The Forgery of Venus (17 page)

B
ack at my hotel there was an envelope waiting for me containing instructions for my trip to Rome. Interesting. Were they so sure I would agree, or did Krebs have agents ready to deliver such instructions at a moment’s notice? I found I didn’t care and that I was not offended. So they had my number? So what? In any case, there was a private jet leaving in the morning. I would get on it with Franco, but until then I was free.

Then out of the hotel, walking aimlessly in the direction of San Zaccaria. Man, I was scared to death but full of incredible energy, it was like waking up in Oz, intensified color, little shivers on my skin. I passed the San Zaccaria vaporetto stop, where a boat waited; I wandered aboard and thought it might possibly be my very last trip ever on public transportation. We putt-putted around the lagoon and I got off at San Basilio in the Dorsoduro. I recalled Krebs talking about San Sebastiano, and I thought I’d drop in and take a look. The
campo
there in front of the church and the Scuola dei Carmini is one of the few places in Venice with any trees, pretty neat, but the Scuola building was closed. I waved a fifty-euro note in the guard’s face because I’m now one of the people who don’t ever have to wait. Inside there were walls and walls and walls of Giambattista Tiepolo’s work, which I liked but thought a bit too heavily influenced by that of Charles P. Wilmot, Jr.

Then I went to the church itself, which is entirely covered by Veronese paintings, except there’s one by Rubens, one of the very few
Rubens paintings in Venice,
Esther Before Ahasuerus.
It was dark in there so I had to peer close, and then I noticed that the painting wasn’t a Rubens at all but a Titian,
Danaë Receiving the Golden Rain,
and for a strange transitory second I thought, Boy, this is a funny painting for a church, that splayed white body, luscious, and I am in El Escorial and I am caught up in a strange emotion…fear, a little, but mainly joy, elation. It is one of the best days of my life, as great almost as when I was made painter to His Majesty’s household, because next to me, listening respectfully to what I have to say, is Peter Paul Rubens, the greatest man in the whole world, save only His Majesty of Spain and the Pope.

He is telling me that I have to go to Italy, to see the classics and the great Italian painters, and although he is the most diplomatic of men, in fact a professional diplomat, still I am conscious of a tone, a suggestion that Madrid is not the center of the artistic universe, that being the painter to the king of Spain is perhaps not all that a painter can ask for, and I understand that yes, I must travel to Italy, and I begin to think how this can be arranged with the king, and with my lord the Count-Duke Olivares, who is my patron and besides has his hand on the purse.

So we talk about Titian some more and how he obtains his effects, how he can create motion out of controlling the eye of the viewer, and how this is done with color and composition, a technical problem that I wish to solve because he is suggesting that it is one thing I lack, that all Spanish painters of the present time lack: the figures are still, like tombstones; passion, yes, but not this Italian movement.

And then it’s later, or another day, and he’s copying one of His Majesty’s Titians and I’m watching him paint, he’s demonstrating something and just then one of the dwarfs comes trotting along, I can’t recall its name, an ugly squat thing, and when it sees us it begins
to tumble and makes faces, and not wishing to be distracted I snap at the thing and tell it to be off. And it goes scuttling away.

Rubens pauses and watches the creature pass. I am surprised when he asks, “What do you think of your king?”

So I make the conventional response, or start to, but he shakes his head, and says, “No, Don Diego, I wish to hear not the courtier but the man. I know he’s been good to you and that you’re a loyal subject, but were Philip not king by God’s grace, then how would you judge him?”

I say, “As a painter he is not much,” and he laughs and says, “Nor as a king, I think. He is a fool, a decent man enough, but not a brain in his head. And your Olivares is as bad. All Europe knows it. You think not?”

He points to the painting he is copying, Titian’s
Charles the Fifth on Horseback,
and says, “When
he
ruled Spain, it was out of all question the mightiest realm upon earth, and now eighty years later you cannot beat the Dutch. Or the French, or the English. In that same time, you have brought from the Indies a mountain of gold and silver, a mountain! And gold and silver still land at Cádiz every year. Yet Castille and Aragon are among the poorest lands in Europe, miserable villages, miserable cities, miserable roads, rags and staring bones wherever you go. Flanders is rich, Holland is rich, England is rich, France is richest of all, yet Spain with all its gold is poor. How can this be?”

I say I don’t know, I am ignorant of such things, but also that the magnificence of the palaces in Madrid belies his accusation.

Rubens says, “Yes, gold enough for palaces, if barely. His Majesty still owes me five hundred reales, and I doubt I shall have it before I leave. Now listen to me, sir. You are a fine painter and may be a great one someday. As great as him, perhaps”—he gestures grandly with his brush at the Titian—“or me. I have never seen anyone paint as you do.
I devise a painting in my mind, and think it out, and block it in, the bones of the piece, as it were, and perhaps I will do the faces, too, and let my people paint the rest. For as you know, I must earn my bread by my brush: I am not the painter to the king of Spain. But you, while you know little of composition and your figures are arranged anyhow and pressed together like a crowd in a tavern, still you have the gift of a living brush, the painting flies out of you like breath. But you must go to Italy, sir, Italy’s the place to learn how to build a painting. And soon, while the king still has enough to pay your way.”

And he laughed. We both laughed, although my laugh was a little forced.

“And another thing. You are a born painter and have made yourself a good courtier enough, but you will never make a diplomat, sir. It is your face, sir. While I was slighting your king and country just now, you had a look of murder on your face, and that is a look we diplomats can never wear. But you will do well; the king loves you, I have heard him say it. And I will say more, for I have known more kings than you, sir. They love us, yes, but they love us in the way they love their dwarfs and fools, like that little fellow just now, amusing for a moment and then got rid of with a kick and a curse. Never think otherwise, sir, however sweetly His Majesty praises you; they are none of them to be trusted.”

And now I am in a room brightly lit with candles, speaking with my lord the Count-Duke of Olivares, the king’s prime minister, about Italy, and he says they are sending General Spinola there, I can go with him. His Majesty will approve the voyage and will ask you to buy paintings for him, but for the love of God keep down the cost!

Then I am in a different place, walking down a narrow street, and everything is marble, old marble. Faces crumbled with time stare out of the architecture; there is a different smell and a different feel to the air, it is damp, and the women have a different look to them, bolder
and more saucy, I think. I’m in Italy, in a crowded street, and I look around for my party, my servants, and there are some artists and officials of this city, I can’t recall which one, Modena, Naples…?

I move to push by some people. There is a bridge of some kind ahead that looks familiar, and someone says, “Mister, can you take a picture of us, please?” and sticks out her hand, and there’s a digital camera in it.

I stared dumbly at her and her husband said, “Honey, he’s a foreigner, he can’t speak English,” but the woman said, “Yes, he can. You’re an American, aren’t you?”

A middle-aged woman with a Midwestern accent, small, tanned, her husband huge by her in a yellow golf jacket; the color hurt my eyes. The bridge was the Rialto, and it took me a half minute or so to understand what the little silvery thing in my hand was. Oh, right, a camera; so I take the picture and give the camera back to her. Now her smile was uncertain; she thought I was some kind of maniac.

I just stood there like I was one of those poles they use to tie up the gondolas while the tourists swarmed around me, thinking, How the hell did I walk blind across half of Venice, from San Sebastiano in Dorsoduro all the way through San Polo and the Rialto without falling into the water?

Then I ducked into a bar and had a grappa, and then another, and then a beer. Watched the tourists for a while, and when a group of seventeenth-century folks strolled by I blinked and swallowed booze until they weren’t there anymore.

Later I looked it up on the Web in an Internet café. It checked out: Velázquez and Rubens met when Rubens came to Madrid on a diplomatic mission and also to paint for the king. He did an equestrian portrait of Philip that got hung up in place of the one Velázquez did, which maybe was just politeness, but in any case the two painters got along okay. Rubens gave him some good advice, and Velázquez, age
thirty, went off to Italy the next year. I had lived through his entrance into Venice the other day.

The funny part about this was that I was kind of glad to still be crazy in this way, because in having fantasies about being Velázquez I was still being who I was, if you get what I’m saying. The
me
Chaz Wilmot. The pasticheur, the coming forger. Not that other guy in New York who I didn’t want to think about. A small plank to cling to in the whirlpool, but it was all I had. I left the café and returned to my hotel, where I packed and drank in a local bar until I was in the mood for sleep, and then slept and woke up.

A pang of terror upon awakening. I checked. Still me.

W
e took off in a private jet from Nicelli Airport, which is a small airport right on the Lido, just east of the city. A Gulf-stream II, and I was trying to act cool, like I was used to this kind of travel, which I supposed I would have to learn to like from now on, although the only person to impress on the scene was Franco, who ignored me. I was alone with him in the cabin except for a pretty young woman who couldn’t do enough for us. I drank a bottle of perfectly chilled Taittinger, in memory of Dad, and got a little looped, and wondered what would happen if I turned into Velázquez on an airplane. Would I go crazy? More than I am, I mean.

Franco drank only coffee, probably because he was on duty, and read an Italian sports magazine. Not a talkative fellow, Franco. I asked him who he worked for, and he said he worked for Signor Krebs, even though we both knew it wasn’t true. Or maybe Krebs was lying, I thought. Maybe there was no Mr. Big behind all this, maybe he just said that to get me scared. But I wasn’t scared, or at least not of the forgery business. As far as that went, he had me at the million dollars.

I recall studying Franco’s head, a look like one of Masaccio’s Romans, that handsome brutality without any hint of sadism. A button man, as they say, a professional. Would he kill me, if he were ordered to? No question. I found then that I didn’t mind it as much as I probably would have if it had been presented to me beforehand as an option. Most of the great painters before the nineteenth century passed their lives rubbing shoulders with people who would’ve cut throats for a handful of coins. There was actually something terrifically baroque about it, the farthest thing from the art hags of Manhattan, invigorating as pure oxygen.

W
e landed in Rome and drove in a Mercedes to a house on the Via L. Santini, one of the little streets that run off the Piazza di S. Cosimato in Trastevere. We had the whole house. There was a furniture shop on the ground floor selling antiques they fake in the back; I had the
piano nobile
upstairs, a nice three-bedroom apartment, and my studio was one flight up. When we arrived, Franco turned me over to an old guy named Baldassare Tasso, who was going to help me with the work. Apparently he was the head forger. He showed me the studio where I was to paint and explained that the entire surface of the room, floors, ceiling, walls, had been stripped back to the seventeenth century or prior, the debris vacuumed and washed and vacuumed again. The windows were sealed shut and all the air intake came from a vent that led to a heat pump and a HEPA filtration system designed to catch and trap anything from the twenty-first century. I was supposed to enter the studio through an anteroom, in which I had to remove any clothing except for that made of leather, cotton, linen, and wool. I had to work in a natural fiber zone, for what a shame if after all my work there were fragments of nylon or polyethylene stuck to the paint! The room was furnished with an antique wooden easel, some old tables and chairs, and a couch, all vetted for period. The top floor was where the cook, Signora Daniello, and her daughter and her daughter’s kid lived. Me and Franco and Tasso were in residence in the apartment. Everything was as jolly as hell, smiles all around.

After we moved in, Franco handed me an envelope containing a black Deutsche Bank MasterCard and an ATM card for my account, which I was not aware that I had ever applied for, but that’s apparently how things got done in my new life. We had a lunch, which was a really terrific risotto; Sra. Daniello’s daughter, whose name I didn’t get, was the housemaid and waitress, and I think Franco had something going there or wanted to. After lunch and a small traditional nap I took a walk down the Viale di Trastevere until I found a bank, stuck my new card in the slot, got five hundred euros for walking-around money, and learned that I had an available balance of a hundred thousand euros.

I went back to the house sort of floating over the quaint cobblestones. Franco was standing outside the house looking anxious; he asked me where I’d been, and I told him and asked him whether there’d been a mistake in my account, so much money in it, and he said, no, Signor Krebs was very generous to those who work for him. And now a big smile. I got the sense that he was glad I was back, that he was supposed to watch me all the time.

So I figured I better get right to work, yes indeedy, and went up to the studio, where I found Baldassare taking the paper off a flat package. After he unwrapped it he set it on the easel. It was about fifty by seventy inches, a
Flight to Egypt
so dark and dirty you could just about make out what a talentless piece of shit it was, some Caravaggio wannabe who could barely draw.

“What do you think, signor?” he asked. I made the Italian choking gesture and he laughed. “Who’s it by?” I asked him, and he said,

“A name lost to art history, but it dates from around 1650, it was painted in Rome, and he used the same very-fine-weave linen canvas that Velázquez liked. So we will clean this shit off and you will paint on his good seventeenth-century glue-size primer.”

“And the stretchers will be period perfect too,” I added, and he got
a funny, sneaky look on his face and said, “Yes, eventually.” I had no idea what he meant until a good while later.

He spoke slowly in a mixture of Italian and English, and I could understand him pretty well. A scrawny bald guy, he must’ve been around seventy, little gold-framed glasses, a bald dome with liver spots all over his scalp and a fringe of white curls. He looked like Gepetto in the cartoon
Pinocchio,
complete to the bib apron and the rolled-up sleeves and the neck-cloth.

I asked him about paints and brushes and he led me over to one of the tables, where a group of bottles and jars was neatly arranged along with what looked like a bunch of used bristle brushes. With some pride in his voice he told me what I was looking at.

“Ground pigments, all exactly similar to the ones Velázquez used in 1650; we have calcite to add transparency to the glazes, naturally. For yellow, tin oxide; for the reds, vermillion of mercury, red lake, red iron oxide; for the blues you have smalt and azurite. We’ve oxidized the smalt so it’s grayer than it would have been when it was supposedly painted on, so you’ll have to take that into consideration when you use it. Then the browns—brown iron oxide, ochre, manganese oxide. No greens—he always made his greens, as I’m sure you know.”

“Yeah, but what about the red lake? That’s organic. It can be dated.”

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 pen
etrate 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 worked 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.”