Deceptions by Anna Porter (fox in socks read aloud TXT) 📗

“Never going to give up,” Andrea answered with a smile.

She led the way down the corridor to the labs. Her own office — a spacious room with a long light table and several large colour reproductions of paintings on the walls — opened from the labs. It had only one door, fluorescent lights, and no windows. “We wouldn’t want anyone to peer over our shoulders,” she explained.

“And no escape route,” Helena said as she made her way to the most prominent photograph. It was huge — at least six feet by six feet — embossed, with a matte finish, and it seemed to be lit from inside the manger. The Virgin’s face, San Lorenzo’s almost garishly bright orange cassock, and the overdressed shepherd’s legs in the foreground all shone with supernatural glow. “Extraordinary! At first glance, I thought . . .”

“No. But it was made by the same people who produced the replica in the church,” Andrea said. “And I don’t need an escape route.” She patted the left side of her stylishly loose red jacket, where a slight bulge betrayed she was carrying a gun. “However, should the need arise . . . It’s best you don’t know. You said this is urgent?” Andrea asked with a little crease appearing between her eyebrows, all business.

Helena showed her the photographs she had taken in the Vaszarys’ living room, a couple from a distance that showed the overall composition and a dozen close-ups of the figures, the faces, Holofernes’s upturned eyes, his gory neck, the spurting blood, Judith’s delicate, long-fingered hand, her face turned slightly away from the man’s head, the lush drapery of her gown. “I have been hired to determine whether this is a real Artemisia Gentileschi, a copy, or a forgery,” she said.

“There’s a great deal of interest in her since Lucretia was auctioned,” Andrea said. “Even more with the National Gallery’s retrospective.”

“This painting is about four times the size of Lucretia.”

“It looks like her, doesn’t it?” Andrea said. “That tendency she had to put her own face on her heroines’ necks. A bit pudgy for our times, but a beauty for the seventeenth century. And that orange with blue dashes and those reds — her colours, I think.”

“She had beautiful hands,” Andrea said, looking at Judith’s bloodied fingers.

“Maybe,” Helena said, “but I’ve always been skeptical of the hands being hers. Remember, her fingers had been bound and twisted when the court tried to extract a confession from her that she had lied about Tassi’s rape and that she had lured him into her bed in hopes of marrying him. Tassi and her father’s housekeeper both testified that she was offering her body to all comers in exchange for small favours, including hard-to-get paints. The lawyers believed that excruciating pain would induce her to confess that she was a ‘harlot,’ as Tassi claimed. It hadn’t worked. Her hands bled for days. Still, if you’re the artist, you can give yourself whatever hands you wish for.”

“But I remember a drawing of her hands by another artist. It should be in one of our books. We have a big library in back — but that’s not why you came to my lab.”

Helena opened the small plastic bags with the three tiny samples she had taken from the painting. “I need your spectroscopic machinery to date these. I’ll need it for no more than a couple of hours. I should be able to identify the pigments, the binding agents, the varnish in that time. And I am also interested in the signature. Only one of her names is on the painting, and it is misspelled. Some of her letters to her friend Galileo Galilei attest to her considerable literacy, as you know. So this could be the work of a clever fraudster, someone who tried to overpaint another signature.”

One of the two Dutch artists Simon had hired for his forgeries had intentionally created spelling errors in two of his Pietro della Vecchias because the painter had been a notoriously bad speller, illiterate according to a biographer. Simon had been greatly amused by the controversy. But Andrea knew nothing of Simon, and Helena was determined to keep it that way.

“Whatever the conclusion, it is an extraordinary work,” Helena said.

“Could you see the brushstrokes?”

“Yes. Not a line wasted. But that does not necessarily mean they were her brushstrokes. Some forgers do magnificent work.”

“I assume you are not bringing the painting here?”

“The owner thinks she can sell it with just an unconfirmed opinion.”

“Yours?”

“Apparently.”

“And, of course, you will be very guarded in what you put in writing?”

“Of course.”

Andrea showed Helena to the array of machinery and left to track down the books she had mentioned.

Paint and what has been used to produce it is harder to fake than brushwork. Wolfgang Beltracchi, for example, had boasted once that he could paint anything Vermeer had painted, and no one would be able to tell the difference. He was tripped up by his use of titanium dioxide white, a pigment not available until the 1940s.

In the seventeenth century, most of the pigments used today had not yet been manufactured. To get the ultramarine blue used by artists at that time, you would have had to buy lapis lazuli pebbles — more expensive, then, than gold. Once you had your lapis, you would have to grind it and use a binding agent to turn it into usable paint. Helena had been puzzled about how Artemisia could have afforded the radiant blue in Judith’s dress if she painted this in her late teens. Later, once she had become successful, buying lapis would not have been a problem. The yellow and red ochre and the copper resinate were all easy to identify. She could also see a touch of saffron, white lead, and alabaster in the speck she had of Judith’s skin tone. And there was the cochineal red she had identified before in a canvas of Caravaggio. Made from cochineal insects