare four, five days.”
And she agreed right away, which I thought was a little odd. Lotte’s response to poverty is the classic French one of bitterness, self-denial, and also resenting the pleasure others get in expending money. We used to fight about that a lot: we couldn’t ever go out for a nice meal, and when I did drag her out she always ordered the least expensive thing on the menu and drank a single glass of wine and sat like the chief mourner at a provincial funeral. She wasn’t like that when I met her; no, she knew how to let the good times roll. It was the kid getting sick. Or me. Maybe I have a special charism for making women bitter.
Two days later Franco and I picked her up at the airport and drove to the San Francesco, which is not quite the Danieli in Venice but is the best hotel in Trastevere. She was quiet, a little withdrawn, which I guess I had to expect, and when we got out of the Merc at the hotel, she gave me a look. Lotte, being a diplomatic brat, is used to the top end of things-or was before she married me-and the look said, can you really afford a place like this? And so I whipped out my magic black card and handed it to the desk clerk.
Who took it with both hands and made a little bow and was all smiles. He was about to check us into the room I’d reserved when Lotte put a hand on my arm and drew me aside.
“I want my own room,” she said.
“Why, you think I’m going to attack you in a frenzy of lust?”
“No, but I’m not here for a cozy holiday. A few months ago you were a raving maniac who pulled a knife on a gallery owner, and I would like to have at least one door between us if this maniac should happen to return.”
&
nbsp; “Fine. So what is this, a tour of inspection, like a sanitary commission?”
Now she was standing in combat position, with her arms folded across her breasts and her jaw thrust out, and at that moment more than anything I wanted to tell her the whole thing. But I did not. I was terrified that if I spilled it her face would take on a certain look, one I was more than familiar with from the terminal stages of our marriage, in which shock, pain, and bone-deep disappointment each played a part. The suspicious and canny face she was now showing was not a natural part of her expressive repertoire, I knew. It was me that put it there, as surely as if I’d painted it on with oils. My mom used to wear it often, as a matter of fact, and now I’d given it to my beloved forever. Life is just so wonderful.
“If you like,” she said. “You say you have all this money, and I’ve seen some of it, but I want to be sure you are not in some insane delusion about the rest of it. It’s about our child, Chaz, and about his future. You see why it’s hard for me to trust you-”
“Sure. Okay, no problem. Two rooms. Can they be adjoining or do you have to be heavily isolated from the maniac?”
“Adjoining is fine,” she said coolly, and I turned again to the desk.
An elderly porter with the manners of an ambassador ushered us up to our rooms and got a tip commensurate with his mien. When he’d gone, we agreed to meet in an hour and go out to dinner. I tossed my bag onto what would be my lonely bed and left for the bar on the roof of the hotel, where I drank a couple of Camparis and watched the sky go dark and the shadows creep up the ochre walls of the little convent across the street until they vanished into blackness.
When I returned and knocked on the door of Lotte’s room, I found her ready to go, wearing a dress of just the rose pink that Fra Angelico used to clothe his angels in and a worn velvet jacket colored a sort of verdigris, very quattrocento. It suited her coloring, the dark blond hair, the dark eyes, an unusual combo, but one you see often in paintings from that period. From her Italian mother. And it’s a habit of Lotte’s to dress in colors, when everyone in her circles in New York wears black, as a sign, she says, of mourning for the death of art.
The Forgery of Venus Page 18
