Rare Traits (The Rare Traits Trilogy Book I)

by David George Clarke

  Chapter 17 : July 2009

  A week after his visit to Lawrence Forbes in the National Gallery in London, Ced Fisher found himself in the very different surroundings of Corrado Verdi’s office in the Accademia di Ristauro e Conservazione, two streets from the Piazza Navona in the historic centre of Rome. He had spent the past few days champing at the bit, desperate to follow up on his theory of John Andrews as a master forger. Finally, he had escaped his work schedule and taken an early flight from Heathrow to Rome’s Fiumicino airport and then a taxi into the city, arriving shortly after eleven-thirty.

  The Accademia was in the Palazzo Leone, a fifteenth century five-storey villa that had always been associated with painting and sculpture. It had an international reputation for conservation and restoration, employing some of the most skillful and knowledgeable minds in the world of Italian art to be found anywhere, Corrado Verdi pre-eminent among them.

  Ced gazed around Verdi’s vast office. Originally a grand dining room, it had walls and ceilings decorated with frescos dating back to the mid-fourteen hundreds, the vaulted ceiling disappearing into the poorly lit gloom some thirty feet above him.

  “Fascinating, aren’t they, Cedric?” laughed Verdi, pronouncing the name as ‘Chey-drick’. “And yet we still don’t know who painted them. They are Giotto-like, no? But the building isn’t old enough. Maybe you should photograph them and run them through your comparison program. It might give us an answer.”

  Ced shook his head in amazement. “You mean, Corrado, that I am sitting here in the vast office of a world-renowned art scholar surrounded by Renaissance beauty the world never sees and you don’t know who the artist is?”

  Verdi shrugged. “Cedric, you must understand, Italy is full of buildings like this one that are covered in such works. There simply isn’t time to examine them all. Neither is there the money. We need your program to help us, Cedric. It will save so much time.”

  Ced looked at his host. He blended so well with his surroundings it was hard to imagine he hadn’t occupied his office since the fifteenth century. He even fitted the building’s name – his studiedly casual but immaculately styled mane of long grey hair brushed back to half-cover his ears. A lion in the Palazzo Leone. Ced wouldn’t have been surprised if Verdi had greeted him in a long velvet cloak fastened at the neck. Instead, he was wearing crisply pressed light-grey designer trousers, an open-necked, blindingly white, long-sleeved cotton shirt and black leather shoes polished to a dazzling shine.

  “As I mentioned on the phone, Corrado, I’ve hit what seems to be a big problem and I really need to take my own very hi-res photographs of some authenticated works as controls for comparisons with other paintings. I have images of a Tommaso Perini and a number of de la Places that my program says are painted by an artist who’s currently alive and working in England. The only explanation that makes any sense is that I’ve stumbled across possibly the most accomplished art forger of all time. I need more paintings of undisputed provenance from these artists; it’s the only way to solve the problem.”

  “Ah, yes, Perini and de la Place. Both highly accomplished and underrated artists. Well, I can certainly help you with some Perinis, we have a number whose provenance is unquestionable. In fact, a couple of them had never been out of the hands of the family for whom they were painted until they sent them to us for conservation. But de la Place …” he shrugged. “He was French, and this is Italy.” He shook his head sadly and Ced expected the worst. “I’m afraid, Cedric, I can only lay my hands on three.”

  “Three!” beamed Ced. “That’s brilliant, Corrado. And their history?”

  “No problem, my friend,” replied Verdi nonchalantly. “Bought by my mother’s great-grandfather in London.”

  “Corrado, you’re a genius. I have a good feeling we’ll get this sorted today. When can I start?”

  “Cedric, it’s lunchtime and you’re in Rome. We can start about three-thirty once I have introduced you to the most divine pasta you have ever tasted accompanied by a white wine so delicate you would kill for it. Come, life in Italy is all about priorities, and there is no higher priority than food.”

  He paused as he slipped his suit jacket over his shoulders, his arms remaining outside the sleeves, and looked mischievously into Ced’s eyes. “Well, perhaps there is one. That’s what the siesta is for, but my lady friends are all out of town this week.”

  By three o’clock, Cedric had finished his third plate of linguine alle vongole followed by two helpings of saltimbocca alla romana, all helped on their way with a fine, dry Frascati, perfectly chilled. For dessert, Verdi suggested some cantucci biscuits for dipping in Vin Santo. “It’s not a Roman dish, Cedric, but I think it will be to your taste. The ‘Holy Wine’ is from Tuscany. It’s exquisite, and by making it the Tuscans justify their claim to be Italians, even if they are otherwise a little primitive.”

  Ced sat back in his chair and caught the eye of the restaurant owner. The small, almost round man was standing by the door to the kitchen beaming in delight. Ced raised his glass to him, “Grazie, signore! Ottimo!”

  Verdi laughed and, turning to the owner, launched into a lengthy monologue in Italian that appeared to be all about Ced. An equally lengthy reply followed, accompanied by much chortling, after which, the owner left to get them some espresso.

  “You understood, Cedric?”

  “Not a word, Corrado.”

  Verdi smiled. “I was telling him that you are a brilliant art expert who is going to weed out all the world’s forgers. He was very impressed. He thinks you should marry his daughter and come to live in Rome.”

  “I’d better run that one by Sal, I think, Corrado.”

  “Ah yes, your new girlfriend. I am very disappointed she did not accompany you. Lawrence told me on the telephone that she is a great beauty.”

  “Lawrence said that?”

  “Not those words, exactly, but I could tell from his tone of voice it is what he meant. You have her photograph?”

  “I do, as a matter of fact.” He took a photo from his wallet, one taken of Sally and him crammed into a passport photo booth after a triathlon.

  Corrado took it. “Madonna e tutti i Santi, Cedric, she is a goddess! No wonder you left her at home. She would have hordes of men stalking her in this city. You must promise me you will come to Rome for your honeymoon. I shall lend you a villa in the hills. It is the most romantic spot you could imagine.”

  “It would be idyllic, Corrado. I’ve always wanted to run the hills of Lazio.”

  “Cedric!” Verdi was aghast. “It will be your honeymoon!”

  Verdi had collected twenty Tommaso Perini paintings for Ced to process.

  As Ced worked through them, totally absorbed with adjusting the lighting and angles for each of the shots, Verdi looked on in admiration and not a little wonder.

  “This is the miracle of modern technology in action, Cedric. Each of these beautiful portraits submitting gracefully to the caress of expert hands gliding gently over them, like a shy young maiden in the arms of her first adoring lover.”

  Ced smiled. “I sincerely hope they prove to be more willing to reveal their mysteries than some I’ve been dealing with lately, Corrado. My program is feeling rather emasculated at the moment.”

  At six that evening, as Ced completed his imaging, Verdi moved to a stack of a dozen paintings in a corner of his office.

  “I thought these might interest you, Cedric,” he said picking up two of the pictures. “They are also portraits, but by Piero Perini, Tommaso’s son. It would be interesting to see what your program makes of them. It is known that Piero learned his trade from his father, so the styles should be similar.”

  Ced agreed and set to work.

  As he finished, he checked his watch. Seven thirty.

  “Corrado, the next stage is going to be slow because I only have my laptop with me. I can continue at my hotel and have the results by the morning.”

  “An excellent idea, Cedric. Shall we meet here
at eight-thirty?”

  “So your results show that all the Tommaso Perinis were painted by one person, and all the Piero Perinis were painted by one person, but the same person could not have produced both sets of works. And, as you found in England, the Tommaso Perinis cannot be distinguished from the John Andrews portrait.”

  It was the following morning and a bleary-eyed and despondent Ced was sitting across from Corrado Verdi, today wearing immaculate blue jeans and a pale pink shirt.

  Ced nodded. “Exactly. The program has performed perfectly in distinguishing the two Perini men. As you pointed out yesterday the styles of Perini father and son are very similar, although Tommaso Perini’s is definitely more sophisticated. A layman would not be able to tell many of the paintings apart but the program distinguishes them with no problem at all. Which is what it’s designed to do. So why can’t it distinguish Tommaso Perini’s work from John Andrews’? There’s no way he could have painted them.”

  Verdi shook his head. “I can offer no explanation, Cedric, but like Lawrence, I am convinced there is something you are missing.”

  Corrado Verdi scratched his head delicately with the little finger of his right hand. “Dare I suggest we look at the three de la Places? If nothing else, it would give you more good image data for when you do solve this problem.”

  Cedric reluctantly agreed, knowing in his heart what the result would be.

  While they were waiting for the comparison program to churn through the numbers for the de la Place paintings, Cedric looked around the walls of Verdi’s office. Verdi walked over to join him, handing him a pair of binoculars.

  “Try these, Cedric; without a stepladder to get close, it’s the best way to study the detail.”

  Ced took the binoculars and focused on various details of the frescos. But his mind was elsewhere.

  “You know, Corrado,” he said as he looked absently from one area to another, “I can accept the fact that Andrews is so good a forger that he is able to defeat my program when he reproduces the work of any particular painter. That would be a very exciting discovery which would necessitate a further refining to find the subtle differences that must be there but which are currently escaping the program’s attention. It would result in a better program. What I simply can’t understand is why the program can’t distinguish the works of a number of painters coming from completely different eras, works that we know are genuine.”

  “It’s a complete mystery, Cedric,” replied Verdi. “I can offer no solution. I am not an expert in your computing methods so all I can suggest is that you expand the number of paintings you test from these artists you cannot distinguish. Perhaps by doing that you will find one you can tell apart from Andrews’ work, and by finding what it is that distinguishes that one, you might discover the way into solving the problem.”

  “That’s what I thought was going to happen by coming here to Rome. I thought I’d be going back with a set of images from genuine Tommaso Perinis and Jean de la Places, and then hit Andrews with the results, with the fraud squad waiting outside to arrest him.”

  “It will happen eventually,” smiled Verdi in an attempt at reassurance. “He will slip up. Now, I have another idea. While you are attempting to coax your clever program to be even cleverer, I could use my brain, my eyes and my experience to become a little smarter. I intend to scrutinise in every way I can the originals of these mysterious works by Perini the elder and de la Place, to cast my so-called expert eye over them and see if I can find something that shows me they were painted by different painters.”

  “That would be brilliant, Corrado. If anyone can do it by eye, it’s you.”

  Verdi nodded, pleased to have thought of another potentially constructive approach. “It will be a very interesting exercise, not normally something one would think of doing. After all, apart from saying that artist A from one century paints in the same style as artist B from another century, one would never consider that artist A could be artist B. It is not logical.”

  They worked on through the morning, took a light lunch and continued into the afternoon. Around four, Verdi excused himself to search for some paintings by another artist he had thought of. He returned with three portraits.

  “Claudio Lorenzini, Cedric. Seventeenth century. Like these others, very underrated. Please, try your program on them.”

  An hour later, Ced thumped his hands on the table and slumped back in his chair, close to tears in frustration. He waved a hand at the laptop screen.

  “It gets worse by the minute, Corrado. The program can’t distinguish these Lorenzinis either. Where’s it going to end? I don’t understand it. It’s not as if the program is coming up with only a possible match. On the contrary, it couldn’t be much more definite, whether it’s when I compare one of these artists with another or with the John Andrews portrait of the old woman.”

  Corrado Verdi paced the floor, his arms working furiously as he tossed arguments around in his head. He stopped, turned to Ced, his shoulders and arms lifted in an emphatic Italian shrug.

  “You are convinced, Cedric, that this man Andrews is some kind of master forger?”

  Ced nodded.

  “If that is true,” continued Verdi, “suppose he has recognised another series of forgeries from long ago.”

  Ced frowned, not understanding Verdi’s line of reasoning.

  “Think about it, Cedric, we think that we know the provenance of these Perinis, the de la Places, even the Lorenzinis. But do we? The Perinis are from three hundred and fifty years ago; much could have happened in that time that we are totally unaware of. There could have been copies made, the originals switched.”

  Ced pulled a doubtful face. “It’s possible, but why? Tommaso Perini was a relatively minor artist. I doubt that one or two hundred years ago very many people had even heard of him. Why should anyone want to copy his works and make off with the originals?”

  “Who knows, Cedric, but it’s possible, yes? The question is: who would do it and when was it done?”

  Ced thought for a moment. “Well, so far, we have Perini painting in the middle to late fifteen hundreds, Lorenzini in the late sixteen hundreds, and de la Place in the mid seventeen hundreds. But he was painting in Paris and London, while the other two were here in Rome and somewhere else in Italy.”

  “Siena,” said Verdi, “Lorenzini and his sons worked in Siena.”

  Ced shook his head. “Is your brain permanently logged into Google search, Corrado? There seems to be nothing about Italian artists you don’t know.”

  Verdi smiled and tapped his head knowingly. “Signor Google downloads from me, not the other way round, you know.”

  Ced laughed. “OK, given we can’t distinguish one from the other in style signature, that would make de la Place, as the most recent of them, the forger. Unless there are others we have yet to discover who are even more recent.”

  He hit his forehead with the palm of his hand.

  “Moretti! I’d forgotten about Moretti. But he was working in England in the nineteen forties and fifties. I don’t think he left England apart from when he died.”

  “He died in Venice, didn’t he?” said Verdi.

  “Yes,” replied Ced, “he drowned. Look, Corrado, this theory of a master forger replacing all these paintings, it doesn’t really work. It can’t have been Moretti; he’s too recent. And what about John Andrews’ work? Andrews can’t have had the opportunity to creep into all these Italian museums and galleries in the dead of night and swap a pile of paintings for no known reason.”

  “You’re right, Cedric. It makes no sense.”

  He went back to his examination while Ced returned to scrutinising his results.

  After about half an hour, Ced sat back, his mind unable to focus further on the numbers, He was thinking about the artists whose work he had now spent many apparently fruitless hours studying. Who were they? What was known about them? What did they look like? He turned to Verdi.

  “Corrado? May I interrupt
you for a moment and ask you to dig into that encyclopedia of a mind? Do you know much about the lives of these artists who are tormenting us? Are there any paintings of them? Do we know even what their faces were like?”

  Verdi stretched his arms above his head and cracked his knuckles. “Interesting questions, Cedric. Let me think. No, I am not aware of any paintings of the artists themselves. You know, ‘Self-portrait of the artist as a young man’ and so on. As for their lives, now you mention it, it’s strange. There are distinct gaps in what is known about them. OK, for an artist in Tommaso Perini’s time, that is not too unusual; it was a long time ago and records weren’t always good. From what I remember about him, he turned up in Arezzo as a relatively young man with a wife and young family. It isn’t known where he came from.”

  He frowned, thinking about what he’d just said.

  “That in itself is rather odd, you know, Cedric. Artists moved around in those days, for commissions and so on, but for a whole family to move, that is strange.”

  “What about the Lorenzinis?” asked Ced.

  “The Lorenzinis? Well, Henri Lorenzini worked here in Rome for a number of years until he was murdered.”

  “Murdered? I didn’t know that.”

  “Yes, it was a tragedy: he was maturing as an artist very well. Certainly he was a lot more accomplished than his younger brother, Michel. But the older one, Claudio, as we now know from what we’ve seen today, he was brilliant and yet hardly recognised then or now.”

  “And they were from Siena?”

  “Yes and no. They worked in Siena, Claudio and Michel, but like Perini in Arezzo, they just appeared there. They certainly didn’t originate from Siena and after the death of their brother, Henri, they returned there briefly and then disappeared. I’m not aware of anything by them after Henri’s death.”

  “So we have two Italian artists we can’t distinguish who both led enigmatic lives. And then de la Place?”

  Verdi shook his head. “Yes, he was French and, as far as I know, never set foot in Italy. But his life was equally shrouded in mystery.”

  “So,” mused Ced, “we have three artists linked in their style signature to such a degree that we can’t distinguish them and all of them led lives we know only fragments about. You know, come to think of it, Moretti wasn’t that different either.”

  “Moretti?”

  “Yes, he turned up in London from obscure origins in the US, son of Italian immigrants, worked in England all his adult life, largely as a recluse, and then upped and left on a whim in his sixties only to drown in Italy. I wonder if there are any others.”

  “Perhaps you should ask Mr Andrews.”

  “After my meeting with John Andrews, I doubt he’d be too willing to answer any of my questions.”

  Verdi nodded thoughtfully. “You say his likeness is in some of the Piero della Francesca frescos.”

  “Yes, that’s what crossed my mind when I asked you if there were any paintings of the others. Although why that should be relevant, I don’t know.”

  “May I have a look, Cedric, at the photographs of Andrews and the faces in the della Francescas?”

  “I’ll call them up now,” replied Cedric.

  “So this is John Andrews.”

  Corrado Verdi was studying the images Ced had called onto his computer screen. “He has an interesting face. Those eyes are very unusual.”

  “Yes,” agreed Ced, “it’s the first thing you notice about him.”

  “And here they are in ‘The Awakening’. How strange.”

  Verdi stared at the images for some minutes, then turning to Ced, he asked, “Have you ever seen it in the flesh, so to speak?”

  “‘The Awakening’? No, I haven’t. It wasn’t on view to the public when I was a student and I haven’t been back to the San Sepolcro area since.”

  “You should. It’s a very powerful painting, as powerful in its way as ‘The Resurrection’. Do you want to go and see it? We can get there and back in a day.”

  “If there’s time, Corrado, I’d love to.”

  “It will be my pleasure. We’ll drive up first thing in the morning. My little car needs to stretch its legs on the autostrada.”