chemicals.
There's a saying about patina, among antique dealer illiterati, that 'green is great, black is bosh'. Don't trust this motto. It stems from the great collectors of the early 1800s, who believed that ancient bronzes of pretty goddesses, incense burners and the like, were originally black. So when they bought genuine antique bronzes with greenish patina, they thought, oops, wrong colour. By then, of course, emerging industries could offer collectors a range of chemicals. So you can find marvellously convincing ancient bronzes unaccountably black, when they ought to be lovely matt green. The Chinese have made replicates, new 'fakes', over the past aeons, mimicking patina as a kind of testimony to ancestral creativity. Like, a bronze bowl made in the Ming (say Good Queen Bess's time) period and decorated with a phoney patina is highly valuable even though it's a clear copy of an artifact buried in the Shang period one thousand years BC.
It's customary nowadays to blame Pliny's remark about patination by bitumen for the notorious black-should- be-green fallacy, but I say leave Pliny alone. We can't go on whining that every mistake we make is somebody else's fault, though that's the modern fashion. Some sins - can this be true? - are of our own making, and we deserve the blame. Mea, in fact, culpa.
There's chemicals you can buy. Suppose you pick up a modern statuette. Maybe you've even seen it cast in some holiday pottery, foundry, or even in some 'resin-and-rubber', as they're known, moulding shop where tourist trinkets are created. You rather like the bronze appearance of the pretty dancing girl, say. You buy it for pennies. On the way home, you realize how very similar the little figurine is to that statuette Uncle George once had, so cruelly stolen by your nasty cousin from Sunderland. How nice, you think, if this little cheapo had the same patina!
Any antiques workshop will do it for you. Cost? The price of a cup of coffee. Time?
Come back tomorrow, and collect. (On the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, people give you any patina you like while you drink the coffee.) Everything made in antique days develops a patina with time, from flints to ironwork, coins to statues, exposed stonework, glass even. And every patina is different. Chlorides, carbonates, sulphides and sulphates, all change metals. My own trick was currently deep in an East Anglian fen. I'd made a series of hammered silver coins of Harold II vintage. They're easily done, if you have the correct die. About ten weeks before, I'd buried three score of these little hammered silver pennies in the slimy fens. A spell of wet weather, a dismal winter-tide, and I'd dig them up by spring. The patina - darkish sulphurous black, smooth and shiny once cleaned - would do the selling for me to other dealers, maybe Chris Ollerenshaw in Wormingford. I'd not need to advertise. Grub money for a few weeks, with luck. Where was I?
With Alessandro Castellani, in nineteenth-century Rome, while great institutions bought his 'antiquities'.
Look at Sotheby's, Christie's, Philips, Bonham, Agnews, the rest. Reputation is justifiable snobbery. We go with the flow of common approval when in fact there's no sense in it.
Buyers the world over love to say to friends, 'Ah, I know they're expensive, but dealers allow me a special price.' Or, 'This restaurant always keeps me a table.' Daft, isn't it.
Snobbery costs. It's as if we love being ripped off, because it proves we can afford to get done.
The problem is, it's inextricably mixed with trust.
Signore Castellani, eminent, thoroughly proper, sold antiques. The greater the museums buying his items, the more he was exalted. The costlier, the higher soared Castellani's fame. There was however one cloud on the horizon. His workshops also produced new items of jewellery 'in the style archeologica', as he freely advertised. A few dark suspicions must have lurked unspoken, because his craftsmen slogged to
'restore' the assumed original appearances of certain antiques.
A small step to fakery.
Over two thousand items of ancient jewellery were imported from Castellani's in 1872.
Modern laboratory tests prove that his beaten gold filigree is actually made from modern drawn wire. The trace-metal analyses don't hold up. His stuff is what dealers call 'tiler fakery' - that is, a bit of so-say genuine antique here, a bit there, joined by forger's hands. Genuine antique beads or miniature figurines mounted as a modern gold necklace is one of Castellani's typical jokes. They were still coming eighty years later, ending only in the 1930s, when skilled rivals entered the market.
I don't blame the fakers. They were poor, working for peanuts. British dealers being paramount in Georgian days, several of them set up on the spot. Thomas Jenkins was the faker's maestro. This hero even employed English artists to assist local talent. He had a factory making cameos, amber jewellery, rings, intaglios, actually in - that's in -
Rome's Colosseum. His blokes did no more than sit round whittling, carving, supplying Jenkins with gems, ambers, cameos, whatever. Some of his pals kept notes, and produced laughable tales - like Joe Nollekens the sculptor, who used to help out by assembling the bits of statues dug up in the vicinity. Jenkins paid off Nollekens with dollops of fakes 'to say nothing', he records with blithe honesty for posterity to read.
The very best forgers in Rome were Pistrucci and Nathaniel Marchant. I'd give a lot to hold some of Marchant's engraved gems. See the problem? Brilliant artisans, wondrous jewelers, using the same skills and gemstones as the Ancient World. Can you call their creations fakes, forgeries, Sexton Blakes, duplicates, replicas?
Some antique bronzes Castellani stripped of their genuine patina, and 'restored' them, with more fashionable patinas which museums would more readily buy. It is easily chipped off, and the genuine antique beneath seen clearly.
Great opportunities there. For the murderous Dieter Gluck.
Time was getting on. I had to meet my team. I finished my cold tea.
This canal business - where and what? And Colette. Does a woman hang about because she's addicted to a scene? Because that's what she told me. She was a street-market lover, just like me, she'd said.
Now, I don't know much about women. Being a bloke I go about saying I do, but that's only me pretending I'm Beau Nash or whoever. I do know one thing, though. It's this: A bloke will slog away at something just because it's that something. He'll slave away building a dream because it's his dream - build a tower, change a coastline. A woman won't. She's too practical. Sooner or later she'll think, good heavens, here am I hauling logs to build a path across this swamp, when I'll never even see its completion. And she'll think, stuff it. She'll leave.
Unless it's for a Somebody. She'll carry on with might and main for somebody else.
She'll go hungry, be humiliated, shamed before the herd, suffer indignity year on year.
It's noble. You may only see an old scrubber woman's degradation as you drive past in your Rolls, but get to know her and she's putting her grandson through medical school or guarding her dead man's memory. Nowadays we're not supposed to be sentimental.
