Portrait of a Man by Georges Perec, David Bellos Page B

you’d decided to quit, settling in Dampierre when your own studio is in Geneva, and a one-hundred-and-fifty-million project when you’d chosen much less expensive guys …”
    â€œI’d said yes to the new deal, so I had no reason to quibble over the rest of it. Once I’ve agreed to do a forgery, I don’t see why I would have preferred to fake a d’Oggiono instead of an Antonello …”
    â€œIt takes more work …”
    â€œMaybe that’s what I wanted … Since I was saying O.K., why not go the whole hog?”
    â€œYou were going the whole hog?”
    â€œIn my own way, yes …”
    â€œBy deciding to do an Antonello?”
    â€œMore precisely, by deciding to do a Condottiere … As good a way as any of coming a cropper …”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œWhen I got back to Paris I decided to change the way I worked. Up till that time I’d always worked like any other forger, like van Meegeren, Icilio or Jérôme. I’d take three or four works by whomever, pick out various bits and pieces from them all, juggle them around and make a jigsaw puzzle out of them. But that didn’t work for an Antonello. At the start, let’s say, I had a few preconceived notions, the ones you get from a basic acquaintance with Antonello’s work: his stiffness, his almost obsessive precision, the sparseness of his settings, a more Flemish than Italian distribution of mannerisms and, so to speak, an admirable command of the subject or, more exactly, a way of portraying command itself. There’s nothing ambiguous or hesitant in the eyes or the gestures, only a constant assertion of poise and strength. The format of the dei Conti obliged me to do a portrait and the only one in my mind was the Condottiere. But the Condottiere is the only portrait Antonello did that is so powerful. His other portraits always fall a bit short, they’re slightly more neutral, slightly more sentimental; I had no departure point for constructing my puzzle; I had just one single portrait besideswhich the others seemed barely more than sketches or drafts. They pointed towards the Condottiere, but that’s all. I couldn’t make a jigsaw …”
    â€œI don’t understand you … Couldn’t you have made a puzzleportrait out of those same drafts, as you call them, to produce something that would look like another draft of the Condottiere?”
    â€œI wasn’t interested in doing that …”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œI don’t know … I had this idea … to start from the Condottiere in order to paint another Condottiere, a different one, but of the same quality.”
    â€œThat’s what you called as good a way as any of coming a cropper …”
    â€œYes, of course … To set off on your own in search of something that only existed once and for all time …”
    â€œWhy did you do it?”
    â€œWhy not? I had nothing to lose. I thought I had nothing to lose … If I’d managed, it would have been an incredible coup.”
    â€œIt was a flop?”
    â€œIt was a flop …”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œFor all the reasons in the world … I wasn’t ready … I wasn’t good enough. Was looking for something that didn’t match anything inside me, that didn’t exist in me … What I call stiffness I can also call sincerity … Could I understand that face, could I understand that mastery? It didn’t mean anything to me. I was just playing around,pretending to be a painter. But Antonello wasn’t joking. As long as I added two and two, of course I got four … But I should have guessed that there was no point at all in doing sums on my own …”
    â€œI don’t understand you.”
    â€œOf course you don’t! Nobody can understand, not even I can … If I’d understood, I wouldn’t have tried, but if I’d understood I would have