After a late dinner I got on to the next step-an examination of each painting with the ten-power lens and a pen-light, to see if I could find a tiny, shield-shaped design in the upper left corner of the canvas, eighty-two millimeters from the top and sixty-six millimeters from the left edge, the entire design tilted clockwise one millimeter from the verticaclass="underline" Bolzano's delicate micropattem of fifty-one tiny holes, which no one else connected with the show was even aware of. Find it and I would find a masterpiece of a reproduction masquerading as a masterpiece of an Old Master.
I began with the Vermeer, which was an act of bravery. Not long before, right there in Berlin, neutron photography had proved that The Man With the Golden Helmet, among the most beloved of Rembrandt's paintings, wasn't a Rembrandt at all. When asked to comment at the time, my statement to the San Francisco Examiner had been to the effect that it was no less a masterpiece than ever, and who had or hadn't painted it didn't affect its power or its intrinsic worth.
I had lied. It mattered a lot to me that Rembrandt had never stood before that lovely portrait, considering, adding a touch of red ocher to deepen the shadows of the sad face, a tiny blob of stiff impasto to highlight the glowing helmet. A lot of the magic was gone, and even some of its power and intrinsic worth, whatever I had meant by that.
And now, as anxious as I was to find the forgery, I didn't want to lose this "new" Vermeer too; I wanted the beautiful young woman standing at her clavichord to be genuine, and I believed she was-and yet Peter's "Right down your alley" kept bringing me back to her. I leaned over the canvas almost holding my breath, the lens close to the surface, and the penlight a few inches off to the side, to highlight the texture. Ten careful minutes later I straightened up with a creak.
No pattern, thank God. And none on the Rubens or the Titian. Or the Piero or the Durer or the Hals. There wasn't any on the Giordano either, and at that point it occurred to me that I might not be recognizing the micropattern when I saw it, since I'd never seen it on an actual painting. I went to the alcove where the reproductions hung and, without taking it down, had a close look at the "Cranach" (not one of those flirty little Venuses but one of his ugly, bloat-bellied Eves, painted to please his friend Martin Luther).
The painting, like the other copies, was beautifully executed, but it took only a few seconds to find the telltale pinholes. It was just as easy on the copy of Vermeer's Woman Peeling Apples and on the "Poussin." So at least I knew that I knew what I was looking for. I went back to the originals, but without much hope of success. I had already examined the older paintings without finding a micropattern, and Reynolds, Gericault, Monet, Corot, and the rest were simply not "down my alley" by any criterion I could imagine. Nevertheless, I looked.
And found nothing. I called it a day. It was almost two in the morning now, and the guards who helped me put the paintings up again were the same ones who'd taken them down eighteen hours before on their previous shift. They were grouchy about it, and so was I; grouchy, grubby, and bone-tired.
But not disappointed. To find nothing, after all, was to learn something: Whatever I was looking for, it was not one of Bolzano's fakes that had found its way into the authentic collection. The dull, mechanical search for secret markings was over; it was time for some serious, scholarly analysis, to which I looked hungrily forward. But not until I'd gotten some sleep.
Late Sunday morning, strengthened by Columbia House's colossal weekend brunch, I got down to business, with particular attention to the down-my-alley paintings. In addition to the Titian, Vermeer, and Rubens from Hallstatt, there were the Durer self-portrait; the Piero Madonna; an extremely beautiful Portrait of the Officers of the Saint George Militia Company by Frans Hals; and The Four Apostles, a pair of matching panels by Luca Giordano. Again I worked until nearly 2:00 a.m., but for a change I came to some real conclusions.
The Durer and the Hals were genuine. They were just too dazzlingly perfect. Hals is one of the most frequendy forged painters, often successfully so, but it is always the seemingly careless Hals of The Jolly Toper or The Laughing Peasant. No faker in his right mind would try to ape the brilliant and exacting group portraits.
The Giordano I spent a lot of time on, although on the surface it was an unlikely candidate. Giordano was an excellent craftsman, quite difficult to imitate well. And although he was the leading Neapolitan painter of the late seventeenth century, he has never become popular with collectors. The result is that forgers stay away from him. Why bother, when there are so many less daunting painters whose works, or reasonable approximations of them, bring so much more money?
But there was another side to it. Giordano himself was a celebrated forger. In an age when artists were expected to borrow each other's ideas freely, he had been in a class of his own, figuring in one of art's earliest lawsuits. He was hauled into court over his Christ Healing the Lame Man, which he had painted very much in the style of Durer-so faithfully, in fact, that it included Durer's monogram. When the angry buyer learned what he'd really bought (the prideful Giordano had put his own name at the edge of the canvas, where it was covered by the frame), he sued the artist. The town council's verdict: Not guilty; no one can blame our Luca for painting as well as the great Durer. Which goes to prove what I'd tried to tell Lorenzo Bolzano: Attitudes change.
The reason all this is pertinent is that in my wondering about Peter's uncharacteristic playfulness that day in Kranzler's, I had begun to think I might know what his little joke was. And, artistically speaking, it would have been worth smiling about-a forgery of a painting of one of history's great forgers. But there wasn't any joke. In technique and style, it was pure Giordano. The real thing, without question.
That left four paintings, including the ones from the cache, and I had doubts about them all. Under ordinary circumstances they wouldn't have been very grave, but circumstances being what they were, I wasn't quite ready to give any of them a clean bill of health. One of them, I was sure, had to be a fake.
The Madonna of Piero, our earliest painting, was the best bet, at least on technical grounds. It was a canvas, and that was extremely unusual for 1460, when frescoes and wooden panels were the norm. Canvases didn't become popular until Titian's time, almost half a century later, when it was learned that they would hold up better in moist air. The artists of the day, who were given to sudden departures, also found it quite an advantage that they could quickly be rolled up and stuffed in a trunk. Try that with a wooden triptych or a ceiling fresco.
And there was something else. In 1460, tempera was still the primary binding medium, although people were beginning to experiment with oils. For the Madonna to be painted in either medium would have raised no suspicions, but it was painted in both, and that was unusual.
Unusual, but not unknown. Piero himself had used the two media in another painting, The Baptism of Christ. And as for the use of canvas, Uccello, painting at about the same time, had used it for his Saint George and the Dragon, the famous painting now in London's National Gallery. So what I had were two unlikely features in the same piece, and they were enough to make me wonder. The tempera-oils issue was more complicated than it might seem on the surface: the Madonna had probably been restored a dozen times. For all I knew Piero himself had done it completely in tempera, only to have it retouched in oils three or four hundred years later.
Fortunately, old paint fluoresces differently from newer paint, so this was an issue with which Max Kohler of the Technische Universitat could help me. Max tends toward the hysterical, and when I telephoned him, he practically wept. It was impossible, his lab was overflowing with work, he was laboring twenty hours a day. But finally he agreed to come the following Tuesday and to bring his ultraviolet lamp and some other equipment with him. This was on my solemn promise to ask nothing else of him for at least a month. That didn't present a problem; my questions about the remaining three paintings weren't technical, and they were for me to answer, not Dr. Max and his mysterious machines.