So … Michel van Rijn is dead. Art dealer, forger, smuggler, conman, criminal, informant and inkslinger: whose long-vanished eccentric website exposed many a dirty deed in the art world.
Apparently he died last year, aged 73, on 25 July 2024, in Italy. There was a notice in Het Parool, which published material from him in the past.
The art world is not my area of expertise. Men have always bought and sold precious things, and always will. Other men have sometimes tried to stop them, for various reasons. Some of those involved are villains. Some are rich men rescuing what would otherwise be destroyed. Consequently the world of art dealing is one of secrecy and rumour, and no small amount of slander and dishonesty. In addition the world of Coptology has long been dominated by people whose self-interest exceeds their devotion to scholarship, as James M. Robinson makes clear in his many articles on the Nag Hammadi codices.
But it is well for those interested in antiquity to be aware of this world. More than twenty years ago, I became aware that four Coptic manuscripts had been discovered somewhere, around 1983, and had found their way into the hands of the Cairo dealers, and then onwards internationally. This is entirely normal. Most such discoveries are made by fellaheen, tilling the soil, and the dealers keep agents in the villages for precisely this reason. Indeed if they did not do so, it is likely that papyrus finds would simply be destroyed by the finders.
Among these manuscripts was a previously unknown gnostic “Gospel of Judas.” This was published in 2006. The whole story is told by Herbert Krosny in his The lost gospel : the quest for the Gospel of Judas Iscariot (2006), which I used to have but seems to have vanished in a recent house move.
My own interest led me to the website of Dutch art dealer Michael van Rijn. This was a huge farrago of art-world gossip, obviously unreliable – and probably by design – hurling accusations of dodgy dealings at all sorts of people. It was strangely formatted, and yet deeply entertaining. How widely read it was I cannot say.
Van Rijn had become aware of the find, and he had also acquired photographs of some of it, and a rough translation. I corresponded with him, and found him by email to be a charming yet clearly very unreliable person. He published what he had on his website, and I mirrored some of it on my own. The trail of what I could find out is still online here. He was even interviewed by the BBC, who seemingly did not realise the importance of what he had, and chose to run end-credits over footage of him reading unpublished material from the work.
In the end his website was shut down, in 2006. This shut-down took place well before the orchestrated censorship of the last few years, in days when such things were still unthinkable. So I can only infer that he had annoyed some very important people indeed. What happened afterwards I know not. There is a 2012 interview with him by Jake Hanrahan here, although, as ever, I do not know how much of it you can believe. He cultivated his image as a rogue. He appeared in a 2016 film. The last I heard of him, he was living in Italy.
And now… he is gone. Whether he made the world a better place, or a worse one, I cannot say. But there is no doubt that he made it a more entertaining one.
Farewell, old inkslinger. May you find mercy at the hands of One to whom all answers are known, and from Whom even fewer secrets are hidden.