A Nearly Perfect Copy - By Allison Amend Page 0,75
handed her a pair of gloves, donned a pair himself, and zipped open a case Elm had not noticed behind the chair. She got up and hurriedly drew the gauze undercurtains so the light would not damage the drawings.
She approached the table, the whirr of excitement building. She loved this part of the job, the sense of discovery that accompanied looking at truly fine art. And she wouldn’t lie: she loved the power. She determined what was authentic or fake, important or disposable, decorative or museum-worthy.
He laid the first drawing on the table. A typical Canaletto veduta, it showed a palazzo in architectural detail, with some extra flourishes that were clearly added by the artist, who often moved or added obstacles to suit his compositions. She noticed the gently swaying shadows and how the woman who was standing in front of the palazzo holding a basket mimicked that curve. The clouds were in a light wash, slightly sepia-toned, either from age or from original intent. She held it up gingerly. The watermark was appropriate. She couldn’t remember the firm off the top of her head, but she was sure she’d seen it before. The paper was handmade, the grains haphazard and the remnants of the pulp visible. Occasional wormholes dotted the page, with some mold spots. Period paper, then.
Her heart began to beat quicker. She could hear her own breathing. Maybe she was excited to be holding such an important piece of work. But that couldn’t be it. She had held much more important works, works that held significance for her personally, without such an extreme reaction. Maybe she was anxious about tomorrow.
She studied the lines. The drawing had Canaletto’s sure hand, his talent for perspective that wasn’t exactly as nature (or man) built monuments, but made sense to the naked eye. She took Klinman’s proffered loupe and looked more closely at the wormholes. The ink hadn’t bled into them, meaning that the holes were made after the drawing was complete, not before. Otherwise excellent fakes often had this telltale sign; the forger had drawn over the old paper, but the ink had betrayed him.
Mentally, she classified where in Canaletto’s oeuvre this work might fall. She recognized the street in Rome from her stay there in graduate school. It was not exactly as she remembered it, but that was possibly a fault of her memory, or of Canaletto’s. Sure enough, faintly underneath the ink lines she saw the barest remnants of chalk and red pencil where he had sketched the outlines before returning to his studio.
Elm considered, watching the curtains sway with the forced air blown out beneath them. It could be from one of Canaletto’s atelier. By the end of his life, he had quite a production line going. But the scene was from a veduta earlier in his life, when he was still sketching primarily on commission. And it wasn’t a pastiche. Too often, imitators of a master (whether forgers or hobbyists) amalgamated all of a master’s styles into one piece, the visual equivalent of overembellishing a lie. This piece had remarkable restraint. It had to be a Canaletto. And yet …
She put the picture down, willing her face not to betray any emotion. She felt the barest pinch of a headache, the constriction of her lungs. Her head told her that this was an authentic work. She had been trained by both the academy and personal experience to be an expert. She needed four hands to list the reasons this was definitely a Canaletto original and didn’t have a single reason to doubt herself except that her body seemed to be signaling her to trust instinct over reason.
“Hmmm,” she said, noncommittally. “The others?”
“Another Canaletto,” he said. It was from the same papermaker, which made sense. It showed a bit of water, a rare Canaletto subject, a gondola in the distant background, rowed by just the suggestion of a gondolier.
He stood by her, a respectful distance, his hands clasped in front of him, rocking on his toes. He looked at the ground so as not to make her nervous. He did everything a dealer was supposed to do.
When he showed her the Piranesi, the word no rose up in her like a belch. She managed to quell it before it escaped her lips. An odd reaction to what was by all accounts a beautiful drawing.
What, she asked herself, was that voice responding to? She realized it was responding to her assumption that this drawing was by Piranesi. Her