“But the morality of that—which I understand—won’t square with what we have been doing here.”
“The morality of the art world is not square, my dear pupil and colleague; it is a polyhedron. But it is a morality, none the less. So—go and win your spurs!”
“And what if I don’t?”
“Then I shall come and do what you have failed to do, by one means or another, including even the Evil Eye—if anyone is so foolish as to believe in it, which I don’t, as I have made clear—and if you and I have any further association, it will be simply as master and perpetual apprentice. You will have failed and I shall have to find another successor to myself. In this affair you are being tested as well as Letztpfennig.”
The Dutch Ministry of Fine Art treated its guests well—indeed, in princely style—and when Francis arrived in The Hague he was put up at the Hotel Des Indes, and ate a splendid meal into which he admitted no scrap of veal. The next morning he presented himself to Judge Huygens, who looked precisely as a judge should, and who took him after an exchange of civilities to a handsome room, where the disputed painting was displayed on an easel. Francis settled to his work, and it was soon clear that the Judge meant to stay in the room all the time he was there. A large, watchful, uniformed attendant was also on guard at the door.
The Harrowing of Hell was a most impressive picture, larger than Francis had expected, and obviously meant for a church. The colours glowed with the extraordinary light and appearance of transparency that the brothers van Eyck were reputed to have perfected and brought to the world of painting in oils; colour had been used at its greatest strength above a light ground, which created the magical glow of even the darkest pigment. In the middle of the picture was the figure of Christ, triumphantly bearing the banner-cross of the Resurrection in His left hand and gesturing toward Adam and Eve, the prophets Enoch and Elijah, and figures of Isaiah, Simeon, and Dismas, the Repentant Thief, with His right hand; He was beckoning them to follow Him through the gates of Hell, which stood open behind Him. On His left, averting their faces from His glory, cringing, gnashing their teeth, and seeking to escape, were Satan and his attendant fiends. The background was a true Dutch sky, flecked with delicate clouds, beneath which was to be seen some parts of a truly Dutch landscape, lying behind the gates of Hell—and Hell obviously employed a brilliant and imaginative metalsmith.
Francis studied the picture for perhaps half an hour. If it were a fake it was a magnificent fake, done by a painter of enviable talent. But there have been magnificent fakes in the history of art. Well, that’s enough aesthetic judgement, thought Francis; now we get down to the really inquisitorial inspection. He had brought, in a brief-case, what he thought of as his Little Jiffy Bernard Berenson Art Expert’s Set, consisting of a pair of binoculars, a large magnifying glass, and a brush of medium size. He looked at the picture through the binoculars, from the greatest distance the room allowed; then looked at it through the wrong end of the binoculars. Neither magnification nor diminution suggested anything peculiar about the composition. He looked at the picture through his magnifying glass, inch by inch, and then at his request the large attendant stood the picture on its head, and he examined it again from that aspect. With a reassuring nod to the Judge he dabbed at it here and there with his soft brush. He examined the back, tapped the canvas, inspected the workmanship of the stretchers. To the astonishment of Huygens and the guard he crumpled his handkerchief, warmed it with a cigarette-lighter, and held it to the canvas for perhaps ninety seconds. He sniffed the heated area loudly. No: not a whiff of formaldehyde. Then he sat down again and looked at the picture for another hour, occasionally turning away and suddenly rounding on it, as though it might have relaxed some of its pervasive van Eyck-ishness while his back was turned. He spent a good deal of time peering at the monogram, small but easily enough seen when you knew where to look, hidden in the folds of Isaiah’s robe. It might have been many things: Hubert of Ghent? Signatures didn’t matter, anyhow; the real signature was the quality of the painting, and try as he might he couldn’t find anything wrong with it.
Fakes, as he well knew, tend to declare themselves a generation or two after they have appeared and been accepted as originals. Truth, the daughter of Time, reveals indications of another age, another temper and taste, in a picture which is painted long after the period to which it has been attributed. Paint ages in the wrong way. Fashions in faces change, and the change may be seen when the fashion for a certain conformation of features has passed. But he did not have fifty years to wait. His job was to declare the picture a fake, and to do so as soon as possible.
When at last he said to the Judge that he had seen enough he received a shock. “Several of your fellow-experts are in the city at present,” said Huygens. “They are anxious to hear what you have to say, as I am myself. You speak, we know, with the authority and probity of Tancred Saraceni and we have agreed that your opinion shall carry great weight, and indeed will doubtless prove decisive. Will you meet us here tomorrow at eleven o’clock? The painter will be here also. Understandably he expects a triumphant vindication.”
“And you, Edelachtbare Heer?”
“I? Oh, my opinion is of no importance. I am simply the director of the investigation. Indeed, it would be improper if anyone holding strong opinions about this sort of painting had been appointed to preside. I do, of course, represent the Netherlands government.”
At luncheon, as Francis was treating himself to another veal-free blow-out at the expense of his hosts, he was joined by a smiling American.
“Mind if I sit down? I am Addison Thresher, and I’m here from the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Also representing one or two other interested parties. There’s no harm in our talking; Huygens said it was perfectly all right. What did you think?”
Addison Thresher was an expensively dressed, conservatively dressed, more than ordinarily tastefully dressed man, with silver-rimmed glasses and those American teeth, so disconcerting to the European eye, that always seem to have been furiously brushed not more than an hour ago. His manners were wonderful and he smelled of a costly toilet water. But in his eyes there was a steely glint.
Warily, Francis told him what he thought, which in effect was nothing at all.
“I know,” said Thresher; “that’s the trouble, isn’t it? Not a thing you can quite lay your hand on. The signature is a fake, of course, but that’s not important. But there is something about the whole affair I don’t like. You’ve seen the composition before, of course?”
Francis shook his head, his mouth being full.
“Have you ever looked at that late-medieval manuscript of the Cooks and Innkeepers Play, in the Chester group? There’s a miniature of the Harrowing. Very suggestive. Could van Eyck have seen it? Barely possible. But a faker could know it. There’s nothing that hints at the Fra Angelico or the Bronzino of the Harrowing; that would have been a dead give-away, for Hubertus van Eyck couldn’t have seen either. But there is also a strong feeling of that big wall painting at Mount Athos, and that would be funny, wouldn’t it—two minds with but a single thought, and God knows how many centuries between them? The influences, if they are influences, are so damned scholarly. Nothing in any of the work of either of the van Eycks suggests that they were learned in that way. Painters in those days simply weren’t.”