by Aaron Elkins
The little Boursse was as exquisite as I remembered it, a meticulously executed interior scene along the lines of his Woman Cooking in London's Wallace Collection. But this one was even more intimately domestic: A Mother Ridding Her Child's Hair of Lice—not a hugely appealing subject to today's art lover, but in seventeenth-century Holland a frequently used image of maternal love and a homely metaphor for good government. Sipping the fragrant wine, I looked at it lovingly no longer covetously), but I could hear Ugo behind me, shifting impatiently from foot to foot, could feel him psychologically yanking at me.
I turned away from the picture. "Ugo, are we in some kind of hurry?"
"No, no. Well, yes. Don't you want to see my surprise?"
"Surprise?"
His face fell. "You don't remember?"
I did, dimly. "In Bologna, at that bar. You said something about a surprise. . . ."
"Yes, come!" Now he was physically yanking me. "You can look at your Boursse some more later." We bypassed the elevator (too slow?) and started down the steps. "Do you remember," he said with a nervous laugh, "you once told me there was somebody missing from your show?"
"Uytewael," I replied.
More properly Wtewael, Joachim, made fractionally more accessible to the nonspeaker of Dutch by its alternate spelling. Uytewael was another painter of the Utrecht School, one of its leaders in his day, but little-known now. He was a legitimate part of Northerners in Italy, having spent two formative years in Padua when he was in his twenties. Originally, a single rare Uytewael had been included in the loan we were getting from the Pinacoteca, but the picture had proved too fragile to travel, so the show was without one. Or had been until now.
I stopped him on the stairs and stared at him. "You haven't gone out and bought an Uytewael, have you?"
He grinned again and tugged at me to move along.
I held him back. "You're going to lend it to the show? That's great, Ugo! But where—"
He put a fist on each hip. "Hey, Cristoforo, you want to talk about it, or you want to see it?"
Chapter 16
I wanted to see it. We took the lower flight of stairs in what seemed like two strides, and Ugo pulled me into a big ground-floor room that served as a workshop and storage area. There, in the center, clamped to an easel by wooden vises, it was: a small, unframed mythological scene, Venus in the Forge of Vulcan, a favorite subject in those days.
I began to move closer, but Ugo grabbed me by the arm again. "Wait. Look at her eyes." He led me, not to the easel, but from left to right in front of it. "You see?" he whispered reverently. "Wherever you move, the eyes follow you."
"Ah," I said, "so they do."
So they did. So do the eyes of the Mona Lisa (as any self- respecting Louvre guard will tell you if you let him), of the Rembrandt self-portraits, of Hals's Jolly Toper—and of ten thousand other pictures in the galleries of the world— including several others in Ugo's collection. So, for that matter, do the eye-dots on a six-year-old's Happy Face drawing. The fact is, any two-dimensional rendering of a three- dimensional face looking directly out of a picture will appear to be looking at you wherever you stand, if you take the trouble to notice. It is an artifact of human perception.
But of course I wasn't about to tell Ugo and spoil his pleasure in it. I was filled with gratitude. Ugo's generous gesture was going to eliminate a significant gap in the show. I moved slowly closer, looking at the picture of the near-nude figures: two bearded men, Venus, Cupid. It was painted on a panel, like Blusher's van Eyck-cum-Terbrugghen, only on this one the crackling ran the way it was supposed to. With time, an irregular groove had appeared down the center, marking the separation between the two planks beneath, and some of the glue used in joining them had leached to the surface, staining the figure at the anvil.
I walked around it to look at the back. The panel was from the Utrecht St. Luke's Guild, I thought, which was as it should have been. Besides the guild logo there were a couple of brands on it; one I recognized as an old quality-control mark, the other I thought was the stamp of the panel maker. A few strips of linen, brown and cracked with age, had been glued into the joint for support. I shifted to examine it from the sides.
And I began to feel a faint, intuitive stirring of doubt. Was there something not quite right here? Or was I getting paranoid? Was I going to be seeing forgeries every time I turned around now?
Ugo was busy pouring wine at a worktable. He came to my side with two tumblers. "You're surprised, yes?" he burbled. "You like it? It's not such a terrible painting, is it?"
"Mm, " I said. Abstractedly I took the glass he offered. What was holding my attention was not the painted surface, or even the back, but the very edges of the panel. You don't often get to see panel edges. They're usually glued solidly into sturdy frames, not just for appearance but for bracing. But this one was unframed, and the edges were coated with what looked like a compound of tangled yarn embedded in tar. This in itself was not extraordinary. In those days masses of plant fibers were sometimes glued to the hidden joints of a panel for additional stability. However, I couldn't recall seeing them cover the entire perimeter the way they did in this case.
My silence was getting to Ugo. "Cristoforo, what's the matter? You don't like it?"
"I don't like this," I said, fingering the edging.
"I'll have it taken off," he said anxiously. "Right away, don't worry."
"No, I mean I don't like the way it feels." I pressed a finger gently into it.
Ugo did the same. "How should it feel?"
"After four hundred years? Brittle, dry. It shouldn't still give this way. When did you say you got this?"
"In January, why? What's wrong?"
"January," I repeated. "Four months ago. Ugo, I could be wrong, but I don't think this stuff can be any older than that. Maybe newer."
His lips jerked. He didn't quite see where I was heading, but he didn't care for the general direction. "What do I care about this . . . this substance? What does it matter?"
I explained. What I was worried about was a waggish little caper that went back at least three hundred years. Toward the end of the seventeenth century the city council of Nuremberg had given permission to a painter to take down and copy Dürer's great self-portrait, which hung in the town hall. To make sure he didn't do something dastardly, such as swiping the original and substituting his own copy for it, they marked the back of the panel with various seals and hard-to-copy brands. Whereupon this resourceful crook carefully sawed off the front panel with Dürer's painting on it. He then used the thinned boards as the base for his copy, which was dutifully returned to the council complete with certified seals and markings still on the back, and made off with the famous original. (Not to worry; as often happens, it eventually found its way back into public hands and is now the showpiece of Munich's Pinakothek.)
Ugo took my undrunk wine back. He put both tumblers on the worktable with the bottle, returned, and looked soberly at the little painting.
"You think someone sawed off the front of my picture," he said slowly, "and painted a copy of it on another piece of wood, and then glued the copy on the panel? And then they stole the real picture and covered up what they did by putting on this black stuff?"
That was what I was thinking, all right. It wasn't only the freshness of the black adhesive, it was the painting itself that was worrying me. It wasn't an obvious forgery, like Blusher's fake van Eyck, but there were things about it that made me wonder: the washed-out colors, the flatness of the forms, a lack of the elaborate detailing that usually characterized Uytewael. True, I hadn't seen much of his work, and what I'd seen had varied in quality from picture to picture, so maybe I was imagining things. Besides I was by no means expert in this obscure Dutch Mannerist's work. But taken all together, I was uneasy, and I was truthful about it with Ugo.
"But, Cristoforo, look how old it is," he said. "See the cracks, see how it's stained, see the patches? Look how it was fixed up—here, and here, and here—a long
time ago."
"Yes, I see." The trouble was, I told him, those were just the sort of "imperfections" a knowledgeable forger would supply. "Where did you get this, Ugo?"
"From Christie's, in London. Clara was there for an auction, and she called me to say it would be offered. She knew," he added proudly, "that I am a collector of the Utrecht School."
"Clara?" I said. "Clara Gozzi?"
"Sure, Clara Gozzi. She said it was going to go for a low price, a bargain. She wanted to know, did I want her to act as my agent."
"And you told her to?"
"I said yes, all right, up to £100,000."
"And what did you wind up paying?"
"I got it for £93,000."
About $150,000. A bargain, all right—if it was really an Uytewael.
"Where did it come from? What's its provenance?"
"What the hell do I care where it came from?" He grabbed me roughly by the shoulder and swung me around to face him. "What are you saying, they stuck me with a fake? That's impossible!"
Max once told me that he'd seen Ugo genuinely worked up only once, and that had been over a ridiculously trivial matter, when someone had tried to overcharge him a few hundred lire for theater tickets. The overriding imperative of Ugo's life, Max had said, was non farsi far fesso—not to be made a fool of. It was a result, Max had airily supposed, of social insecurity stemming from a peasant background.
Whatever the root cause, Ugo was thoroughly worked up again. His face was splotched with red; in his temple throbbed an artery I hadn't seen before. I felt guilty for upsetting him, sorry that I'd been so blunt. I should have eased into this, kept my suspicions to myself until I had something more to go on.
"I don't think there's any reason to worry, Ugo," I said with more confidence than I felt. "I'm just naturally suspicious. If something does turn out to be funny about this, Christie's will take it back."
"What are you talking about?" he shouted. "How could anything be funny? The people at the museum, they checked it over."
"What museum?"
He snorted and waved his arms at the walls. "What museum, what museum—the Pinacoteca, what else? Di Vecchio examined it himself."
He quieted down enough to explain that the purchase had been conditional on Ugo's having the painting examined by experts of his own choosing. He had left it with the Pinacoteca for a few days, and Di Vecchio and his staff had concluded that there was no basis on which to dispute the painting's authenticity. There was a high probability that it was a genuine Uytewael, but if so it was an inferior one; perhaps unfinished, maybe a study, probably just an unsuccessful effort that had been discarded but not destroyed.
Di Vecchio had told him to forget his plans of offering it to Northerners in Italy; it was simply not exhibition-quality.
"So I did," Ugo said. "But then, when you said you would come here to Sicily anyway, I figured, Amedeo doesn't know everything; why shouldn't I let you decide for yourself?"
"No reason at all. But didn't he say anything about this black stuff?"
"Nothing."
I hunched my shoulders. "Well, forget what I've been telling you. All I can say is, it would never have gotten by Amedeo. He'd have noticed it, and looked into it, and he must have been satisfied with the answers he got. Maybe it was restored just before it was auctioned, maybe—"
"Notice? How could he notice? With the frame on it you couldn't see the edges."
"It had a frame when it was auctioned?"
"Sure. Over there." He pointed to the disassembled parts of a simple old frame on a worktable a few feet away. "Why did you take it off?"
"Me, I didn't take it off. Vittore took it off."
Vittore Pinto, Ugo explained, was his Catanian restorer, and it had come off because one of the panel's long-ago owners had apparently seen fit to preserve the deteriorating wood of the frame by bathing it in olive oil. It had worked fine for the frame, but over the years a greasy film had spread onto the margins of the painting.
Ugo halted. "Wait, doesn't that prove it's old? Vittore said it would take years and years for such a film to form. Doesn't that prove it's real?"
Unfortunately, I told him, it proved nothing. It was just another touch a clever forger would throw in.
"You're just like these damn psychiatrists!" he exploded. "Everything proves what you say. You hate your mother too much? Sure, that proves you wanted to have sex with her when you were a little kid. You love your mother too much? Sure, that proves you wanted to have sex with her when you were a little kid."
I laughed, glad to have him making jokes again, and leaned over to look at the picture. "I don't see any film now."
Pinto had removed it, according to Ugo, and had touched up the rest of the painted surface as well. The frame had undergone an oil-evaporation process, had been coated with sealant, and was now drying. On Monday the restorer would come back and refit it to the panel.
"Ugo, maybe I've been making us crazy over nothing," I said hopefully. "Could Pinto have touched up this black edging, too?"
"No, I don't think so. Vittore's good at his job, but he makes sure to charge plenty. There's nothing on his statement about this, so take my word for it, he didn't do it."
Unless he did it without telling Ugo. The copyist that forged the Dürer hadn't charged the council for alterations, either. But this seemed too unlikely to pursue. If Pinto had sliced off the face of the original Uytewael and made off with it, he would hardly have left the evidence of his tinkering sitting around Ugo's workshop for a week.
Besides, who in his right mind would go to all that risk and trouble to make off with a Joachim Uytewael, for God's sake? What kind of market was there for Uytewaels? Even in Ugo's relatively modest collection there were paintings worth nine or ten times as much. Was I inventing all this?
Tentatively, I fingered the tarry black border again. No, I wasn't inventing anything. Something wasn't right here. Maybe there was a simple and legitimate explanation, but something wasn't right.
"Ugo, tell me: Does it look exactly the same as when you first saw it? I mean exactly."
He studied it, lips pursed. "Yes. A little nicer since Vittore cleaned it."
"You're absolutely sure it's the same painting Clara brought back from London?"
"Ten minutes ago I was sure," he grumbled. "Now, with all these questions, who knows?" He chewed on a plump underlip. "You're starting to worry me, damn it. The fact is, Cristoforo, I didn't see it when she brought it back. I was in the middle of moving back here from Milan. I had no time for it. Clara took it straight to the museum. The first time I saw it was when it got here a week, two weeks, later." He grabbed up his tumbler and gulped down the rest of his wine. "But so what? What are you saying?"
"I don't know. How did it get here from the museum?"
"It came with the rest of my paintings. Max arranged with the shipping company there, I forget their name—"
I looked at him. "Salvatorelli?"
"No, not them. From Milan. Albertazzi."
Another theory bit the dust. Albertazzi Figlio were also well-known transporters of fine art. But unlike the Salvatorellis, they were incontestably upright; not a shred of rumor about underworld connections attached to them.
"The Pinacoteca's in Bologna, Albertazzi's in Milan," I said. "How did it get from Bologna to Milan? Or did the movers just pick it up at the museum on their way south?"
"How do I know? Can I take care of every detail? Can't I trust the Pinacoteca?"
He banged down his glass, threw up his hands and stumped angrily around the little room, lapsing into a muttered dialect I couldn't understand.
Two circuits calmed him. He stopped, facing me. "Cristoforo," he said quietly, "let me get this straight. You're worried that if we could see under that black stuff, we'd see two pieces of wood, two layers of wood."
"Right."
"But if you're wrong, there'd be one solid piece, the way there's supposed to be."
"True."
He smac
ked his hands together. "Fine! So then let's see. What are we standing here talking for?"
He went quickly to the workbench, rummaged for a moment, and came back, freshly energized, with a wood chisel in his hand. Ugo was first and foremost a man of action.
"Wait!" I jumped between him and the picture. Chisels being addressed to seventeenth-century paintings tended to turn curators into men of action, too. "What are you going to do?"
He blinked at me. "I'm going to scrape it off and see what's underneath. Why not?"
"For one thing, you just paid millions of lire for this. Hundreds of millions."
"So? It's mine, isn't it? Don't worry, I'm not going to hurt the picture. Just this crap on the edges."
We were dancing absurdly around, Ugo trying to bull his way past me, me holding him off.
"Ugo, I just think the painting might be a forgery. You can't just chip away at it when you feel like it. Besides, it isn't yours."
He stopped shoving and peered skeptically up at me. "Who says, not mine?"
"Not yours to do anything you want with, It's yours as an article of public trust. You're its custodian, its guardian, not its owner. You're the one who's responsible for preserving it for posterity—not scraping away at it with a chisel to see what's underneath."
Okay, it was a little windy, but this kind of thing has a better ring to it in Italian. And being exactly what I really believe, it was delivered with sincerity. In any case, the appeal to Ugo's better instincts did the trick.
"Cristoforo, you're right," he said, lifting his jowls a little, as befitted a guardian of the public trust. He put down the chisel. "So what do we do?"
I'd been giving this some thought. "The top person I know on early sixteenth-century Flemish painting is Willem van de Graaf at the Mauritshuis."
"At the what?"
"It's a museum in The Hague. I'd like him to see this."
"Sure, tell him to come down."
"No, I mean I'd like to take it there. That's where his laboratory is. I could fly up there with it on Monday morning. If it's genuine, I'll take it gladly, and I can have the Mauritshuis ship it on to Seattle for the show. If it isn't— well, I'll call you, and we can figure out what to do from there."
