So the question might not so much whether it could happen again, as it happens daily and will ever do as long as people want to be fooled, either wittingly or unwittingly.

As with regard to the Han van Meegeren case it seems rather the question: How could it have happened that even leading art historians of their time, like Abraham Bredius (1855-1946), Director of the Mauritshuis in The Hague for 20 years and renowned Rembrandt- and Vermeer-specialist, were fooled by a painter of rather moderate talent. Well, when Bredius was presented Van Meegeren’s ‘Christ and the Disciples of Emmaus’, he was already an 83 years old man but he was certainly not so blind as not being able to distinguish between Vermeer’s so softly and finely executed figures and the sophisticated complexity of his compositions and the flat, rather ghostlike faces and broad figures in nearly all of Van Meegeren’s works.

He may certainly not have been able to realize a rather fine detail in Van Meegeren’s picture: the specifics of the bottom of the Berkemeyer-glass left-side and on full display. In a quite intelligible article ‘Between Fantasy and Reality. Utensils in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art’ (in ‘Senses and Sins’, exh.cat. 2005) Dutch art historian Alexandra Gaba-van Dongen proves by comparing a typical 17th-century Berkemeyer with that depicted by Van Meegeren that this painting (‘Emmaus’) is not of 17th-century origin, as already the glass shows specifics of those used in 19th century. So with a bit of knowledge of period and contemporary daily utensils which were always depicted by 17th-century artists with utmost accuracy, it would have been possible to reveal Van Meegeren’s forgery, without any modern technique of today’s examination practice. But as Lopez resumed quite right: it was an art historian’s dream… and the dream or wish of many others to follow…

AR