Georges Perec, David Bellos (translator) · written 1957–60; French publ. 2012 (Le Condottière); Eng. 2014 · EPUB · Calibre ID 782
Resurfaced in Certificates Without Originals (2026-09-26).
Role in the triad
The object without its provenance: a forger with certificates for everything who cannot make an authentic Antonello, and finds his own face instead.
Why this book
Inverts Zweig: certification is trivial (‘They had them’), authenticity impossible. Winckler believes in the original enough to kill over it, which stages the conflict with Krauss from inside fiction. Antonello’s cartellino (‘me pinxit’) is the self-certifying mark he cannot forge.
Quotations
Verified against the book’s own text on the day of the reading.
- “to create an authentic masterwork of the past” (Part I, ≈31%)
- “Anything by anybody of any period” (Part I, ≈66%)
- “Forger. Faussaire. Fausse ère : wrong period.” (Part I, ≈83%)
- “it was the double, triple, quadruple game of a fake artist pastiching his own pastiche” (Part I, ≈98%)
- “I’d take three or four works by whomever, pick out various bits and pieces from them all, juggle them around and make a jigsaw puzzle out of them. But that didn’t work for an Antonello.” (Part II, ≈13%)
- “‘And the certificate of authenticity?’ ‘They had them. I never knew where they got them, or whether they were fakes too or whether they had an official authenticator on their books.’” (Part II, ≈85%)
- “I did succeed in painting my own portrait … I got my own face” (Part II, ≈88%)
- “a painting cannot be a forgery and an authentic work of art at the same time” (Bellos, Introduction, ≈47%)
Themes
Antonello da Messina · authenticity · cartellino · conscience/consciousness · forgery · pastiche · Sartre · self-portrait