From "The Forger's Spell - A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century" by Edward Dolnick

The subject is Han Van Meegeren, Vermeer forgery artist [My italics - Wes Clark]:

Art from past centuries, the art historian Otto Kurz pointed out, is written in a dead language. "Forgery is a kind of short-cut that translates the ancient work of art into present-day language." Van Meegeren spoke the same language as his audience, and they soaked up every word. When Bredius looked at Emmaus and reported that "I had difficulty controlling my emotions," he had all of Europe for company.

Every forger of old masters is a time traveler hoping to stroll unnoticed down a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century street. It's not easy. "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there," the novelist L. P. Hartley famously observed. In particular, they paint pictures differently there. Time travel trips up most forgers. It tripped up Van Meegeren, but his mistakes like his modern-day depiction of Christ - all worked to his advantage.

When the critic Kenneth Clark was still young and little-known, he asked an impertinent question about a Botticelli Madonna that had just been purchased, at great expense, by an English collector named Lord Lee. The painting was universally hailed as a masterpiece, but Clark wondered aloud if perhaps this Madonna from the 1400s looked a bit too much like a generic Hollywood starlet from the 1920s. Scientific tests soon proved that the painting was as modern as Clark suspected.

No Kenneth Clark came along to unmask Van Meegeren. This was more a matter of good fortune than good planning. The problem for Van Meegeren and most forgers is that, even as they try to travel into the past, they bring the trappings of their own world with them. Their peers don't see anything awry because they share the same blind spots, but sooner or later a new generation will come along and giggle. In similar fashion, science fiction always tells as much about the era when it was created as about the era it tries to imagine. In the future as it was portrayed in the fifties, for instance, husbands commuted to work in personal rockets and wives stayed home and cooked up meals in a pill. For a decade or two, readers found it all quite plausible.

In art, the rule of thumb is that fakes have about a forty-year lifespan.* "Forgeries must be served hot," the great art historian Max Friedlander once observed. Art historians are fond of Friedlander's rule, for it implies that time is on the side of the good guys. But the rule has a flip side that is often overlooked and that played an enormous role in Van Meegeren's success. It's perfectly true, as Friedlander pointed out, that forgers of old paintings may run into trouble because they cannot help revealing that they live in our world and share our assumptions. But, precisely for that reason, as we have seen, it's also true that sometimes we prefer a fake to an original.

Authenticity can be off-putting. When we listen to early music played on period instruments, for example, it often sounds worse to us than what we are used to, thinner and less powerful, because our ears have been conditioned by the new sounds of the intervening centuries. Van Meegeren tried to impersonate Vermeer. He failed, and that failure was the key to his success.

Van Meegeren's pictures bore the taint of the modern world, but his audiences sensed only something unusual, not something amiss. What was unusual, they decided, was that these seventeenth-century paintings spoke with greater authority and depth than other paintings from the Golden Age.

And then, before anyone had time to catch his breath and take a sober second look, Emmaus was whisked offstage. Van Meegeren was arrested only seven years after Emmaus's first appearance. The arrest was disastrous for Van Meegeren but ideal for his reputation. Perhaps he would have been one of those fortunate forgers whose misdeeds are never uncovered. More likely, he would have had a grace period of a generation or two. After that, his paintings would probably have come to look silly. James Dean is in the pantheon in good measure because he died before he could lose his hair and grow a paunch. Even in his undoing, Van Meegeren benefitted from perfect timing.

* It is a rule with a worrying amount of elbow room. Some forgers, like the goldsmith Reinhold Vasters, flourished for decades and were found out only by a fluke. Vasters worked in the late 1800s, specializing in elaborate productions supposedly from the Renaissance. He went undiscovered for nearly a century. More generally, as the Met's Theodore Rousseau once remarked, "We should all realize that we can only talk about the bad forgeries, the ones that have been detected; the good ones are still hanging on the walls."