'Yes, Mr Saintly.'
That was it. As I left he raised a hand.
'Is it true, this divvy thing? You feel genuine antiques?'
'Aye. And it gives me a headache.'
He considered this. 'It'd be worth a headache. Does it work for people too? You see through fraudsters?'
'No. I get people wrong.'
He almost smiled. 'Let me know how your search goes, eh?'
'Search?' I froze on the door, scared. 'What search?'
'For the gems, Lovejoy. What d'you think I meant?'
A bit ago I said there were too many it's knocking about. The truth is that in life there's never enough. I emerged into the press of people heading into the Belly, trying not to look red in the face from embarrassment at having alighted from a plod motor.
Snob. So Gluck who killed Arthur, was a snob. Did that help? Auntie Vi and Gaylord reckoned so.
Well, sometimes. Look at The Great Castellani.
Excitement began to throb in me. Just a little, but starting up. I went and sat in Maria's Caff over tea and a wedge wondering if I'd found the answer. It had come to me when Saintly had been yapping. Something he said gave me a sudden vision. He'd said see through. One difficulty in seeing through to an antique's dazzling soul is patina. In fact some dealers claim that patina is everything. Trying to look bored, yet sensing the thrill a con trick brings, I sat, noshed, and wondered about appearances. What else is snobbery but appearance?
My mind scoured its memory pits, and I came up with the answer.
Long ago - we're in mid-Victorian days - the Ancient World was all the rage. Bring home Etruscan, Greek, Egyptian, Babylonian, and you were admired. Gentlemen had cabinets crammed higgledy-piggledy with antiquities they collected on the Grand Tour. Trophy time. To prove you were educated to the correct degree of snobbery you had to display ancient scarabs and funereal artefacts from Mesopotamia. If you couldn't afford to go on the Grand Tour, you saved up at home then quietly bought a cabinet stuffed with a dealer's miscellany. It was the reliquary chasse but more personal. These collections were mere aggregations bought without thought. They occasionally come to auctions nowadays. When they do, dealers fall on them because the items are usually untouched. They've got a 'late provenance'. This means that since those intaglio rings were purchased in Damascus one hundred and fifty years back they've just lain in Great-grandpa's bureau.
Which, put bluntly, was snobbery.
This isn't to say that travelling gentry didn't pay through the nose for those antiquities.
They often paid too much. And everything in these collector's cabinets isn't always genuine, because they're often gruesome fakes of the most transparent silliness. Some are so clumsy you have to laugh, or weep.
And some are so genuine they melt your heart.
I don't even go to see these cabinets when they surface. I can't. I think they're a bit spooky, like entering a temple then realizing you're in a mausoleum. It's the difference between life and pretended life. I can understand a bloke collecting penknives, fossils, sparking plugs for heaven's sake. But somebody who sets out simply to accumulate is just a gannet. No points for that. Snobbery is as snobbery does.
It wasn't only society folk on the Grand Tour, though. Snobbery struck museums, famous galleries, eminent societies, even nations. And where snobbery goes, can shame be far behind?
Enter the British Museum, and The Great Castellani.
Now, this prestigious museum is one of the great places on earth. I'm a fan. It's also honest - well, narrow that down, maybe it edges near to honesty. It proves this by putting on displays of its mistakes. Antique dealers don't advertise our clangers from the rooftops. We certainly don't go racing after some lady calling out that the mid-eighteenth century kneehole desk, 'made in London's Long Acre', that we've just sold her is actually a fake we made last weekend from a Utility, World War II vintage wardrobe. (This sort of fake is common, because horrible Utility furniture was made from the right thickness of wood, and antedates chipboard.) All of us, blokes and birds alike, don't advertise past sins. We keep quiet about our holiday in Folkestone, don't we?
One of the BM's mistakes was multiple. It involved a superb nineteenth-century jeweler in Rome, called Alessandro Castellani. Now, good old Alessandro's firm was highly regarded. It employed only eminent craftsmen. He sold his quality jewellery and
'restored' antiques to international buyers. Much of the allure of those days centred on patina. Look it up. A patina was once a flattish dish used in the Eucharist, but the word also means a film or incrustation forming on old bronze, usually green 'and', adds the OED drily, 'esteemed as an ornament'.
Take any ancient bronze statuette or bowl. Let's suppose it's genuine Etruscan, just the right trophy for your living room, to impress neighbours, make friends jealous. Its surface colour, texture, appearance (remember appearance) is a conspicuous sea green. Okay, it feels slightly granular, looks a little matt in oblique light on account of its great age. And after all, didn't the Roman and Ancient Greek bronzes always have that delectable leaf green or even green-black colour?
No, not really. Paintings that have survived from those times show Ancient World statuary. I'm always rocked back onto my heels by the immediacy of the faces, the astounding impact of the colours, the clothes, the brightness of the eyes. Look closely.
The statues are painted flesh colour! Or, if they're made of bronze, they're painted bronze! They're not black, not green. Collectors over the past two centuries only believed they were. So they went about hunting the opposite of what was right.
In other words, snobbery made them seek, and pay through the nose for, antiques that were the opposite of genuine. The real Ancient World wanted its statues lifelike, the more flesh-coloured and red-nippled the better. And so what, if the ancient artists had to use a little russet copper to pink up the statue's lips? Living women use cosmetics, everybody dyes their favourite shirts and skirts. Nobody today wants a dead statue, a moribund painting, stuporose art. And they didn't Back Then, either.
Enter the forger, anybody who could do a hand's turn with a crucible of wood ash and a few impure
