“Was the work going well?”
“Extremely well … You’re amazed, aren’t you? You think it would make better sense if I’d been working poorly, making silly mistakes, wasting my time, or not wanting to work, or working without my heart in it … But it wasn’t so … My ivory tower was still standing … I was working only too well, right through the night … That’s what made sense … plugging without delay the little wobble I’d felt … Getting back on my usual track … The straight track …”
“Is that what set it all off?”
“Was that it, or was it something else? That was it, and there was also something else. It was that among other things. Tonight that was how it started because I’m telling you about it … Something has to be the start of it … Why not Mila? But it could just as easily have been Jérôme getting old … or my slow realisation of what my true position was, the feeling that I was being used, being taken advantage of, or the simple, extremely simple accumulation of pastiches … masks, more masks, the burden of masks … The things that were stifling me without my knowing why, without my knowing what was stifling me, without my knowing that what was making me a living was the same as what was making me die … It’s what I’d sought … So what? I’d sought immediate life, instant victory … I had to live and fight … I didn’t want to fight … I was fighting in the shadows, under impenetrable armour, I was fighting against shadows. I pitted my patience against their genius. Of course I won every time. I was cheating. I didn’t know I was cheating … But I had to wake up one day … It didn’t matter when or where … It happened, it had to. It happened because of Mila, but it could have happened because of something else. It doesn’t matter. It began … The rest is like unravelling a piece of knitwear … The tower collapsed, to begin with only a tiny piece broke away, but then it crumbled faster and faster … I tried to shore things up, to take cover, to rebuild … but it was pointless …”
I went back to France at the end of November; I spent a few days in Paris buying materials and went to Dampierre. Madera had done things properly: he had a whole section of his basement remodelled as a studio. There was a large armchair in the middle of the room with low tables on either side of it, a wonderful wood-and-steel easel, and countless spotlights. He’d had carpet laid, and put in a shower and even a telephone so I wouldn’t need to be disturbed during the day. There were tables for paint pots, bookcases in every corner, more tables, a turntable, a refrigerator, another armchair, a sofa, a bed … It was the fairest prison you could imagine. I lived there for fifteen months and never went outside, except for a few lightning trips to Paris and Geneva. I did nothing apart from the Condottiere …
The start was very easy. I took ten days just to set things up: sorting out my filing cards, pinning up the reproductions I had got hold of, laying out the brushes I would use, finding the right places for paints and liquids. It all went swimmingly; I think I was more happy than not, as I always am at the start of a new job … Then I started to smooth down the wooden panel; that was a routine job, a tiresome one because you have to be very patient and take a lot of care. It took me ten or twelve days because I went at it very very slowly. But the panel came out almost completely blank. It was a fine piece of oak with almost no damage, so I could start on the gesso duro almost straight away. That was the first difficult operation. Again it was a game of patience, a steady addition of layers of plaster and glue. At the beginning of January everything was ready and I could get started on the real job; I began on plain sheets of paper, then on cardboard, trial canvases, and roughly prepared panels. I would spend part of each day copying details from the Condottiere or other Antonello portraits, and the rest of the time inventing details of my own. That’s pretty much all I did for six months, without painting a single stroke. Every week I sanded the panel down a tiny bit and added a few layers of gesso duro to keep it in perfect readiness … That’s when it got really difficult … I had my panel in front of me. But I was not like any other painter, and it was not like any other canvas. It was not the same as painting a windmill or a suburban landscape or a sunset … I had to give an account of something that already existed, I had to create a new language, but I was not free: the grammar and the syntax were given, but the words had no meaning; I did not have the right to use them. That was what I had to invent, a new vocabulary, a new set of signs … It had to be identifiable at first glance, but nonetheless it had to be different … It was a tough game to play …
At the start you think, or you pretend to think, it is easy. Who is Antonello da Messina? Started out in the Sicilian School, strongly influenced by Flemish painters, with secondary but still perceptible influence of the Venetian School. You can find that in any course book. It will do for a first approach. But what next? Spareness and control. That’s what you tell yourself, and you think you’ve said it all. But what are the signs of that sparseness? The signs of control? They don’t come all by themselves. They come painfully, slowly, confusedly … You sit in front of your canvas or your board for hours and hours. There’s nothing there except the set of laws that constrain you and that you’re not allowed to break. First you have to understand them, completely, from top to bottom. Without the slightest error. You timidly venture to make a sketch. You subject it to criticism. Something’s not right. You think you’re changing a detail but you’ve made the whole structure collapse in one go. For six months I played cat and mouse with my Portrait of a Man. I gave him a beard, a moustache, a scar, freckles, a snub nose, a Roman nose, a flat nose, a hook nose, a Greek nose, armour, a brooch, short hair, long hair, a bonnet, a fur hat, a helmet, a drooping lip, a hare-lip … I could never get it right. I would look at the Condottiere. I would tell myself: look, that tautening of the muscle is such and such a shadow underscored in such and such a way with an arc of shading on the cheek, and that shading, conversely, is the whole expression of the face, its bodying forth, it’s what makes one thing invisible and another thing shine out. It’s from the overall play of shade and light that the facial sinews spring, packed with energy, with their own will. That was what I had to get hold of, without a model to copy. That was what struck me the most. For instance, I compared the Paris Portrait of a Man to the one in Vienna. It was the complete opposite. The Condottiere is a man in middle age – or rather younger, between thirty and thirty-five; whereas the Vienna portrait is of someone who is at most twenty. One is decisive, the other floppy – soft face, sunken features, receding chin, small eyes, huge bare cheeks, no muscles, no vigour. On the other hand the tunic is brighter and sharper than the face, with pleats visible as well as a brooch. I could have been wrong about the comparison, but what seemed most obvious to me was the displacement of the signs. The Vienna portrait wasn’t hard to do; it could have been anyone. But the Condottiere, since it was him I’d decided to paint, had to be a face. I went round and round this realisation, I could not square the circle. To begin with I was quite taken with the idea of adorning my Condottiere with a breastplate. It would simplify a lot of things; it would allow me to play with the lighting, the grey of the breastplate and the grey of the eyes, just as in the other painting everything revolves around ochre: the headgear and the tunic, the eyes, the hair, the greenish brown background and the light ochre of the skin. I would have done a Condottiere in grey: helmet and breastplate, eyes, fairly fair hair, and very dull skin in light grey like the young man in the Botticelli at the Louvre. Only it didn’t make any sense. What use did a Condottiere have for a breastplate, seeing that he was obviously sheer strength in his own right? A breastplate or cuirass was a sign, a too facile sign, just as it would have been too facile to paint him in accordance with the idea that the Romantics gave us of Italian mercenaries of the Renaissance – as a crass and boozy swashbuckling musketeer. I dropped the breastplate. I dressed him in a vaguely red tunic; but it was too close to the real one … I tried again … Every day, ten hours a day, for six months. Then I thought I’d got it. My Condottiere would be seen three-quarters, like the
real one and the Vienna portrait and the Florence Humanist, hatless, the ground would be slightly more visible, the tunic would be laced but without the laces standing out, and would have a few just visible pleats at shoulder height. I settled on this costume after a great number of trials and not before going to the National Library to check whether it was actually possible. It could just about work; I could lift all the details from different works – the collar from the Vienna portrait, the tunic lacing from a Holbein, and the general configuration of the head from a Memling. The Condottiere’s complexion alone took me two weeks; I couldn’t pin it down; it had to match the colour of the tunic, it was supposed to set the key for all the other colours; I ended up picking a rather dull ochre, with a swarthy skin, black hair, very dark brown eyes, thick lips that were a shade darker, a lie-de-vin tunic, a dark red background, slightly lighter on the right hand side. Each choice entailed full-scale sketches, hesitating, pausing, backtracking, and making heroic decisions. I think I was trying to be too careful. It was all done. Ahead. With such precision that I couldn’t go wrong, that the slightest touch of my brush on the wood panel would be definitive and final. That was the way I had to work, of course, but in this instance the margin for error had been completely eliminated. Any hesitation would have obliged me to start again from scratch, to sand the board down and redo the gesso duro. I was scared. There was something very odd about it. I’d never been scared of getting a fake wrong. On the contrary, I’d always been confident of getting it right with ease. But in this case I took whole days making up my mind about a colour, a gesture, a shadow.
The hardest part obviously was that celebrated tautness in the jaw. It was impossible to pastiche without creating a double, and there was no sense in that. In the end I settled for using Memling’s portrait as my model: a very thick and powerful neck, with the first minute signs of a double chin, very deep eyes, a line on each side of the nose and a fairly thick mouth. I would put the strength into the neck, into the articulation of the head, in the very high and straight way it was held, and in the lips. It was all fine on the drafts. On the trial paintings in gouache it even turned out rather splendidly: a complex melange of Memling and Antonello sufficiently corrected, with a very pure look in the eyes, immediate contours that yielded easily at first and then thickened, became impermeable, turning hard and merciless. No cruelty, no weakness. What I wanted. Pretty much exactly what I was after …
It was another month before I started really painting. I had to get my pots, brushes and rags ready. I took three days’ rest. I began to paint sitting in the armchair, with my palette within easy reach, and the panel set on the easel with its four corners wrapped in cotton wool and rags so that the metal angles that held it in place would leave no mark. I had an elbow support and a crutch to keep my hand steady, a huge visor to keep the glare of the spotlights off my eyes, and wore magnifying goggles. An extraordinary set of safety devices. I would paint for twenty minutes and then stop for two hours. I sweated so much I had to change three or four times a day. From then on fear never left me. I don’t know why but I had no confidence at all, I never managed to have a clear vision of what I was trying to do, I couldn’t say what my panel would be like when I’d finished painting it; I wasn’t able to guarantee that it would look like any of the dozens of more or less completed drafts lying around the room. I didn’t understand some of my own details, I was unable to get a grip on the overall project, to recognise it in the smallest touch, to feel it taking shape. I was stumbling onwards, despite the innumerable safeguards I’d set up. Previously, I’d been able to paint any Renaissance picture in a couple of months, but now, after four months’ work, in mid-September, I still had the whole face to do …
I took eight days off; I spent five in the laboratory and three in Paris, at the Louvre and in the Archives, for no precise reason; checking details, reassuring myself about the accuracy of my collar and tunic, looking at countless books for hours on end in the search for pointless confirmation. I went back. I worked on for another two months. At the time of Jérôme’s death I allowed myself another week’s break; I went to London and Antwerp. Then straight to Geneva, because of Jérôme. I came back. I still had the eyes, the mouth and the neck. And the pleats in the tunic around the shoulder. I took a whole month to get them done, I’d never painted so slowly in my life. I spent hours looking at the panel. It was already a month overdue. Madera would come down more and more frequently, hovering over me, saying nothing, then he’d go out, slamming the door behind him, angry at having come upon me sitting still in my armchair with the elbow support untied and a brush hanging idly in my hand, staring for hours on end at a detail and going over in my mind the hundred or so possible strokes it would take, trying to extract a finished image from a still shapeless painted panel. Hour after hour after hour, from sunrise to nightfall, I would forget to eat, forget to drink, forget to smoke, so fascinated was I by a possible shading, obsessed by a line that was too precise, haunted by almost invisible speckling … At the end of the year I took another two days’ off. On January 1, I began the mouth. On February 1, I started on the shading of the neck. I think I was too tired and too nervous and too edgy to do anything worthwhile. On February 20, I stopped almost completely. I looked at the Condottiere for five days running. He was still missing his eyes and all the muscle-lines in his neck … It was possible he could be completed … It was still possible he would be completed … I pushed away the armchair, the side-tables and the elbow-crutch. The easel stood on its own in the middle of the room. Like a gallows. In the morning of February 25, I started painting standing up, without a visor and without a magnifying eye-piece, with a dozen different brushes and a palette. Within the day, almost without a break, I finished the neck and the eyes. By the evening it was almost entirely done, there were just some tiny details left. After that I would just have to put on the glaze and then bake it to make the craquelure appear. I thought I had carried it off. I wasn’t particularly proud. I wasn’t particularly happy. I was exhausted, shattered. Buggered. Something I couldn’t resist, the feeling that it wasn’t right, that I’d lost the thread, that the Condottiere wasn’t what he should have been. As if I’d made a complete mess that I hadn’t been able to see, and it was too late now. I went to bed. I woke up in the middle of the night. I switched on a single spotlight. I looked at my Condottiere …
“And then?”
“Then nothing … It wasn’t right … Not right at all …”
“Why?”
“I don’t know … it was the converse, or the inverse … just a guy with a pale face, a miserable chap …”
“You’d never noticed before?”
“No … I’d never seen him before … A rat … A rat with resentful eyes … it was anything … anyone … a convict released after fifteen years inside …”
“But didn’t you believe just a few hours before that you’d succeeded?”
“A few hours before, yes I did … But that didn’t mean anything! It was a high! I’d done my homework … it was the satisfaction at having got it off my back …”
“Did Madera see the Condottiere?”
“Yes … the next morning.”
“What did he say to you about it?”
“Nothing … He said nothing … I was lying on the bed fully dressed, with my tie nearly strangling me, dead drunk, surrounded by empty bottles, stubbed cigarettes and puke … I was dead drunk … He called Otto who made me take a dozen showers and down a litre of coffee …”
“Why did you get drunk?”
“To celebrate my great victory … To celebrate my admirable triumph … The sensational end-piece of twelve years’ sterling service …”
“Why did you get drunk?”
“What else did I have to do? I’d been sleeping next to those awful guys for eighteen months … For eighteen months I’d been frantically trying to get the last one of all … It hadn’t worked, it was a complete mess … What else would you have had me do? You think I should h
ave slept like a log? And had a lovely dream? I was finished. Washed up. Done for. Done in. Down and out.”
“How do you know the Condottiere was a mess?”
“I saw it …”
“You saw it twice … The first time you thought it was a success, then you wake up in the middle of the night and realise it’s a failure …”
“If it had been right why would I not have seen that twice in a row?”
“Because you wanted it to be a failure …”
“That’s too easy, Streten … I can see what you’re getting at … But I’d spent eighteen months struggling with it …”
“What does that prove?”
“It proves I wanted to get it right … Hindsight makes it tempting to say I must have done it on purpose … But all I put into it was only done because I needed it to be a success … And my failure is only proof of the fact that what I was after was unreachable …”
“I don’t understand you …”
“So what? To be or not to be a forger, that was the problem, that was the solution, that was the question … Maybe it had to kill me, but the only work I could henceforth try to produce had to be my own. I dropped the jigsaw idea, I set out to paint on my own account. I tried, yes, I tried to be the equal of Antonello. Not to employ meticulous and patient care to equal his accuracy and genius, but to set off with no guides apart from his paintings serving as beacons, as distant targets, and to fly towards him, to experience his labour and his triumph. Antonello da Messina and not anybody else. Antonello and not Cranach, Antonello and not Chardin. Because all ambiguity had to be eliminated, because I had to rise to his limitless triumph, his gigantic lucidity, his phenomenal certainty, his inhuman strength. His controlling genius. Because what I’d been striving towards for years and years was nothing other than ascension … Because that’s where the solutions I’d been looking for were to be found … Because at the end of the road I’d have found my own face, which is my sincerest ambition … Because I needed my own face, my own force, my own light … Because the proof and the trial were the only things that would allow me to stop being a forger thereafter. Because if I’d managed it, then by the same token I would have uncovered something beyond specialist knowledge and craft – I’d have found my own sensibility, my own lucidity, my own puzzle and my own solution …”
Portrait of a Man Page 10