A Glancing Light

Chapter 16

I wanted to see it. We took the lower flight of stairs in what seemed like two strides, and Ugo pulled me into a big ground-floor room that served as a workshop and storage area. There, in the center, clamped to an easel by wooden vises, it was: a small, unframed mythological scene, Venus in the Forge of Vulcan, a favorite subject in those days.

I began to move closer, but Ugo grabbed me by the arm again. 'Wait. Look at her eyes.' He led me, not to the easel, but from left to right in front of it. 'You see?' he whispered reverently. 'Wherever you move, the eyes follow you.'

'Ah,' I said, 'so they do.'

So they did. So do the eyes of the Mona Lisa (as any self- respecting Louvre guard will tell you if you let him), of the Rembrandt self-portraits, of Hals's Jolly Toper—and of ten thousand other pictures in the galleries of the world— including several others in Ugo's collection. So, for that matter, do the eye-dots on a six-year-old's Happy Face drawing. The fact is, any two-dimensional rendering of a three- dimensional face looking directly out of a picture will appear to be looking at you wherever you stand, if you take the trouble to notice. It is an artifact of human perception.

But of course I wasn't about to tell Ugo and spoil his pleasure in it. I was filled with gratitude. Ugo's generous gesture was going to eliminate a significant gap in the show. I moved slowly closer, looking at the picture of the near-nude figures: two bearded men, Venus, Cupid. It was painted on a panel, like Blusher's van Eyck- cum-Terbrugghen, only on this one the crackling ran the way it was supposed to. With time, an irregular groove had appeared down the center, marking the separation between the two planks beneath, and some of the glue used in joining them had leached to the surface, staining the figure at the anvil.

I walked around it to look at the back. The panel was from the Utrecht St. Luke's Guild, I thought, which was as it should have been. Besides the guild logo there were a couple of brands on it; one I recognized as an old quality-control mark, the other I thought was the stamp of the panel maker. A few strips of linen, brown and cracked with age, had been glued into the joint for support. I shifted to examine it from the sides.

And I began to feel a faint, intuitive stirring of doubt. Was there something not quite right here? Or was I getting paranoid? Was I going to be seeing forgeries every time I turned around now?

Ugo was busy pouring wine at a worktable. He came to my side with two tumblers. 'You're surprised, yes?' he burbled. 'You like it? It's not such a terrible painting, is it?'

'Mm, ' I said. Abstractedly I took the glass he offered. What was holding my attention was not the painted surface, or even the back, but the very edges of the panel. You don't often get to see panel edges. They're usually glued solidly into sturdy frames, not just for appearance but for bracing. But this one was unframed, and the edges were coated with what looked like a compound of tangled yarn embedded in tar. This in itself was not extraordinary. In those days masses of plant fibers were sometimes glued to the hidden joints of a panel for additional stability. However, I couldn't recall seeing them cover the entire perimeter the way they did in this case.

My silence was getting to Ugo. 'Cristoforo, what's the matter? You don't like it?'

'I don't like this,' I said, fingering the edging.

'I'll have it taken off,' he said anxiously. 'Right away, don't worry.'

'No, I mean I don't like the way it feels.' I pressed a finger gently into it.

Ugo did the same. 'How should it feel?'

'After four hundred years? Brittle, dry. It shouldn't still give this way. When did you say you got this?'

'In January, why? What's wrong?'

'January,' I repeated. 'Four months ago. Ugo, I could be wrong, but I don't think this stuff can be any older than that. Maybe newer.'

His lips jerked. He didn't quite see where I was heading, but he didn't care for the general direction. 'What do I care about this . . . this substance? What does it matter?'

I explained. What I was worried about was a waggish little caper that went back at least three hundred years. Toward the end of the seventeenth century the city council of Nuremberg had given permission to a painter to take down and copy Durer's great self-portrait, which hung in the town hall. To make sure he didn't do something dastardly, such as swiping the original and substituting his own copy for it, they marked the back of the panel with various seals and hard-to-copy brands. Whereupon this resourceful crook carefully sawed off the front panel with Durer's painting on it. He then used the thinned boards as the base for his copy, which was dutifully returned to the council complete with certified seals and markings still on the back, and made off with the famous original. (Not to worry; as often happens, it eventually found its way back into public hands and is now the showpiece of Munich's Pinakothek.)

Ugo took my undrunk wine back. He put both tumblers on the worktable with the bottle, returned, and looked soberly at the little painting.

'You think someone sawed off the front of my picture,' he said slowly, 'and painted a copy of it on another piece of wood, and then glued the copy on the panel? And then they stole the real picture and covered up what they did by putting on this black stuff?'

That was what I was thinking, all right. It wasn't only the freshness of the black adhesive, it was the painting itself that was worrying me. It wasn't an obvious forgery, like Blusher's fake van Eyck, but there were things about it that made me wonder: the washed-out colors, the flatness of the forms, a lack of the elaborate detailing that usually characterized Uytewael. True, I hadn't seen much of his work, and what I'd seen had varied in quality from picture to picture, so maybe I was imagining things. Besides I was by no means expert in this obscure Dutch Mannerist's work. But taken all together, I was uneasy, and I was truthful about it with Ugo.

'But, Cristoforo, look how old it is,' he said. 'See the cracks, see how it's stained, see the patches? Look how it was fixed up—here, and here, and here—a long time ago.'

'Yes, I see.' The trouble was, I told him, those were just the sort of 'imperfections' a knowledgeable forger would supply. 'Where did you get this, Ugo?'

'From Christie's, in London. Clara was there for an auction, and she called me to say it would be offered. She knew,' he added proudly, 'that I am a collector of the Utrecht School.'

'Clara?' I said. 'Clara Gozzi?'

'Sure, Clara Gozzi. She said it was going to go for a low price, a bargain. She wanted to know, did I want her to act as my agent.'

'And you told her to?'

'I said yes, all right, up to ?100,000.'

'And what did you wind up paying?'

'I got it for ?93,000.'

About $150,000. A bargain, all right—if it was really an Uytewael.

'Where did it come from? What's its provenance?'

'What the hell do I care where it came from?' He grabbed me roughly by the shoulder and swung me around to face him. 'What are you saying, they stuck me with a fake? That's impossible!'

Max once told me that he'd seen Ugo genuinely worked up only once, and that had been over a ridiculously trivial matter, when someone had tried to overcharge him a few hundred lire for theater tickets. The overriding imperative of Ugo's life, Max had said, was non farsi far fesso—not to be made a fool of. It was a result, Max had airily supposed, of social insecurity stemming from a peasant background.

Whatever the root cause, Ugo was thoroughly worked up again. His face was splotched with red; in his temple throbbed an artery I hadn't seen before. I felt guilty for upsetting him, sorry that I'd been so blunt. I should have eased into this, kept my suspicions to myself until I had something more to go on.

'I don't think there's any reason to worry, Ugo,' I said with more confidence than I felt. 'I'm just naturally suspicious. If something does turn out to be funny about this, Christie's will take it back.'