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Nevertheless, to a quick glance, this Madonna still looks at least somewhat like a Botticelli. Whereas the most famous forgeries in modern times, Van Meegeren's "Vermeers," look hopelessly unconvincing. Van Meegeren (1889-1947) was a talentless and paranoid academic hack who felt the Dutch art world had joined in a conspiracy of silence against him. For this, he wanted revenge. He found a real 17th century canvas with its stretcher intact, scraped the image off (leaving the ground and its authentic craquelure) and went to work. He ground his pigments with oil of lilies and thinned them with a medium of phenol-formaldehyde resin. Then he baked the picture in a low oven.
The result was an almost perfect replication of Vermeer's enamel-like paint surface, even though everything else was hideously wrong. Van Meegeren's bodies were boneless; his faces coarse and thick-lipped, their expressions stereotyped. Yet Dutch experts, led by the art historian Abraham Bredius, rushed like lemmings toward a collective suspension of disbelief. "What a picture!" Bredius rhapsodized in an art magazine. "What we have here is a -- I am inclined to say -- the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft." Not only did the experts fail to expose Van Meegeren, but they closed ranks to protect their attributions when he tried to tell the truth about them. He produced a stream of "Vermeers" over the next few years, into the German occupation of the Netherlands, and one of them, Christ and the Adulteress, was bought by Hermann Goring. At the end of the war, Van Meegeren was charged with treason for selling a national treasure to the Nazis. Penalty: death.
At the trial, Bredius and all his colleagues testified that the Vermeer was genuine. Van Meegeren convinced the court that he had made it and was sentenced to a year in prison for fraud. To everyone's intense relief, he died before the sentence was up. If the general and ancient moral of the forger's trade is caveat emptor (let the buyer beware), Van Meegeren illustrated another: peritis nec crede (put not thy trust in experts).