Madonna and Corpse

Chapter 4 Dubois

As he changes the CD in the Bose and begins squeezing white lead from a tube, Dubois laments the changing of the times. In the years since health agencies have banned lead-based paint in homes and offices, white lead — artists’ favorite primer for millennia, a white so dazzling it makes paintings glow from within — has become virtually impossible to obtain. It remains perfectly legal, of course, for expendable artists like Dubois to risk lead poisoning, but alas — in dutiful obedience to the law of supply and demand — paint manufacturers no longer find it profitable to make the meager amounts of white lead required by artists, and so stockpiles go steadily down and prices go swiftly up. The single tube he’ll use to reprime this one panel cost him a week’s grocery money, and he had to grovel to get it at all. Soon he may be forced to make his own white lead, the same way the ancient Greeks did, by suspending thin sheets of lead above a vat of vinegar (encased in fresh horse dung, for warmth!) until the lead is covered with white corrosion, then scraping off the corrosion, grinding it, and mixing it with linseed oil. A damned nuisance, he fumes, and all because a few stupid babies ate too many paint chips.

Once he begins applying the white lead to the panel, though, he forgets his irritation and, as always, falls under the spell of the work: the velvety feel and silky sound of the white lead gliding onto the panel. He turns and touches the Bose, and angelic voices fill the studio — a women’s quartet singing an eleventh-century polyphonic chant, “10,000 Virgins.” The soaring melodies infuse his studio and his paint and his soul with sublimity. At this moment, anything is possible; on this luminous, immaculate surface, he can be a Michelangelo, a Da Vinci, a Rembrandt, or any other genius of the ages. As it happens, he will be Botticelli, specifically, the Botticelli who painted the sweet Madonna and Child. This one, his third, will be his best yet — far better than the two that he’s foisted off on the old bat at the Petit Palais — for this time, he has a buyer willing to pay a price worthy of the work.

It’s taken three years to reel in the buyer, a British art dealer named Felicia Kensington. It began when she wrote to express her admiration of a Caravaggio painting—Salome Receives the Head of John the Baptist—that he’d cleaned and retouched for the National Gallery in London. “The painting now glows with Caravaggio’s genius and your own,” she said. Dubois responded with an equally effusive thank-you note, and they passed a few more flattering messages back and forth. Eventually he mentioned, oh so casually, that occasionally he got lucky enough to unearth a work by an old master — a painting or drawing languishing, unsigned and unrecognized, in some junk shop or attic.

“If,” she’d swiftly responded, “you should happen upon any unsigned works in the style of Caravaggio — for instance, drawings or preliminary studies of the Salome painting, or other scenes in a similar vein — I should be most grateful for the opportunity to have them appraised, and to offer them to certain clients of mine.” Dubois, no fool, had instantly decoded the phrase “unsigned works in the style of,” and six months later, he wrote with the happy news that he’d “discovered” three unsigned studies “in the style of Caravaggio”: one of Salome’s face, one of the Baptist’s head on a trencher, and the third of the old woman (Salome’s mother, perhaps?) lurking in the background. Kensington had paid a thousand pounds apiece for them; a year later, he read that a rare group of three Caravaggio studies had been found and sold to a private collector, for the rumored sum of a million pounds!

Not long after producing the “Caravaggios,” he’d dined with Kensington in Paris at the King George V Hotel — a lovely, delicate piece of fish in white truffle oil, he recalled fondly — and she’d asked him to keep an eye out for other, similar finds. “My top clients are especially keen on Rembrandt, Titian, Michelangelo, and Botticelli,” she’d gushed. In that moment — the taste of the truffle oil vivid in his memory — Dubois had glimpsed a remarkable opening.

He’d just been hired by Avignon’s Petit Palais Museum to clean and restore their prized Botticelli, and it had occurred to him that the opportunity of a lifetime glittered before him, if he had the courage to seize it. “What do you think you could pay for a preliminary study of Botticelli’s Madonna and Child?” he inquired in an offhand tone. “First quality, of course; verifiable fifteenth-century materials.”

Her eyes took on a hungry gleam. “That would be quite a find,” she said, struggling to keep the excitement out of her voice. “I imagine I’d be able to pay somewhere in the range of, say, fifty thousand pounds?”

Dubois had nodded noncommittally. Then — after a moment’s pause — he delivered the coup de grâce: “And what if I told you that the museum that thinks it owns the finished painting has been deceived? That the painting hanging in Avignon is a modern fake… and that the actual, authentic painting might—possibly—be available, for the right price, to a very discreet buyer?”

She’d stared at him, openmouthed, all pretense of nonchalance gone. “You can’t be serious.” Then, leaning forward, laying a hand on his hand: “Can you? Are you? Is it really possible?”

He’d played it cool. “Notice, I said ‘what if?’ But I gather you find the idea intriguing. Do you have any clients with ambitions — and budgets — as lofty as that?”

She regained her poise swiftly. “I believe I do,” she purred. “How soon do you need to know?”

“One month,” he’d answered.

Two weeks later his phone rang. “I have a client who is extremely interested in… the painting you mentioned to me in Paris,” she said. “Needless to say, he’d want assurances that the work is authentic.”

“Of course,” Dubois had responded, his voice smooth as fresh varnish. “And, I assume, he’d want proof that the other — the one on display — is not authentic.”

“Yes. That, too.”

“Neither of those conditions poses a problem,” he went on. “If.”

“If what?”

“If the price is right. Bear in mind, only four paintings by Botticelli are in private hands. Four. For a true connoisseur, this would be the acquisition of a lifetime.”

“I understand.” She paused. “Did you have a figure in mind? A number I could relay to my client for consideration?”

“I like round numbers,” Dubois had answered. “Do you recall the figure you mentioned for a preliminary study? Fifty thousand, I believe?”

“Yes, that’s correct.” Her voice was hungry.

“Multiply that by a hundred.” He heard a soft gasp at the other end of the line. “It is,” he reminded her, “one of Botticelli’s finest early works. Simple. Sweet. Vibrant. I understand, of course, if it’s more than your client can afford…”

“I didn’t say that,” she countered, perhaps more eagerly than she might have wished. “Let me run this past him, and I’ll ring you back.”

Two hours later, she’d called back. “If you can conclusively demonstrate the authenticity of what you’re offering, we’re in.”

Dubois was smiling as he hung up.

Now, months later, he smiles again as he finishes applying the white-lead primer, cleans his brush, and lays out the pigments with which he will paint the “authentic” Botticelli for Felicia Kensington and her wealthy, greedy, and gullible client. Caveat emptor, he thinks: Let the buyer beware.