T
he story of Christ at Emmaus comes from the Gospel according to Luke. Three days after the crucifixion, Jesus’s tomb has been found empty. Two downcast disciples who have not yet heard that Christ is risen trudge their way along the road from Jerusalem. Jesus joins them but does not reveal his identity. In the town of Emmaus the three travelers sit down to supper. “And it came to pass,” Luke tells us, “as he sat at meat with them, he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them. And their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight.”What artist could resist a scene that so dramatically combined joy and as tonishment? Not Rembrandt or Dürer or Velasquez or Rubens, nor a host of lesser names. Caravaggio painted two different versions. Van Meegeren chose the second of these two Caravaggios, painted in 1606, and stuck close to it.
Why Caravaggio?
Van Meegeren needed to take someone as a model, that much was clear, for he was simply not good enough to leap to Vermeer’s height from ground level. Caravaggio was a brilliant, mischievous choice because there had long been speculation in art circles that Vermeer had studied Caravaggio’s work and been much influenced by it. Some historians even argued, though without proof, that Vermeer had traveled to Italy and studied Caravaggio on his home ground. But even if Vermeer never left Holland, which may well be the case, he knew Italian painting well—recall that he had been called as an expert in a legal case that turned on the authenticity of a collection of Italian paintings. Moreover, the city of Utrecht, only a short distance from Delft, had been
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home to a group of painters so indebted to Caravaggio that they were called
Caravaggisti, followers of Caravaggio. Vermeer indisputably knew their work. When Hannema put together his Vermeer exhibition in 1935, he had titled the show “Vermeer: Sources and Influences,” and he went out of his way to link Vermeer and Caravaggio. “In the exhibit’s first room,” Hannema wrote in his catalog, “a number of works by Utrecht masters like Honthorst, Baburen, and Terbruggen will be found.” Lest anyone miss his meaning, Hannema spelled out the reason he had included works by the Caravaggisti in a show dedicated to Vermeer. “They are related to early works by Vermeer.”
Every forgery is a game of “I think that you think that . . .” The forger needs to anticipate the connoisseur’s expectations and build in precisely those touches that will move the expert to say, “Just as I figured.” Van Meegeren could be sure that any connoisseur would murmur appreciative words about a painting based on a work by Caravaggio but incorporating allusions to Vermeer.
The Hannema show had called enormous attention to Vermeer. But ex perts on Dutch art wanted to do more than argue in favor of a Caravaggio- Vermeer link. They yearned to prove, once and for all, that the link was a solid, tangible fact. Two months after the Hannema exhibition closed, the Dutch critic Pieter Koomen suggested that one day a new Vermeer might be discovered that would establish the Caravaggio-Vermeer tie beyond any ques tion. Caravaggio had influenced Vermeer, Koomen wrote in the highly re garded Maandblad voor Beeldende Kunsten, but that infl uence had been subtle and elusive. Then Koomen went on to write one of the astonishing sentences in the entire Van Meegeren saga: “Perhaps tomorrow we will discover a thus far unknown painting, and next year another one, which will convincingly show this infl uence.”
Such a discovery would be almost too much to hope for. But if by some fluke such a Vermeer did appear—a painting that precisely vindicated Hannema’s view of Vermeer—one thing was sure: Hannema would move heaven and earth to acquire it.
Hannema and Koomen had not quite fallen into the trap of the Piltdown paleontologists—they had not predicted the existence of a missing link. But they had done Van Meegeren almost as great a favor. By highlighting the Vermeer-Caravaggio connection, they had handed the forger an answer to the knotty question of how he could make people think “Vermeer” without copy ing him.
it would be the most ambitious, most difficult forgery he ever undertook. Nearly all the dates in the Van Meegeren saga are hard to pin down, but prob ably Van Meegeren began to paint Christ at Emmaus a month or two before
Koomen’s article appeared. Even without Koomen’s broad hint, that is, Van Meegeren had decided that his greatest forgery would be a “Vermeer” mod eled closely on a Caravaggio. Not for the first time, he had gauged the mood of the day perfectly. In December 1935, at precisely the moment of Koomen’s public plea for a new Vermeer, Van Meegeren had begun to paint the very picture that the experts hoped to find.
N e a r ly a l l t h e artists who painted versions of Christ at Emmaus focused on the most dramatic moment—the instant of Jesus’s revelation or its imme diate aftermath. Rembrandt depicted the awed disciples gaping at an empty chair. In Caravaggio’s first version, Supper at Emmaus, which today is one of the treasures of London’s National Gallery, a clean-shaven, red-cheeked, robust Jesus makes his startling announcement, and the excitement nearly undoes the two disciples. One clutches his chair, as if he is about to leap up. The other, whom we see in profi le, flings his arms apart in shock and bewilderment. His left hand, a tour de force of foreshortening, thrusts straight at us. It seems almost to burst out of the canvas and materialize before us, larger and more powerful than any hand in the ordinary world.
But Vermeer would never grab us in a meaty paw to get our attention. And just here Van Meegeren did something brilliant. He decided to model his ver sion of Emmaus closely on Caravaggio’s Emmaus, but he chose Caravaggio’s sec ond version of the painting rather than the first. If Van Meegeren’s choice of Caravaggio as a model was clever, this choice of Caravaggio’s second version of
Emmaus was inspired.
The second painting shows a close kinship with the earlier version—in 1606 as in 1601, Caravaggio focused tightly on the table, with Jesus in the cen ter, facing us. In both pictures, one disciple sits facing Jesus, his back to us, and one sits at Jesus’s left, his profile toward us. Both pictures feature Caravag gio’s intensely focused light and an astonishingly rendered array of shadows, though the later painting is darker and quieter.
In the 1601 Caravaggio, Jesus is rosy and youthful. In 1606, Caravaggio depicted a more familiar Jesus, bearded, careworn, and weary. But a far more important difference between the paintings is the moment Caravaggio has chosen to represent. In 1606, Caravaggio painted the moment before Jesus’s
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revelation; in 1601, he had painted the moment after. The subtler 1606 version is the painting that Van Meegeren took as his model. An instant from now, the light will dawn—almost literally—but we are not quite there yet. The disci ple with his back to us is on the brink of understanding; he has just begun to lift his hands in surprise. But at this instant everything is still pending. The mood is quiet, intense, watchful, subdued.
The moment, in other words, was exactly the one Johannes Vermeer would have chosen had he set out to paint Christ at Emmaus.