"As with any old painting."
"Yes, exactly, exactly. And so the question is, how much of an old painting must be the work of the original maestro for it still to be authentic-that is, in this case, still to be a genuine Masaccio? Or let me put it another way: What percentage must be the work of restorers before you would call it inauthentic?"
"Well, I don't think it's a question of percentages. The Trinity-"
"Ah, ah, but, as you suggest, the issue is broader than the Trinity, broader than restoration. Consider Rubens, for example, with his vast student workshop, all right? Well, is a portrait in which the head and hands were done by Rubens and the rest by his students a genuine Rubens or merely a school project? What if Rubens signs it?"
"Well-"
"What if the head alone was painted by the maestro? What if only the mouth? What if only the signature is his entirely?
"Well-"
"For that matter, who can distinguish with certainty how many square millimeters of a painting are by Rubens, and how many by his pupils? Can I? Can you? Ah-ha-ha."
"Well-?"
"Or consider a thoroughly authentic Piero della Francesca that was 'improved' in the nineteenth century, as so many fine paintings were, to make it more salable? How would you classify that? Eh?"
As interesting and important as these questions are, they're unresolvable. They have to be handled case by case; there aren't any generic answers. But Lorenzo was attacking them with all his usual relish for abstract and insoluble problems.
I laughed, cheered as always by his enthusiasm. "Well…" I paused automatically, but this time I was allowed to go on. "In the first place, there aren't any 'authentic' Pieros in that sense. We're talking about the mid-fifteenth century. In those days, as you well know, an artist's signature was more or less a trademark for the products of a sort of mass-production workshop. It wasn't until da Vinci that the idea of artistic individuality-"
This descent into the concrete did not keep his interest. "But!" he cut me off excitedly. "But! Take the case of an artist undervalued in his own time-Vermeer, Manet, Degas-to which a more famous, more marketable signature has been added. What then? How do we classify that? Art or fake? Eh?"
"Well-" I began, and this time I interrupted myself with a start. Was this merely Lorenzo's usual academic babbling, or was there a point to it? It had just occurred to me that every artist he'd mentioned was represented in The Plundered Past. Did he know something I didn't know? Was this his roundabout way of getting to it?
"It's both," I replied. "A work of art and a fake. And a forgery. Like the de Hooch signature on your Vermeer."
I said this as meaningfully as I could, but all I got in return was a continuation of his wacky smile and an absent-minded nod of the kind that tells you you didn't get through.
I tried again as we stopped before the door of the church. "Lorenzo, are you trying to tell me something?"
'Tell you something?"
"About art forgery? About one particular forgery?"
"I'm not talking about particularity at all, Christopher, but about universality-the universal absurdity of objectivist definition, with specific relevance to authenticity in art."
What could I say to that?
What could anyone say?
Outside, in the welcome winter sunlight, we strode over the ancient, uneven paving stones of the Piazza Santa Novella, scattering the grumbling pigeons before us. Lorenzo was waving his bony arms and ranting about synthetico-functional intuitions of reality, but my mind was going back over what he'd said. Whether he had intended to or not, he had me thinking about forgeries from a highly particular perspective indeed.
Was it possible that what I was hunting for wasn't a forgery in the ordinary sense at all, but something else? A legitimate if "overzealous" restoration, for example, perhaps centuries old, that had obscured the work beneath and could now be cleaned away with modern techniques? A painting that had gotten by until now as a Rubens or a Reynolds, but that Peter had spotted as a apprentice project? Was that why he'd been so ambiguous when I'd tried to pin him down?
"As to defining forgery from a historico-contextual perspective," Lorenzo raved on, "you have to remember that the lex Cornelia de falsis wasn't formulated until the last century B.C., so forgery as such didn't- Urp!"
He yelped as I grabbed him by the arm and yanked him back onto the curb of the piazza. Without even glancing at the murderous Florentine traffic, he had started across the Via della Scala.
"-become a criminal act until quite late in the development of Roman law," he continued, unshaken. Was he aware that three drivers were screaming obscenities at him? Had he noticed that I had saved his life? That I still had him firmly by the arm? I doubted it.
When the traffic light permitted, I nudged him, and he moved trustingly into the street, still going on about forgery in ancient Rome. He stopped, however, when we came to an old red Fiat, dented (as all cars must soon be in Italy), weathered, and indifferendy cared for. "Here we are," he said.
I must have looked surprised, because he said, "In Italy people of wealth are wise not to draw attention to themselves." He opened the passenger door and motioned me in. "I think you will agree," he said dryly, "that this automobile has been well chosen in that regard."
I laughed, but I was sure Lorenzo Bolzano wouldn't care-or notice-whether he were driving the old Fiat or a new Alfa-Romeo. He edged the little car out of its cramped parking spot, first crunching against the car behind, then scraping the rear fender of the one in front, muttering peevishly at them all the while.
Driving in Florence is not quite as terrifying as it is in Rome or Naples, but it is still less a matter of skill and judgment than of raw courage. Lorenzo was one of the people who made it that way, undergoing his Jekyll-to-Hyde transformation the moment he grasped the wheel. Once out in traffic, he drove his little clunker with defiant bravado, zigzagging around other cars when there was no need, aggressively thrusting timid pedestrians back onto the curb, contemptuously forcing gigantic trucks to slam on their brakes to avoid pulverizing us.
We drove down the Via de Fossi toward the Lungarno, that highly civilized avenue of walled, guarded private palazzos where there was reputed to be more great art than in the Uffizi and Bargello combined. It was where I had always imagined Claudio Bolzano to live, but we passed it and drove over the Ponte alla Carraia into the distinctly less tony section of the city south of the Arno. After a few blocks, we turned onto the Via Talenti, a nondescript street lined with huge square-fronted Renaissance palazzos.
If you've never been to Florence, you're wondering how anyone could call a street lined with Renaissance palazzos nondescript, right? But in Florence you'd have a hard time finding a city block without a few of them, and many blocks are made up of nothing but. Some of these old town houses are very beautiful, among the most beautiful buildings in the world; others, like those on this drab, grimy street, are not. People understandably assume that anything erected during the Renaissance was a work of art, but of course that isn't so, any more than it is so that something built in the twentieth century is necessarily ugly, although there you'd have a better case.
With a final unnecessary lurch around and in front of the car ahead of us, resulting in a quick, expert exchange of raised fists, Lorenzo jerked the car to a stop half-in and half-out of the vaulted entryway to a gloomy, boxlike pa-lazzo. This prompted one more yelp of outrage from the other driver, who swerved around us and continued on his way, one hand leaning on the horn and one fist sticking out the window, raised and quivering. It didn't occur to me to wonder who was steering.