The Art Thief: A Novel

by Noah Charney

  Barrow walked past the glass door and through a corridor. He emerged from another exit, along the side of the building. The metal door slammed shut behind him, with a resounding clang that made him wince.

  No matter, he thought. Cloudless blue shined above, as he stepped out onto the Strand.

  At the front entrance to the Arts Building, the man in the suit checked his watch and stared in at the glass door. Then he lifted his mobile phone and dialed.

  Barrow moved slowly, thanks to the limp that had plagued him since his hip surgery, two summers before. Crowds of people, tourists and businessmen, moved around him in the bright summer day. The sun beat down against his herringbone sport jacket, too thick for the heat, but he would not take it off. He thought of it as a counterbalance to the gross indecency of dress in the youth of today.

  He passed by a window display and peered within, to examine a Verdi CD that had caught his eye. Then he saw the reflection in the window.

  The man in the suit.

  Barrow could see him standing on the other side of the street. What’s he waiting for, he thought? If he wants me, why hasn’t he approached? Barrow turned away and limped off along Upper St Martin’s Lane, favoring his left leg since the surgery. The crowd of people grew denser as he passed the monument to Oscar Wilde, who lay smiling and smoking in his coffin.

  A train must have just let out, Barrow thought, as a swarm of bodies emerged from Charing Cross tube station. He stole a glance at the reflection in another shop window. There was the man in the suit, again. Only this time, there was someone else with him. And they were both walking toward him.

  CHAPTER 5

  Barrow spun around and elbowed his way through the sea of people rising from the underground. Against the tide, he pushed down the stairs into Charing Cross station, which lay, labyrinthine, beneath Trafalgar Square.

  Underground, Barrow stumbled his way down one passage, then another, until he reached a set of stairs. He surfaced by the foot of the monument to Lord Nelson, fringed by imperious stone lions, at the center of Trafalgar Square, and several hundred meters away from Oscar Wilde. He wove his way through tourists and pigeons toward the National Gallery.

  As Barrow passed through the revolving door and onto the marble floor of the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery, he saw a cluster of his students, milling and giggling.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I’m over here, you toads! Kindly remove your minds from your trousers and the trousers of your neighbors, and think about art!”

  He was at home once more, within the comforting walls of the museum. The students were almost incidental. They changed from year to year. But for Professor Simon Barrow, teaching was about communion with the art that he loved, and a new gaggle of students was merely an excuse to revisit old friends and unlock their mysteries.

  “We will begin, aptly enough, at the beginning, and when we get to the end of the course, if anyone is still left standing, that is, we shall stop.”

  Barrow mounted the vertiginous white stone staircase. The problem was that he tried to do so backward, in order to be heard by the group of twenty survey students trailing behind him, and he stumbled and fell on his posterior.

  Barrow had turned many enrolled in the university’s Survey of Western Art History course into art history lovers and majors, but it was early days into the semester, and affections had yet to be consummated. It was the flirtation period.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I am taking you on the Barrow high-speed tour of the greatest hits of the National Gallery. Please show requisite awe, veneration, and subsequent enlightenment.”

  Barrow turned left at the top of the stairs, and left again into the rooms containing the oldest works in the National Gallery. His New England accent had long ago melted into fox-hunt British, so many years having passed since his necessarily permanent emigration to be with his kindred spirits.

  “Let us begin here.”

  He stopped in front of an enormous gold-choked altarpiece, perhaps twenty feet across and eight feet high, smothered in large figures of saints and assorted clergy.

  “Before I launch into the talk that will change your meager lives, and for the better, I might add, let me set the scene. With your music television and action films and pornographic pictures and digital cameras, it is impossible for any of you to imagine what life was like before the printing press. But try, for God’s sake.

  “Imagine that you have never seen an image before. I know that’s difficult to conceive, but most medieval Europeans, without the large quantities of money required to commission art for themselves, would never have beheld an image. Without printing, every image must be handmade. Materials are very expensive, so the only art that exists is made on commission. Mirrors and glass are also very expensive. It is entirely possible that the only image you’ve ever seen as a medieval peasant was your own reflection in water.

  “Imagine, then, that when you come to church, you are confronted with this!” He gestured toward the magnificent altarpiece, so large, and beaming with gold. “The figures painted here may look two-dimensional to you, you dismal sheep, but imagine how realistic they would seem if you had never seen an image before. The awe that this must have provoked, the admiration for God and the Church, is astounding. So peel away your jaded egos, and bathe in this! Rising bollards, Tom! Stop looking at Sophy’s breasts, and look over here!

  “This altarpiece is iconographically exemplary. For those of you looking confused and drug-addled, the word ikon is Greek, and means ‘image.’ ‘Iconography,’ as Abby here can explain to you, is the study of symbolic images within art. There has always been a formulaic way to present the most common images in the Bible, and this is a painting of the Heavenly Choir.

  “In early paintings, the most important figures were made larger than the rest, so we have Jesus and Mary, enthroned and clearly having taken their vitamins, in the center. Also, only divine figures were painted facing front, which is why only the big boppers, Jesus and Mary, are thus here. Now, who can tell me what the single most expensive aspect of this painting is?”

  Barrow looked out on a sea of confusion.

  An anonymous response. “Uh, the gold?”

  “Uh, no, but that’s exactly what I thought you’d say, so you’ve provided the perfect segue, thank you, Robert. What you are reacting to is gold leaf. The process is delicate. Sheets of gold are hammered to a width thinner than paper, so thin in fact that they would crumble if you touched them with a fat and oily finger. So, what did these brilliant medieval craftsmen do? They took a brush made with animal fur, and rubbed it in their own head of hair, creating static electricity. Using the static, they could pick up the sliver-thin gold leaf and press it onto the gessoed piece of poplar wood that would become this altarpiece, using an egg as glue.

  “No, you turkeys! The most expensive aspect of this painting is the blue! You can always tell which medieval paintings cost the most by how much blue is in them. Blue was made from lapis lazuli, the philosopher’s stone of alchemical fame, a pigment that was dangerously imported from what is now Afghanistan, and was the single most expensive thing one could buy during the Middle Ages. Artists did not go down to the corner store and buy tubes of paint along with their marijuana cigarettes and hair dye. Not until the mid-nineteenth century. Each artist ground his own pigments, dipped his brush in an open-cracked egg, dipped in the pigment, and went to work. This is tempera on panel. Almost all altarpieces are on large pieces of wooden panel, usually poplar wood, in Italian works. The wood is covered in white gesso…remember that gesso is the white plaster-based preparatory layer painted between the support and the colored paint…then a drawing is made of the outline of figures. Then tempera paint is added.

  “Not until the advent of oil paints, which we’ll see in the next room, could true subtlety and layering be employed in the paintings. You slap on tempera paint, that’s pigment mixed with egg white as a binder, and basta, you’re done. Then a gilder would come in and add the gol
d leaf, sometimes using a tool to decorate with impressions. And, voilà, you have a very expensive work of art. These would exist almost exclusively in churches, paid for by wealthy patrons who were told that they could buy their way into Heaven, a practice which continues in American televangelism. You can read more about this in your homework, for which we’ll be having a pop quiz tomorrow. Ask little Abby for help with iconography, as she will soon be supplanting me as Arts Department chair. Next painting!”

  Barrow led his students into the next room.

  Then he saw them.

  It’s those same turkeys, he thought. But now there are three. Are they procreating?

  They were standing at the back of the room. One was on his mobile phone. A museum guard approached.

  “Excuse me, sir. No mobile phones al—”

  The man stared at the guard, who slunk away.

  This has got to be my imagination, Barrow thought. I’ve seen too many movies.

  Barrow tried not to glance over his shoulder, as the flock of students rumbled into the small peripheral room, containing arguably the single greatest, and most influential, painting ever made.

  “Bow your heads, children. You are in the presence of majesty. Screw the Mona Lisa, screw Whistler and his mother, screw the Water Lilies and every other painting that you’ve heard of but know nothing about because it’s famous for all the wrong reasons. This may be the most influential painting in the history of the universe!”

  The students collectively rolled their eyes.

  “Don’t roll your eyes at me, you ignorant cows! I’m here to enlighten you and, damn it, you will be enlightened! This is The Marriage Contract by Jan van Eyck.”

  “Never heard of him,” came an anonymous cry from the throng of students.

  “Judas Iscariot! Dissension in the ranks. No, none of you has the cranial capacity nor the wherewithal to have researched on your own before starting my class. That is why I am here. Look deeper. I am your shepherd. And there are wolves about.

  “Jan van Eyck was a painter, intellectual, and secret agent. Ah-ha! That caught your attention. You know James Bond, don’t you, you movie-consuming capitalist wet dreams? Van Eyck worked for the duke of Burgundy, and was employed on numerous secret missions, as they are deemed in contemporary documents, on the duke’s behalf. Not only was he the court painter, but he was an adviser and emissary. One of the first, dare I say it, Renaissance men. Although he did not invent oil painting, Jan van Eyck employed it to a perfection never before seen, and he influenced every artist who has come after him.”

  “It doesn’t look like a Jackson Pollock,” muttered someone in the crowd.

  “It doesn’t look like a Jackson Pollock? You’re right, but for the wrong reason.

  “Ladies and gentlemen! Art repeats. The history of art is rife with allusion and self-reference. Art is cumulative. The most modern art comments upon, and reflects, everything that came before it. So, although this 1434 van Eyck does not look like a Pollock, Pollock would not exist without van Eyck, and every artist who came between them. Art that looks different is a reaction against, but it is nevertheless a reaction. I’ll give you a train of for-instance.

  “Ancient Greek sculpture influenced ancient Roman sculpture which influenced Cimabue who inspired Giotto who influenced Masaccio who influenced Raphael who inspired Annibale Carracci who taught Domenichino who worked alongside Poussin who influenced David who inspired Manet who was beloved of Degas who influenced Monet who inspired Mondrian who inspired Malevich who worked with Kandinsky who led to Jackson-goddamned-Pollock, thank you very much! Polydorus to Pollock in seventeen easy lessons.”

  The students broke out into smiles and applauded.

  “Thank you, thank you. I’ll be here until Thursday. Try the meatloaf…Give me any two artists, and I can trace you the trail of influence between them. And you can too, if you pay attention, for bollards’ sake! If you’ll allow me to continue…”

  Barrow trailed off, as he saw the three men standing across the doorway, the only way out of the room.

  “Let us first briefly look at this painting to the left. It is a portrait of the head of a man in a red turban. It is a self-portrait of Jan van Eyck.”

  “I thought that only the divine were shown facing front?”

  “Ah, good point, Liisa. Our friend Jan thinks quite highly of himself. He and another man, whose name should be familiar to you, Albrecht Dürer, were the two earliest painters to portray themselves in godlike poses. Portraiture before this point was done in profile, to mimic the portraits of Roman emperors minted onto coins. These full-frontal self-portraits have to do not only with ego, but also with the philosophy of Neo-Platonism. That’s a reference to Plato. And this philosophy was hugely popular with artists of the Renaissance.”

  Barrow’s eyes still hung on the men at the back of the room.

  “Dear God, where was I? Oh yes, Neo-Platonism. You’ll have to forgive me, children. My train of thought is still boarding at the station. Briefly, Neo-Platonism suggests that art was the closest approximation to the perfection that must exist in Heaven, and that artists were therefore the conduit of a reflection, a shadow of the divine on earth. Raphael is the most obvious exemplar of this theory. In his biblical paintings, Raphael never portrayed any specific model, but instead assembled the most beautiful aspects of faces that he had seen into an ideal composite, one that does not exist, but that he thought echoed the perfection that must exist in Heaven.

  “This is a roundabout way of saying that, while van Eyck thought highly of his abilities, and rightfully so, there was also a legitimate philosophy percolating that said that artists were godlike in their ability to create. So, van Eyck is suggesting to us that he and God are not so dissimilar. And I’m sure his mother would agree.

  “You’ll notice some writing along the top of this painting. It is in Flemish, and says ‘As well as I can.’ Along the bottom is written ‘Johannes van Eyck me fecit,’ which is Latin for ‘Jan van Eyck made me.’ Van Eyck is showing off through his humility, telling the viewer, ‘I tried and this is the best I can do,’ knowing full well that what he’d done was superlative. What made van Eyck so great was his precision, and this was permitted by his use of oil paints. Tempera allowed for minimal layering, and so the colors look flat. Oil paints have a translucence that allows layer upon layer to be stacked and melted into one another. Tiny brushes were used, too, to allow for minute details. But it is the layering of paints that is key. Why do you think the Mona Lisa has an enigmatic smile? Because Leonardo could paint one layer with no smile, one layer with a little smile, one with a bigger one, one with a frown, ad infinitum, until he had something perfectly subtle and suggestive of all the layers beneath. There’s no mystery to it.

  “Look now to The Marriage Contract. It is a portrait of two people, Mr. and Mrs. Giovanni Arnolfini. The mister was an Italian cloth merchant living in Bruges, in what is now Belgium. He holds hands with his ball-and-chain, who is dressed in sumptuous green with fur trimming, clearly expensive. Mr. Arnolfini looks like a toadstool, but it’s not his fault, as hats of this type were popular at the time. The missus looks pregnant, right? Wrong! Sure she’s got a big stomach, but look closer. Look closer. She has gathered up her copious dress in hand before her, showing off the cloth that was the source of her husband’s wealth.

  “Also, the ideal of beauty was different back then. We can see this in another work by van Eyck, called The Ghent Altarpiece. Incidentally, there is a medieval tradition in Ghent that, at the New Year, a bag of cats must be thrown out of a tower, but that’s as may be. In The Ghent Altarpiece, there is a nude painting of Eve, as in Adam and Eve. Without any clothes to hide behind, we see Eve in all her glory. And she looks like a pear. She’s got tiny little buoyant boobies stuck high on her chest, and an enormous belly. There’s a Hungarian term for these perky little eye-gouging breasts, speermel, which I’ve always thought apt. The woman looks like a bowling pin. This was the ideal of feminine beauty in th
e Middle Ages. So, Mrs. Arnolfini is probably not pregnant, but is supposed to look fetching and fecund.

  “There is more, so much more. During the Renaissance in the north of Europe, artists employed a technique with an intriguing name—disguised symbolism. Essentially, this meant allegorical iconography. Objects were placed in paintings that were metaphors or allegorical references to other things. I’ll give you a simple for-instance. There is a piece of fruit, probably an orange, on the table below the window to Giovanni’s right. Fruit symbolized prosperity and economic and biological fruitfulness. There is a dog on the floor between the couple. Look closely. Thanks to oil paints, and small brushes, and probably much squinting, van Eyck has painted every individual hair on this little dog, in an array of colors that cumulatively look highly naturalistic. The dog is the disguised symbol for loyalty.

  “What else? See the statue on the wall at the back of the room? That’s Saint Margaret, the saint to whom you’d pray if you’re hoping to get pregnant. How do I know that this was not a shotgun wedding? Look at the top of the painting. There is a chandelier with one illuminated candle in it. If the candle were extinguished, then Mrs. Arnolfini is pregnant, and these two have already been married. But they are in the process of being married. Here’s why…”

  Barrow could not help but notice that the three men in suits had not moved from their positions blocking the door.

  “There is a Germanic tradition that a candle be illuminated during a marriage ceremony, and placed outside the conjugal bedroom of the new couple. The moment the marriage was consummated, as in the couple had sex…see that got your attention…the parents of the couple would blow out the candle. Voilà, an extinguished candle means consummation, a lit one means they can’t wait to hop in the sack.

  “As an interesting aside, it’s traditional in Annunciation scenes, that’s when God sent the Angel Gabriel to tell Mary that she’d bear the son of God, during the Northern Renaissance, to show an extinguished candle in the room. This indicates that Mary is now consummated in mystical union with God, and she’s pregnant with His baby.