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 Dürer'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 Dürer'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."
"What are you talking about?" he shouted. "How could anything be funny? The people at the museum, they checked it over."
"What museum?"
He snorted and waved his arms at the walls. "What museum, what museum—the Pinacoteca, what else? Di Vecchio examined it himself."
He quieted down enough to explain that the purchase had been conditional on Ugo's having the painting examined by experts of his own choosing. He had left it with the Pinacoteca for a few days, and Di Vecchio and his staff had concluded that there was no basis on which to dispute the painting's authenticity. There was a high probability that it was a genuine Uytewael, but if so it was an inferior one; perhaps unfinished, maybe a study, probably just an unsuccessful effort that had been discarded but not destroyed.
Di Vecchio had told him to forget his plans of offering it to Northerners in Italy; it was simply not exhibition-quality.
"So I did," Ugo said. "But then, when you said you would come here to Sicily anyway, I figured, Amedeo doesn't know everything; why shouldn't I let you decide for yourself?"
"No reason at all. But didn't he say anything about this black stuff?"
"Nothing."
I hunched my shoulders. "Well, forget what I've been telling you. All I can say is, it would never have gotten by Amedeo. He'd have noticed it, and looked into it, and he must have been satisfied with the answers he got. Maybe it was restored just before it was auctioned, maybe—"
"Notice? How could he notice? With the frame on it you couldn't see the edges."
"It had a frame when it was auctioned?"
"Sure. Over there." He pointed to the disassembled parts of a simple old frame on a worktable a few feet away. "Why did you take it off?"
"Me, I didn't take it off. Vittore took it off."
Vittore Pinto, Ugo explained, was his Catanian restorer, and it had come off because one of the panel's long-ago owners had apparently seen fit to preserve the deteriorating wood of the frame by bathing it in olive oil. It had worked fine for the frame, but over the years a greasy film had spread onto the margins of the painting.