Dali House

MC Escher portraying the Loch Ness monster? I hadn’t heard about this until Dali House visitor Jessy made a comment on my Escher biography post, but the work in question was supposedly discovered in 2007.

A quick graze on Google turns up a very suspicious meme, though: a very rough-English message repeated in various online forums — without any proper debate and rarely having anything to do with the subject matter to which it’s attached. Why don’t the webmasters shave this stuff off if it’s completely beside the point? They don’t so it’s replicated all over the place.

In fact this whole thing may be a giant hoax. The artwork in question certainly lacks Escher’s usual precision, not to mention draughting skills.

In the case of Dali House, Jessy provided links to a pair of videos of newscasts and a downloadable PDF of the February 2007 Giornale di Polizia, in which the mayor of Rome is quizzed about the authenticity of “Black Man Without a Face”, then in the possession of the city’s Supervisor of Police.

All of the linked material is in Italian, and Babelfish is, as usual, as unhelpful as possible with the translation.

There’s talk of a “perverse game” and “emotional repercussions”, and speculation about the “fact” that the artwork was found in the southern town of Volturara Irpina, which evidently has its own underwater monster, based on a legend that someone named Gesio killed a dragon hidden in the lake. The storyteller goes on about making the town wealthy through the enticement of flute music, but I can’t follow it at all.

“You leave me to say,” concludes the mayor, “that the monster of Loch Ness has crossed the centre of the earth in order to reach from the famous Scottish lake to the disowned lake of Volturara Irpina.” From the shore of the latter, the serpent is beckoned by the flautist.

Italian news outlets were genuinely filled with either joy or consternation that the newly emerged Escher print was proved authentic in the course of a 51-page expert’s report. The artwork, dated January 18, 1949, was purportedly the gift of a Swiss immigrant to a local family and spent 10 years in a repository (or attic) before being discovered “accidentally” by an Italian policeman.

It was supposedly deemed real in 2006 by handwriting expert Anna Petrecchia of the Rome Civil and Criminal Court.

The ubiquitous mystery poster — who may or may not be “Giovanni Palatucci” or “Michelangelo Marra” of “the Youth Club Association” — calls readers’ “ATTENTION” to an alleged declaration by the MC Escher Foundation of Baarn, Holland: the “painting” is a fake, which “for years people have been trying to get certified”, but the poster counters that “as far as we know” the foundation has never even seen the original.

The word “youth” here may be an indication of a hoax, or at least a determined prank. The entire affair smells like teen spirit.

There is reference to the BBC carrying a story from a newspaper called the Volturarese, but I can find nothing about it on the BBC website.

The message ends triumphantly, “Honour and glory to Escher, the Loch Ness Monster, to everybody in Irpine and the national and international mass media that will publish this HISTORICAL EVENT”.

Palatucci, or Marra, is doing a fine job of getting the word out, but what does the word mean?