Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves (38 page)

Marks was offered the
Flora
bust by another dealer, and quickly agreed terms.
²
She promised to be one of his greatest finds, and as usual he made the most of her. He may not have been able to arrange a splendid dinner to show her off as he had his displays of china, but he ensured she was presented in the New Bond Street showroom he now shared with the Durlachers.
³
Raised on a high plinth, smiling provocatively at the customers,
Flora
charmed all who visited and news of her spread rapidly across Europe and the world, as the discovery of this new and lovely Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece became known. The art journal
Burlington Magazine
ran a feature extolling the virtues of the bust, and Marks' friends and customers travelled long distances to see the
Flora
he spoke of so enthusiastically.
⁴

By the end of the year, the attention had attracted a number of high-profile buyers, and Marks agreed to sell
Flora
to Wilhelm von Bode for the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin for around
£8,000. Bode was opinionated, politically astute and ambitious, in many ways a German counterpart of J. C. Robinson. Many of his contemporaries found him arrogant and egotistical with ‘a tendency to lay down the law with more or less pontifical assurance' but he was devoted to his collecting and was one of the first museum directors to openly court private collectors in the hope of acquiring their objects.
⁵
He rejoiced in making prestigious purchases. He was also Marks' friend and had acquired a variety of pieces from him over the years; in addition, the two men had corresponded energetically as well as collaborating on scholarly publications.
⁶
They knew each other's tastes and respected each other's judgement. It was Bode who had authoritatively declared the bust to be fifteenth century, and unquestionably the work of da Vinci, when he had first seen it in Marks' showroom. So it seemed fitting that
Flora
should go to Berlin to begin a prominent new life. Only the British press objected, bemoaning the loss of such a treasure: ‘Our own museum authorities might have bought it,' complained
The Times
, ‘but nothing was done', adding that the inability of museums such as South Kensington to recognize the importance of
Flora
‘is humiliating to our national connoisseurship'.
⁷

The bust had only been in Berlin a few weeks, however, when the press picked up on a more titillating element of the story: a letter to
The Times
from Charles Cooksey, a Southampton antiquary and auctioneer, claimed that the bust had nothing to do with da Vinci, and had never seen Italy at all, let alone the Renaissance. It was the work, Cooksey asserted, of Richard Cockle Lucas, a Victorian sculptor, who had been copying from a picture of a scantily clad woman draped in flowers. The picture had been shown to Lucas by an art dealer called Buchanan, and might well have had links to da Vinci, but the bust, Cooksey maintained, was nothing more than a second-rate copy that had spent almost forty years rotting in Lucas' garden. When it had
turned up in a Southampton junkshop a few years after Lucas' death in 1883, Cooksey had been given the chance to buy it for less than a sovereign, but did not think it worth the investment: he knew its mundane history and, as he pointed out, ‘it was in bad condition owing to the long exposure'.
⁸

Soon the story, which seemed to be confirmed by Lucas' son, was in all the newspapers. Popular English dailies like the
Daily Mail
carried opinions on what was dubbed ‘the
Flora
affair', as did the more serious
Times
. In Germany, too, the press published pictures, claims and counter-claims, and the American papers kept an amused eye on proceedings, noting that ‘the man in the street in both countries has become interested. . . if he is a German he is very sure that the bust is a genuine Da Vinci, and if he is English he is quite certain that Lucas made it'.
⁹
In an increasingly tense Europe, such allegiances mattered. For several years, there had been talk of the possibility of war between Britain and Germany, while German naval expansion during 1908 and 1909 had sounded alarm bells in Britain and prompted a nervy arms race: ‘we should not complain of Germany's right to build as many vessels as she pleased, she must not take it amiss if we built the number of ships which we thought necessary for our own protection,' explained Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary, anxiously.
¹⁰
With national pride at stake, Kaiser Wilhelm II, son of Princess Vicky, visited the Berlin Museum, examined the bust for over half an hour, and proclaimed definitively that
Flora
was indeed by da Vinci. He assumed that the weight of his opinion would put any controversy to rest, and that he had saved German blushes. But, as the
New York Times
pointed out, there was considerable ‘British joy over the discovery that the Germans have been fooled' and, despite the Kaiser's intervention, impassioned spats continued between London and Berlin, capturing the popular imagination more thoroughly than any learned art history discussion.
¹¹

As we have seen, Marks enjoyed publicity and even a little controversy, but the thought that he had publicly passed on a forgery to one of the world's leading museums horrified him. Collectors trusted him – and this trust was the foundation of profitable trading. As soon as the questions over provenance arose, he sent a banker's draft for the complete purchase price to Bode, begging him to send
Flora
back to London, hoping to clear his conscience and forget the entire matter. But the banker's draft remained uncashed. Unfortunately for Marks, Bode was not ready to accept defeat so easily. He had identified the bust as being by da Vinci, and he meant to stick by his opinion. He was not in the least worried by rumours in the press, and he suggested that
Flora
should be inspected scientifically, to prove to the world that he was right in his assessment.

Marks could do little but wait. But the reports, when they came, were not good. The chemists who examined the composition of the wax were far from convinced that it was fifteenth century. Worse still, it became clear that tucked inside
Flora
was a grey canvas of English origin (some newspaper reports claimed it was part of a Victorian bed quilt), while scraps of a modern newspaper were jammed into the pedestal. The evidence looked damning. Marks wanted nothing more than to be out of the limelight. He pleaded with Bode again to accept a refund and let the matter rest, and he dreamed of letting
Flora
slip quietly out of the international news.

But Bode himself was part of the problem. He had set himself up as an omniscient expert, ‘a sort of Jove in art matters', and it was the appeal of deflating him that encouraged many of the attacks: ‘He had exercised his authority in the world of art opinion in the most ruthless manner, bowling the little fellows over with a mere wave of the hand when they got in his way,' explained the
New York Times
, pointing out that it was therefore inevitable that people would welcome the chance to exact revenge, enjoying ‘a keen delight over the fact that Dr Wilhelm Bode, curator of the
museum, is the particular individual who has been victimized'.
¹²
What's more, Bode resolutely refused to change his opinion, or even to consider changing it: ignoring the apparent evidence from the investigation, he published a statement in
Die Woche
, maintaining his position that ‘only Leonardo' could have been responsible for
Flora
and asserting that the modern material was the result of restoration work undertaken by Lucas.

The outcome was the worst possible for Marks. It was a deadlock, with the dealer stuck helplessly in the middle of the storm. Evidence and counter-evidence, rumour and counter-rumour, swirled around the art world and the whole ‘
Flora
affair' quickly became muddy and unsure. The debate was to drag on for years. Some art historians claimed that the bust was a product of Leonardo's workshop, though not made by the artist himself; others were of the view that the sculptor was one of Leonardo's contemporaries based elsewhere in Europe, perhaps in France. Well into the twentieth century, the belief that
Flora
was the work of Richard Cockle Lucas remained widespread. But Bode, too, had his supporters, who maintained that he was correct in his original assessment. As late as 1939, the art historian Kenneth Clark again raised the possibility that
Flora
might indeed have been a genuine work by Leonardo da Vinci: ‘Nothing in Lucas's work suggests that he was capable of the noble movement of the
Flora
, and the evidence advanced of his authorship only proved that he had subjected the bust to a severe restoration,' Clark contended. ‘Bode was right in seeing this piece as a clever indication of Leonardo's later sculpture. . . [she is] another of those mutilated documents through which, alas, so much of Leonardo's art must be reconstructed.'
¹³
In the mid-1980s, however, further chemical tests on the bust seemed conclusive. They revealed the presence of synthetic stearin, added to wax to help it harden, a substance that was not produced before the nineteenth century. It was finally concluded that
Flora
was a fake.

For Marks' contemporaries, without the benefit of any modern dating methods, the matter remained one of bitter dispute. Although Bode was the target of most of the criticism, Marks could not help but feel that his reputation had been damaged. With the limited techniques available, it was impossible to be certain what the truth behind the bust might be, but it was disappointing that the prospect of discovering a lost da Vinci masterpiece had embroiled him in such negative debate, perhaps undoing years of careful professional work.

The Victorian collecting boom and the irrepressible fashion for exotic objects from overseas, such as blue-and-white china, was a godsend for the unscrupulous, the profiteering and the criminal. Forgers flourished. While the
Flora
affair took place at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was over the previous fifty years or so – at the highpoint of Victorian collecting – that the threat from forgeries had really started to affect the market. For every knowledgeable collector, there were plenty of beginners and amateurs who could easily be seduced by a good story and some convincing brushstrokes, and there were many dealers who were more than happy to pass on dubious stock at a profit – but there were few cases as high-profile or controversial as
Flora
. Mostly it was a matter of an altered signature, a touch-up of paint, or an attempt to give modern objects the distinctive patina of age. Usually it was an inconspicuous sale in a backstreet dealer's or at a country auctioneer's, and in many cases the fact that the piece was not genuine did not emerge until the collection was sold on or broken up – if then. Without modern ultraviolet or X-rays, carbon-dating or chemical spectroscopy to test pigments, collectors had to trust to their eyes and their instincts. Many died unaware that some of their objects were products of a dubious trade.

The lucrative rewards of an increasingly international art market were too great a temptation for many forgers. Political
uncertainty in Europe throughout the nineteenth century made it easier for unprincipled dealers to concoct convincing tales about a ransacked castle or an impoverished nobleman to explain the sudden appearance of a piece on the open market. And the apparently limitless demand for works from the Italian Renaissance in particular meant that, no matter how many objects appeared, there was always a ready buyer. Many forgers concentrated on perfecting the most profitable styles, such as those of fifteenth-century Florentine sculptors, so that they could produce a stream of credible copies. Under a carefully organized and structured system, the best forgers were contracted to international dealers, supplying them with imitation masterpieces in return for a comfortable salary. These artists were often highly skilled and the objects they created were beautiful in their own right, even if false. Some forgers even became briefly famous for the quality of their work: Giovanni Bastianini was an accomplished Italian sculptor who forged Renaissance busts and figures that thrilled nineteenth-century art historians. Several were acquired by the South Kensington Museum, and even when their actual provenance was revealed they were considered to be so fine that they were kept on display.

The growing taste for objects from beyond Europe also created new opportunities for deception. Oriental ceramics and Islamic art, for example, were relatively unstudied compared to the more familiar European genres, leaving the door open for the unscrupulous to dupe the ignorant. Victorian scholars struggled to keep pace with the fashion for foreign pottery, tiles, textiles, architectural and archaeological objects, and it became relatively easy to pass off modern copies as originals. A macabre fascination with quartz crystal skulls in the second half of the nineteenth century led to the sudden appearance of examples in both private and public collections, apparently from ancient sites in Mexico. Some were little over an inch high; a few were larger. Many
dealers boasted a skull for sale, two were exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867, and the life-size example in the British Museum was acquired at the end of the nineteenth century from the reputable New York jewellers Tiffany and Co. But no scientific archaeological excavations had yet been carried out in Mexico, and knowledge of pre-Columbian objects was scarce. This was a perfect environment for forgers. Scientists at the British Museum found that their skull had traces of tool marks which showed that it had been extensively worked with rotary cutting wheels, unknown in Mexico before the arrival of the Spanish in 1519, and analysis of the quartz was damning: it had come from a nineteenth-century mine in Brazil or Madagascar, far beyond ancient Mexican trade links.