The Crown Prince’s Visit (5)
It was understandable, really. If someone suddenly pulled out a painting and claimed it was a work by Leonardo da Vinci, anyone would think it was absurd.
Come to think of it, if I were in their shoes, I wouldn’t believe it either.
So I put together everything I remembered, everything I’d researched, and everything I’d been told when I bought the painting from Eppenfrit Gallery, then said, “This painting was commissioned by Louis XII around 1500 and created by Leonardo da Vinci. Princess Henrietta Maria took it to England when she married Charles I. It stayed with the British royal family for a time, then vanished from sight, only to reappear around 1900. It was in the collection of Francis Cook, a Victorian tycoon, and later passed into the hands of furniture maker Warren Kuntz. After his death, his collection was consigned to Christie’s, but this painting was excluded. Even then, the damage and overpainting were so severe that no one thought it was a Leonardo. Afterward, his belongings were sold off through an antiques dealer and changed hands several times before eventually crossing over to the United States. It then spent more than ten years sleeping in a gallery warehouse in Chicago, until I bought it last week.”
When you thought about it, it was an astonishing thing.
Who would have imagined that a painting by Leonardo da Vinci would cross more than six hundred years and end up in Korea?
“How much did you pay for it?”
Since the answer was something anyone could verify with a little digging, I told the truth.
“$12,200.”
Prince Rashid smiled and turned his head slightly to the side.
“What do you think?”
Asher frowned and said, “It’s ridiculous to expect to sell a $12,200 painting for $150 million in just a week.”
I gave a small shrug.
“What I paid for it doesn’t matter. What matters is how much value the painting actually has.”
There were plenty of good paintings in the world.
But there were very few paintings that carried the fame and rarity of Leonardo da Vinci’s work.
“Unlike other investment assets, a painting is unique, which makes it even more valuable. That’s why the price of a work usually rises after the artist dies. Your Highness has collected many different painters over the years, but as far as I know, you don’t own a Leonardo. This is the only chance you’ll ever have to acquire one. And as you know, $150 million is outrageously cheap.”
Prince Rashid looked back at the painting.
It was badly damaged, but the overall shape was still easy enough to make out. In the painting, a man with long hair held his right hand with the index and middle fingers crossed slightly, while his left hand cradled a transparent crystal sphere.
The man was none other than Jesus Christ.
The crossed fingers symbolized blessing, and the crystal sphere represented the universe.
Prince Rashid pointed to a section of the painting with a finger. “Isn’t this part a little strange?”
“What do you mean?”
“If that’s a crystal sphere, shouldn’t the hand and robe behind it be distorted by refraction? There’s none of that here. Are you sure this is really a da Vinci?”
It was a sharp observation.
Leonardo da Vinci was an exceptional mathematician and physicist, and he also had a deep understanding of anatomy. If he had painted this, he would never have failed to depict the refraction of light caused by the crystal sphere.
In fact, that was one of the biggest reasons I hadn’t been able to believe this was a genuine da Vinci.
Fortunately, there was a proper explanation.
“It’s because the sphere is hollow. A solid sphere refracts light and distorts the objects behind it, but a hollow one causes almost no distortion. In fact, this is an accurate depiction of light.”
Apparently my explanation worked, because he didn’t argue.
A little later, Prince Rashid spoke again.
“Many art dealers come to me trying to sell paintings.”
When you had money, people naturally started circling. For all I knew, maybe there were lines of people carrying paintings all the way out into the Arabian desert.
“And many of them bring forgeries. It’s embarrassing to admit, but I’ve been fooled more than once.”
I spoke as though I were discussing someone else. “Ah, what a shame... Those are terrible people. I think people like that should be punished severely.”
Before coming here, I’d looked into art forgery a little.
The result had been astonishing. People said there were plenty of scammers in the stock market, but compared to the art world, those were child’s play.
Gold and crude oil were commodities with intrinsic value, and stocks and bonds were tied to the value of the companies behind them.
But artworks had no clear standard by which their value could be measured. They weren’t linked to the price of canvas or paint.
Even a drawing made with a single pencil on a sketchpad could fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars if Picasso had drawn it.
Because you could make a fortune the moment something was recognized as authentic, forgeries multiplied everywhere. The problem was that telling the real thing from the fake wasn’t easy.
One Baroque-era painter used to apply paint to the canvas with his thumb while working.
As a result, every painting he made bore his fingerprint.
Just from hearing that much, you might think there would be no forgeries of his work, but in reality, the opposite happened.
Once the idea spread that a fingerprint meant authenticity, forgers began mass-producing copies with the same thumbprint mark, using silicone molds to recreate it. Before long, paintings the artist had never even touched were flooding the market.
The Dutch painter Han van Meegeren was arrested on suspicion of selling the Nazis a painting by the famous artist Johannes Vermeer.
That was a capital offense, the kind of crime that could get you executed for selling off a national treasure.
But during the trial, he said something astonishing: the painting that experts and even the Nazis had accepted as genuine was one he had painted himself.
The experts who had authenticated it insisted he was lying to escape punishment. Van Meegeren, however, painted an identical forgery right in front of them, and every last one of the experts fell silent.
These days, they even use cutting-edge tools like 3D printers to reproduce the original artist’s brushwork patterns exactly.
What’s more, forgeries aren’t only made in the modern era; many were produced long ago as well.
Even the great Michelangelo had a forgery-making history of his own.
And since Leonardo da Vinci was already famous in his own time, forgeries of his work were being made even back then. Pieces like that are incredibly hard to expose with dating methods alone.
There must be at least several hundred da Vinci forgeries circulating out there now.
So how, exactly, do you tell the real from the fake?
What is the standard?
Honestly, the only one who can decide is the painter himself. No—come to think of it, even that’s impossible.
There had even been cases in our country where the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art claimed a painting was authentic despite the artist himself saying he had never painted it.
Were all the paintings hanging in the Louvre, the Orsay, and the Metropolitan Museum really genuine? Wasn’t it possible that a few forgeries were mixed in among them?
On the other hand, how many authentic works had been discarded because they were mistaken for forgeries?
This painting alone had been shoved into storage for more than ten years, with no one imagining it could be a genuine da Vinci.
So what was the conclusion to all this?
Simply this: if enough people believe something is real, a forgery becomes authentic; if enough people believe something is fake, even the real thing becomes a forgery.
Leonardo da Vinci had been dead for six hundred years already. The people who had lived in his time were dead too. It was up to the people of this age to decide.
“Why are you so certain this painting is authentic?”
I answered with complete confidence. “Because I know how to judge a painting.”
“Really?”
It was a lie.
Saying that to a man like him, a true lover of paintings, was like scribbling Chinese characters in front of Confucius.
But...
“Not long ago, Banksy sold one of his paintings at a street stall in Central Park.”
Prince Rashid nodded. “I know. I heard a Korean named Han recognized it and bought the whole lot.”
He trailed off and looked at me.
“Don’t tell me...”
I nodded.
“That was me.”
Prince Rashid looked speechless, and Asher blurted out in disbelief, “...That’s impossible.”
“If you want, I can bring the painting I bought that day and show it to you.”
If it was a lie, it would be exposed soon enough. And if they’d done any background check on me, they’d already know I had been in New York that day.
“You went there knowing Banksy was selling paintings at that spot?”
“Being there that day was pure coincidence. But the moment I saw the paintings at the stall, I knew they were Banksy’s.”
“How could you tell?”
Lying was hard only the first time. Once I got started, the words came flowing out easily.
“Every painter has certain traits that show up in their work. If you analyze a painting with a clear eye, you can tell by instinct who painted it and whether it’s authentic or not.”
Even as I said it, I wasn’t entirely sure what I was talking about, but that was how it was.
“Even if this were a genuine da Vinci, isn’t $150 million far too much for a painting like this?”
I said calmly, “The Mona Lisa is worth more than $1 billion.”
I wasn’t just saying that offhand.
Every year, eight million people visited the Louvre, and you could almost say they all saw the Mona Lisa.
When you factored in the tourism it generated, even if someone offered the Louvre $1 billion, they still wouldn’t sell it.
“Even half of that would still make it worth $500 million, wouldn’t it?”
“Do you really think this painting can be compared to the Mona Lisa?”
“Of course. It just hasn’t been restored yet. Once it is, it wouldn’t be strange at all if people started calling it the ‘male Mona Lisa.’”
Seven years later, this painting would be sold to him for $460.3 million at a Christie’s auction. So why should I bother selling it now for one-third of that price?
There were three reasons.
First, I didn’t have time. Right now, $150 million mattered more than $460 million seven years from now.
Second, a painting tended to rise in value every time it changed hands. The New York dealers who had originally bought this piece would finish restoring it and then sell it to a Russian tycoon for $100 million.
The Russian tycoon would in turn consign it to Christie’s, and after taking the commission, Christie’s would spend years promoting the piece through exhibitions around the world.
They also attached the label “Male Mona Lisa” to it, stoking public curiosity. Thanks to that entire process, it could be sold for more than $400 million.
Finally, by the time Prince Rashid bought it, he would already be the Crown Prince, having completely secured state power.
So he’d be able to drop $460.3 million without even blinking.
But no matter how rich he might be, even among Saudi royalty, that kind of sum would be hard for him to spare right now.
Realistically, $150 million was probably the upper limit of what he could pay immediately.
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