被遺忘在閣樓上的血腥的卡拉瓦喬畫作

Trust your gut. In art, as in life,thinking is overrated. These are the unexpected messages vibrating from thesurface of a painting that has sparked considerable debate this week: a canvassalvaged from the damp rafters of a house near Toulouse in southwestern isticated examinations are being carried out to determine whether thecontroversial painting – which depicts a gruesome scene of decapitation fromthe apocryphal Book of Judith – is likely a lost work by the Italian masterCaravaggio, and therefore worthy of a price tag north of $136million(?96million) specialists believe it to be authentic, and an export ban hasbeen placed on the painting to ensure it remains in France.

相信你的直覺。如同在生活中一樣，思考在藝術上是被高估的。這些令人意想不到的信息從本週引發相當大爭議的一幅畫的畫面中散發出來，該畫是從法國西南部圖盧茲（Toulouse）附近一所房子裏潮溼的椽子之間搶救出來的。該畫正被複雜嚴謹地鑑定，以確定這幅描繪了次經《猶滴書》（Book of Judith）中可怕的斬首場面是否真是意大利大師卡拉瓦喬（Caravaggio）的軼作，進而令其身價超過1億3千6百萬美元（合9千6百萬英鎊）。一些專家相信它是真跡，並且該畫被設了出口禁令，以確保它留在法國。

The rift that the so-called “Caravaggio inthe attic” is creating among experts coincides with the 30-year anniversary ofa dust-up that rocked the art world in 1986, when the J Paul Getty Museum inLos Angeles, California provocatively unveiled a statue that was either atwo-and-a-half millennia-old masterwork or just a fake a few months’ old,depending on whom you believed. Placed side-by-side with the recentlydiscovered Judith Beheading Holofernes, the infamous marble sculpture known asthe Getty kouros offers a timely reminder of the power of instinct over eventhe most gritty and granular of scientific analyses.

這幅所謂“閣樓上的卡拉瓦喬”在專家間引起的分歧與三十年前的1986年轟動藝術界的一件事非常類似，當時位於加州洛杉磯的保羅蓋蒂博物館（J Paul Getty Museum）爲一座雕像揭幕引發了爭論，這座雕像要麼是兩千五百年前的真跡，要麼是幾個月前僞造的贗品，其真實年代完全取決於你到底相信誰的話。與最近發現的《猶滴割下何樂弗尼的頭顱》放在一起，這座稱爲“蓋蒂雕像”的聲名狼藉的大理石像，及時提醒我們直覺的力量甚至比最細緻入微的科學分析更勝一籌。

Without lifting the crudest magnifyingglass and without plugging in a single piece of cutting-edge reflectographyequipment, one can immediately detect the shared problem with both the Gettyforgery and the attribution to Caravaggio of the recovered canvas fromToulouse: they’re not beautiful. Those who initially defended dating the Gettystatue to “around 530 BC” (thus making the work one of only a dozen suchtreasures to have survived), pointed to the discovery of a calcite crust thathad formed on the marble – a patina that only great age could have ters, meanwhile, admitted into evidence the clumsy counterfeiting ofdocuments (some bearing impossible addresses) that accompanied the purchase ofthe statue for $9million (?6.3million) in 1985 and to the bizarre mish-mash ofstyles that appear to pit the braids of the subject’s hairagainst the contours of his hands and thighs, as if the confused work had beencarved by a tag-team of artists across different eras and regions.

不用最原始的放大鏡，也不用插入一片最先進的反射記錄儀，人們可以立即發現蓋蒂博物館的僞作與圖盧茲發現的歸於卡拉瓦喬的這幅作品的共同問題：他們並不精美。那些最初爲將蓋蒂雕像斷代爲“公元前530年前後”進行辯護的人（從而使得該作品躋身倖存下來的十幾件珍品之列），指出在大理石表面發現了方解石外殼，這種薄層只有歷經久遠的年代才能形成。與此同時，持懷疑態度的人，則挑出那些拙劣僞造的文件證據（有些文件上的地址壓根不可能出現），這些文件與1985年花費九百萬美元（合630萬英鎊）購買雕像相配套；以及雕像呈現出來的怪異的風格大雜燴，比如雕像髮辮與手和大腿的形狀風格相沖突，彷彿這個令人困惑的作品是由來自不同時代和地區的一羣藝術家雕刻而成。

But such deep analyses on both sidesoverlook the obvious: the statue lacks what the Romantic writers John Keats andWilliam Hazlitt called “gusto”: a chameleon power that no gizmo can empiricallymeasure and no amount of research can adequately plumb. A work of art eitherhas it or it doesn’t. The Getty kouros doesn’t. Nor, in my opinion, does theToulouse Judith – at least not to anything like the degree necessary to believethat the painting is by the same brush that slanted the shadows and ignitedwith soulful fire the expressions depicted in the scenes from the life ofMatthew in the Contarelli Chapel in Rome.

但是雙方的這種深入分析忽略了顯而易見的一點：這座雕像缺少浪漫主義作家約翰.濟慈（John Keats）和威廉.赫茲裏特（William Hazlitt）所說的“品味”（gusto）：這種變幻莫測的力量，沒有哪個發明能夠憑着經驗把它找出，也沒有大量研究能夠一探究竟，一件作品要麼有品味要麼沒有。而蓋蒂雕像沒有。在我看來，圖盧茲的猶滴也沒有–至少沒有達到讓我有必要去相信該畫與羅馬肯塔瑞裏小教堂（Contarelli Chapel）裏描繪聖馬太生平的畫作來自同一畫筆的程度，這支畫筆令陰影傾斜，並且以靈魂之火點燃了這些場景中蘊涵的感情。

The figure of Judith is strangelynonplussed given the unpleasantness of the messy task at hand: the splurtybusiness of sawing through the neck of the drunk Assyrian general Holofernes,whom the widow suspects is plotting to destroy her home. Unlike a known versionof the same scene by Caravaggio in the Palazzo Barberini in Rome, the compositionof the newly discovered canvas is disjointed and casts its awkward actors outof sync. Might it, I hear you ask, just be the work of Caravaggio on an offday? Now that didn’t feel right, did it?

不同於已知由卡拉瓦喬在羅馬的巴貝里尼宮（Palazzo Barberini）繪製的同一場面，新發現作品的構圖有些脫節，形象之間並不協調。你也許會問，是不是卡拉瓦喬不在狀態？現在你會覺得有點不對勁，不是嗎？從畫面來看，考慮到行徑的血腥場面，猶滴露出奇怪的茫然表情– 旁邊的寡婦懷疑亞述將軍何樂弗尼正密謀摧毀她的家，而她割進喝醉了的將軍的脖子、鮮血噴濺而出。