Portrait of an unknown w.., p.18
Portrait of an Unknown Woman, page 18
“And the subject matter?”
“I’ll let you know the minute I finish painting them.”
The first challenge for any art forger is the acquisition of canvases and stretchers of appropriate age, dimensions, and condition. When executing his copy of Vincent’s Sunflowers, Gabriel had purchased a third-tier Impressionist streetscape from a small gallery near the Jardin du Luxembourg. He had no need to resort to such methods now. He merely had to ride the lift down to Julian’s storerooms, which were crammed with an apocalyptic inventory of what was affectionately known in the trade as dead stock. He selected six minor Venetian School works from the sixteenth century—follower of so-and-so, manner of such-and-such, workshop of what’s-his-name—and asked Sarah to express-ship them to his apartment in San Polo.
“Why six instead of only three?”
“I need two spares in the event of a disaster.”
“And the other one?”
“I’m planning to leave a Gentileschi with my front man in Florence.”
“Silly me,” said Sarah. “But how are we going to explain the missing paintings to Julian?”
“With any luck, he won’t notice.”
Sarah instructed the shippers to arrive no later than nine the following morning and advised Julian to take the day off. Nevertheless, he wandered into Mason’s Yard at his usual time, a quarter past twelve, as the crated paintings were being loaded into a Ford Transit van. The tragicomedy that followed included yet another collision with an inanimate object. This time it was Sarah’s shredder, into which Julian, in a spasm of self-pity, attempted to insert himself.
Gabriel did not witness the incident, for he was in the back of a taxi bound from Fiumicino Airport toward Rome’s Piazza di Sant’Ignazio. Upon arrival he took a table at Le Cave, one of his favorite restaurants in the centro storico. It was located a few steps from the ornate yellow-and-white palazzo that served as the headquarters of the Art Squad.
The palazzo’s door swung open at half past one, and General Cesare Ferrari emerged in his bemedaled blue-and-gold uniform. He crossed the gray cobbles of the square and without uttering a word of greeting sat down at Gabriel’s table. Instantly the waiter delivered a frigid bottle of Frascati and a plate of fried arancini.
“Why doesn’t that happen when I arrive at restaurants?” asked Gabriel.
“I’m sure it’s only the uniform.” The general plucked one of the risotto balls from the plate. “Shouldn’t you be in Venice with your wife and children?”
“Probably. But I needed to have a word with you first.”
“About what?”
“I’m thinking about embarking on a life of crime, and I was wondering whether you would be interested in a piece of the action.”
“What sort of misdeed are you contemplating this time?”
“Art forgery.”
“Well, you certainly have the talent for it,” said the general. “But what would be my end?”
“A high-profile case that will shake the art world to its core and ensure that the generous funding and personnel levels of the Art Squad remain unchanged for years to come.”
“Has a crime been committed on Italian soil?”
“Not yet,” said Gabriel with a smile. “But soon.”
37
Bridge of Sighs
Umberto Conti, universally regarded as the greatest art restorer of the twentieth century, had bequeathed to Francesco Tiepolo a magical ring of keys that could open any door in Venice. Over drinks at Harry’s Bar, Francesco entrusted them to Gabriel. Late that evening he slipped into the Scuola Grande di San Rocco and spent two hours in solitary communion with some of Tintoretto’s greatest works. Then he breached the defenses of the neighboring Frari church and stood transfixed before Titian’s magisterial Assumption of the Virgin. In the deep silence of the cavernous nave, he recalled the words Umberto had spoken to him when he was a broken, gray-haired boy of twenty-five.
Only a man with a damaged canvas of his own can be a truly great restorer . . .
Umberto would not have approved of his gifted pupil’s newest commission. And neither, for that matter, did Francesco. Nevertheless, he agreed to serve as a consultant to the project. He was, after all, one of the world’s foremost authorities on the Venetian School painters. If Gabriel could fool Francesco Tiepolo, he could fool anyone.
Francesco likewise agreed to accompany Gabriel during his nocturnal Venetian wanderings, if only to prevent another mishap like the one involving poor Capitano Rossetti. They stole into churches and scuole, roamed the Accademia and the Museo Correr, and even stormed the Doge’s Palace. While peering through the stone-barred windows of the Bridge of Sighs, Francesco summarized the difficulty of the task ahead.
“Four different works by four of the greatest painters in history. Only a madman would attempt such a thing.”
“If he can do it, so can I.”
“The forger?”
Gabriel nodded.
“It’s not a competition, you know.”
“Of course it is. I have to prove to them that I would be a worthy addition to the network. Otherwise, they won’t make a play for me.”
“Is that why you allowed yourself to be dragged into this? For the challenge?”
“Wherever did you get the idea that this was going to be a challenge for me?”
“You don’t lack for confidence, do you?”
“Neither does he.”
“You’re all the same, you art forgers. You all have something to prove. He’s probably a failed painter who’s taking his revenge on the art world by fooling the connoisseurs and the collectors.”
“The connoisseurs and collectors,” said Gabriel, “haven’t seen anything yet.”
He spent his days in his studio with his monographs and catalogues raisonnés and photographs from past restorations, including several that he had conducted for Francesco. Together, after much debate, some of it conducted with raised voices, they settled on the subject matter and iconography for the four forgeries. Gabriel produced a series of preparatory sketches, then turned the sketches into four swiftly executed rehearsal paintings. Francesco declared the Gentileschi, a reworking of Danaë and the Shower of Gold, to be the finest of the lot, with Veronese’s Susanna in the Bath a close second. Gabriel agreed with Francesco’s assessment of the Gentileschi, though he was fond of his reinterpretation of Tintoretto’s Bacchus, Venus, and Ariadne. His Titian, a pastiche of The Lovers, wasn’t bad, either, though he thought the brushwork was a touch tentative.
“How can one not be tentative when one is forging a Titian?”
“It’s a dead giveaway, Francesco. I have to become Titian. Otherwise, we’re sunk.”
“What are you going to do with that one?”
“Cremation. The others, too.”
“Have you taken leave of your senses?”
“Clearly.”
Early the following morning, Gabriel uncrated one of the paintings he had pillaged from Julian’s storerooms, an early sixteenth-century Venetian School devotional piece of no value and little merit. Even so, he felt a stab of guilt as he scraped the unknown artist’s work from the canvas and covered it in gesso and an imprimatura of lead white with traces of lampblack and yellow ocher. Next he executed his underdrawing—with a brush, the way he would have done it—and meticulously prepared his palette. Lead white, genuine ultramarine, madder lake, burnt sienna, malachite, yellow ocher, red ocher, orpiment, ivory black. Before commencing work, he once again reflected on the shifting fortunes of his career. He was no longer the leader of a powerful intelligence service or even one of the world’s finest art restorers.
He was the sun amidst small stars.
He was Titian.
For the better part of the next week, Chiara and the children saw little of him. On the rare occasions he emerged from his studio, he was on edge and preoccupied, not at all himself. Only once did he accept an invitation to join Chiara for lunch. His hands left smudges of paint across her breasts and abdomen.
“I feel like I just made love to another man.”
“You did.”
“Who are you?”
“Come with me. I’ll show you.”
Wrapped in a bedsheet, Chiara followed him into the studio and stood before the canvas. At length she whispered, “You’re a freak.”
“Do you like it?”
“It’s absolutely—”
“Amazing, I think.”
“I see a touch of Giorgione in it.”
“That’s because I was still under his influence when I painted it in 1510.”
“Who will you be next?”
Jacobo Robusti, the artist known as Tintoretto, was a learned and unsmiling man who rarely set foot outside Venice and allowed few visitors to enter his workspace. If there was one consolation, he was among the swiftest painters in the republic. Gabriel completed his version of Bacchus, Venus, and Ariadne in half the time it took him to finish The Lovers. Chiara nevertheless declared it superior to the Titian in every respect, as did Francesco.
“I’m afraid your wife is right. You truly are a freak.”
Next Gabriel assumed the personality and remarkable palette of Paolo Veronese. Susanna in the Bath required the largest of the six canvases he had acquired from Isherwood Fine Arts and several additional days to complete—in large part because Gabriel intentionally damaged the work and then restored it. Luca Rossetti visited him three times during the painting’s execution. Brush in hand, Gabriel lectured the young Carabinieri officer on the artistic merits and fraudulent pedigrees of his four forged masterpieces. Rossetti in turn briefed Gabriel on the preparations for their forthcoming operation. They included the acquisition of two properties—an isolated villa for the reclusive forger and an apartment in Florence for his front man.
“It’s on the south side of the Arno, on the Lungarno Torrigiani. We’ve loaded it up with paintings and antiquities from the Art Squad’s evidence room. It definitely looks like the home of an art dealer.”
“And the villa?”
“Your friend the Holy Father called Count Gasparri. It’s all arranged.”
“How soon can you settle into the apartment and assume your new identity?”
“As soon as you say I’m ready.”
“Are you?”
“I know my lines,” answered Rossetti. “And I know more about the Venetian School painters than I ever thought possible.”
“What was Veronese’s name when he was young?” inquired Gabriel.
“Paolo Spezapreda.”
“And why was that?”
“His father was a stonecutter. It was traditional for children to be named after their father’s occupation.”
“Why did he start calling himself Paolo Caliari?”
“His mother was the illegitimate child of a nobleman called Antonio Caliari. Young Paolo thought it was better to be named for a nobleman than a stonecutter.”
“Not bad.” Gabriel drew his Beretta from the waistband of his trousers. “But will you be able to recite your lines so confidently if someone points one of these at your head?”
“I grew up in Naples,” said Rossetti. “Most of my childhood friends are now in the Camorra. I’m not going to fall to pieces if someone starts waving a gun around.”
“I heard a rumor that an elderly Venetian School painter gave you a good thrashing the other night in San Polo.”
“The elderly painter attacked me without warning.”
“That’s the way it works in the real world. Criminals don’t often announce their intentions before resorting to violence.” Gabriel returned the gun to the small of his back and contemplated the towering canvas. “What do you think, Signore Calvi?”
“You have to darken the garments of the two elders. Otherwise, I won’t be able to convince Oliver Dimbleby that it was painted in the late sixteenth century.”
“Oliver Dimbleby,” said Gabriel, “will be the least of your problems.”
By the time he commenced work on the Gentileschi, he was so exhausted he could scarcely hold a brush. Fortunately, Chiara agreed to pose for him, as the artist he was attempting to impersonate preferred the Caravaggesque method of painting directly from live models. He gave his Danaë Chiara’s body and facial features, but turned his wife’s dark hair to gold and her olive skin to luminous alabaster. Most of their sessions necessarily included an intermezzo in the bedroom—a hurried one, for Gabriel’s time was limited. The end result of their collaboration was a painting of astonishing beauty and veiled eroticism. It was, they both agreed, the finest of the four works.
Like the other three paintings, it was unmarred by craquelure, a sure sign it was a modern forgery and not the work of an Old Master. The solution was a large professional oven. General Ferrari obtained one from the seized inventory of a Mafia-owned kitchen supplies firm and delivered it to the mainland warehouse of the Tiepolo Restoration Company. After removing the four paintings from their stretchers, Gabriel baked them for three hours at 220 degrees Fahrenheit. Then, with Francesco’s help, he dragged the paintings over the edge of a rectangular work table, first vertically, then horizontally. The result was a fine network of Italianate surface cracks.
That evening, alone in his studio, Gabriel covered the paintings with varnish. And in the morning, when the varnish was dry, he photographed them with a tripod-mounted Nikon. He hung the Titian and the Tintoretto in the sitting room of the apartment, surrendered the Gentileschi to General Ferrari, and shipped the Veronese to Sarah Bancroft in London. The photos he emailed directly to Oliver Dimbleby, owner and sole proprietor of Dimbleby Fine Arts of Bury Street, upon whose rounded shoulders the entire venture rested. Shortly before midnight one of the images appeared on the website of ARTnews, beneath the byline of Amelia March. Gabriel read the exclusive story to his dark-haired, olive-complected Danaë. She made love to him in a shower of gold.
38
Kurfürstendamm
The article was purportedly based on a single source who wished to remain anonymous. Even this was misleading, as it was Sarah Bancroft who had provided the initial tip and Oliver Dimbleby who had supplied the off-the-record confirmation and the photograph—thus making it, in point of fact, a two-source story.
The work in question was said to be 92 centimeters in height and 74 in width. That much, at least, was accurate. It was not, however, a lost work of the Late Renaissance painter known as Titian, and there had been no quiet sale to a prominent collector who wished to remain unidentified. Truth be told, there was no buyer, prominent or otherwise, and no money had changed hands. As for the painting, it was now hanging in a glorious piano nobile overlooking the Grand Canal in Venice, much to the delight of the wife and two young children of the newly minted art forger who had produced it.
The dealers, curators, and auctioneers of the London art world greeted the news with astonishment and no small amount of jealousy. After all, Oliver was still basking in the glow of his last coup. In the salerooms and watering holes of St. James’s and Mayfair, questions were raised, usually in conspiratorial whispers. Did this new Titian have a proper provenance, or did it fall off the back of a truck? Was tubby Oliver absolutely certain of the attribution? Did others more learned than he concur? And what exactly was his role in the transaction? Had he actually sold the painting to his unnamed buyer? Or had he merely acted as a middleman and pocketed a lucrative commission in the process?
For three interminable days, Oliver refused to either confirm or deny that he handled the work in question. Finally he released a brief corroboratory statement that was scarcely more illuminating than Amelia March’s original story. It contained only two new pieces of information, that the painting had emerged from an old European collection and had been examined by no fewer than four leading Venetian School experts. All four agreed, without qualifications or conditions, that the canvas had been executed by Titian himself and not by a member of his workshop or a later follower.
That evening Oliver walked the one hundred and fourteen paces from his gallery to the bar at Wiltons and in keeping with neighborhood tradition promptly ordered six bottles of champagne. Much was made of the fact that it was Taittinger Comtes Blanc de Blanc, the most expensive on the list. Still, all those in attendance would later remark that Oliver seemed subdued for a man who had just pulled off one of the art world’s biggest coups in years. He refused to divulge the price the Titian had fetched and feigned deafness when Jeremy Crabbe pressed him for additional details on the painting’s provenance. Sometime around eight he pulled Nicky Lovegrove aside for a heart-to-heart, which gave rise to speculation that Oliver’s unidentified buyer was one of Nicky’s superrich clients. Nicky swore it wasn’t so, but Oliver cagily declined comment. Then, after kissing the proffered cheek of Sarah Bancroft, he waddled into Jermyn Street and was gone.
It emerged the following day, in a lengthy article in the Art Newspaper, that the unidentified buyer had made a takeaway offer for the Titian after being granted an exclusive viewing at Oliver’s gallery. According to the Independent, the offer was £25 million. Niles Dunham, an Old Master specialist from the National Gallery, denied a report that he had authenticated the painting on Oliver’s behalf. Curiously, so did every other connoisseur of Italian School painting in the United Kingdom.
But it was the photograph of the painting that raised the most eyebrows, at least among the backbiting world of St. James’s. For many years Oliver had utilized the services of the same fine art photographer—the renowned Prudence Cuming of Dover Street. But not, as it turned out, for his newly discovered Titian. Perhaps even more suspicious was his claim that he had taken the photograph himself. All were in agreement that Oliver could handle a tumbler of good whisky, or a shapely backside, but not a camera.
And yet no one, not even the unscrupulous Roddy Hutchinson, suspected Oliver of wrongdoing. Indeed, the general consensus was that he was guilty of nothing more serious than protecting the identity of his source, a common practice among art dealers. The logical conclusion was that it was only a matter of time before another noteworthy picture emerged from the same European collection.
