A QUESTION OF ATTRIBUTION

Francis Bacon was one of the great artists of his time, and one of the most unpredictable. But is it really possible that even he would give 500 key works away? And, if so, why?

CHRISTIAN RAVARINO, an Italian-American journalist, has hundreds of drawings by the English painter Francis Bacon. Some of them are in the boot of his Audi. But he's having trouble with the central-locking system.

Bacon was not just screaming popes and butchered triptychs, says Ravarino. He was not just "the world's greatest living painter" - a label he was already learning to live with when Ravarino first met him in 1980. He was also, says Ravarino (who likes to talk), a great draughtsman. A great wielder of the pencil and the blue Biro, on sheets of typing paper which his Italian friend provided.

Bacon in Italy in the last 12 years of his life (he died in 1992, aged 82) is not an impossible scenario. He travelled constantly, alone or with an ever-changing group of friends; and travel, for Bacon, meant putting the Channel far behind him. Bacon drawing is another thing altogether. The official line is that he just didn't do it, at least not after his career as a painter had taken off. Michael Peppiatt, a longtime acquaintance, and author of the 1996 biography Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, is adamant that Bacon "did almost no drawings - and the ones that we do have are very painterly. He was a painter through and through."

The drawings owned by Ravarino are currently at the centre of a legal wrangle in his home town of Bologna. The case was instigated by his main customer, a Bolognese dentist and art collector called Francesco Martani, who bought a job lot of around 50 drawings in 1992 for what Ravarino says was "a few million lire each" (3m lire is currently around pounds 1,000). Ravarino says that he was forced to sell them off in a hurry because his mother had just died and he needed the money to pay the US death duties. "In any case," he says, "they were by no means the best." A few years after his purchase, Martani began to get cold feet. He says that he hopes the drawings turn out to be authentic - but he is convinced that bringing in Italy's Art Police (the Nucleo tutela del patrimonio artistico) and accusing Ravarino of having sold him a bunch of fakes is "the only way of getting at the truth".

The case will rumble on for at least another year. In the meantime Ravarino, like the Ancient Mariner, is desperate to get the story off his chest.

Ravarino says that he first met Bacon in Calderino, a village in the wine-growing hills west of Bologna, in November 1980. The artist was staying in the holiday villa of a certain Bernard Sellin (or Sellen), who claimed to be "a pediatric surgeon at the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London". Ravarino was 28 at the time. He was introduced by a friend of his mother's who knew both Bacon and Sellin.

He got five articles out of their meetings, including an interview published in Italian Penthouse in April 1982. In 1996 he gathered these articles together in a book published by a small Bologna press, with reproductions of some of the drawings and a rambling afterword.

Later, when Bacon visited the ski resort of Cortina d'Ampezzo in the Italian Dolomites, and again in Venice, Ravarino was a hanger-on. He also talks of trips to Rome and Florence "sometime in the mid- to late Eighties", including one visit to the Uffizi Gallery during which Bacon tried to wrench Artemisia Gentileschi's gory painting of Judith Slaying Holofernes off the wall. The police let Bacon off with a warning. He couldn't see what all the fuss was about: "I would have given them one of mine in exchange," he explained to Ravarino.

SINCE THE early Eighties, when Bacon apparently praised his boyish good looks and his pert bottom, Ravarino has - by his own admission - gone to seed. In fact, it's difficult to connect him in any way with the cherubic passport photograph he shows me, dated 1972.

The frayed brown overcoat, the scuffed supermarket trainers, the long hair, streaked with grey, the puffy face - Ravarino looks like a method actor three months into preparation for his role as Down-At-Heel Writer And Italian Friend Of Bacon. He drives a clapped-out Audi with a rattling gearbox. He talks earnestly and incessantly in great arcs of free association that lead from Velazquez to the Mafia. He hangs a right when he sees a police car up ahead ("Shit, what are they doing here? They don't normally wait on that corner"). But he can also be calm and cultured, with the smooth, persuasive voice of a breakfast radio host.

The only time I hear Ravarino stumble is when I ask him if he ever had sex with Bacon. Um, well, basically, the thing is ... he doesn't remember. Sorry? "You have to realise just how much these people drank, and how much you had to drink if you didn't want to offend them ... I was often in a kind of alcoholic coma." He goes on to tell me a story about Bacon putting a rose on the breakfast table one morning, in some hotel, he doesn't remember where or when. Or why.

Ravarino - whose English is far from fluent - holds an American passport. He also claims to act as an advisor to the US Department of State, and talks of an uncle who works for the Planning Organization Board - "the decision-making body of the National Security Council, which controls the American President". He writes the way he talks: leaping from one conspiratorial hub to another, even when he is ostensibly discussing Bacon. Aldo Moro is in there, of course, and the Kennedy assassination. So is the Pont de l'Alma in Paris, Blackfriars Bridge in London and the omnipresent Licio Gelli (former head of Italy's P2 Masonic lodge). They're all connected, deep down.

Such things fascinated Bacon, according to Ravarino, and he claims to have spent hours talking to the painter about espionage, terrorism and the Mafia. In a long memoir he wrote in 1995, Ravarino recalls an episode which took place in the Hotel Danieli in Venice in 1991. Bacon was watching a TV interview with Mafia godfather Michele Greco, and was enchanted by the fact that his Italian nickname was Il Papa (The Pope) - so much so that he immediately ordered Ravarino to send the man a drawing. Like most of the other Bacon drawings that Ravarino claims to have posted to eminent personages (the former Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, among others), this one was stolen by an unscrupulous assistant before it reached the great man.

The problem with Ravarino's "Bacon and I" stories is that there are no photographs, no tape recordings and few witnesses. No one seems to have heard of Bernard Sellin - the surgeon friend Bacon was supposed to have been staying with in Calderino. The Great Ormond Street hospital has no record of him. Paul Brass, who was Bacon's personal doctor, never once heard Bacon mention Sellin. The other important claim made by Ravarino - that at this time Bacon believed he was dying of cancer, hence the "urgency" of the drawings - baffles Brass. But he concedes that Bacon "did tend to worry about his health".

Just as one is beginning to believe in some magnificent fictional construct, a few Italian sightings come to Ravarino's rescue. Calderino wine producer Carlo Gaggioli remembers a visit to his cellars by a "very merry" group of foreigners, including an older English artist. He has a drawing similar to those owned by Ravarino, "which was given to me by the artist - or by Ravarino, I don't remember. But they definitely gave it to me that same day." Bacon was also spotted in Cortina d'Ampezzo, the ski resort where Ravarino claims to have interviewed him "towards the end of the Eighties". Gloria Pagani remembers Bacon's rowdy visit to her restaurant, La Siesta - which was followed the next day by the gift of a drawing. And Vincenzo Lucchese, an architect who teaches at Venice University, has testified that he saw Bacon and Ravarino together at a Venetian Carnevale party "at the end of the Eighties" (though Ravarino, in one of his few stabs at precision, sets this meeting in 1991).

According to Ravarino it was during this Venetian visit, when Bacon was around 80, that the artist presented him with the bulk of the drawings. Bacon was staying with "some rich English friends" who owned an apartment in Venice, and Ravarino remembers that "he wasn't feeling very well".

As usual with Ravarino's stories, the Venetian scenario comes complete with theatrical mise-en-scene. "Bacon said to me: 'I told my friends that you would go round to the flat to tidy up.' I was a bit put-out by this, but I said, 'Fine'. Then Bacon said: 'But make sure you don't steal anything.' That was one of the few times I ever got angry with him - I really blew a fuse. He quite liked it when people shouted at him. Anyway, he said he'd been joking, and that he only meant I should be careful with the crystal glasses. So along I go to the flat, which is really something - Sebastiano del Piombo paintings on the wall, the whole works. And I find that it's spotlessly clean. Then I notice a big package sitting on a table, with a typewritten note: 'Per il dottor Ravarino.' Inside were hundreds of drawings."

The last time he talked to Bacon, says Ravarino, was when the artist rang him a few weeks later. When Ravarino asked him why he had bothered to type out the note, Bacon replied: "So you don't have anything on me. I don't want anyone to recognise my handwriting. I don't want you to make this into a book. And I haven't decided what I want you to do with the drawings yet."

So why, then, did Bacon sign the drawings? Ravarino says that he talked the artist into signing them "when I brought them to him in Rome". His chronology - unreliable at the best of times - goes very fuzzy around this point. It's unclear, for example, whether this "last meeting" took place before or after the phone-call referred to above. "I was shaking all over. He was drunk, and I was worried he was going to destroy them. Instead, he started signing them. Some he initialled, some he signed with his full name, some just with an 'F' - like those early paintings that were published recently in a book with a preface by Milan Kundera - paintings which nobody had ever seen before." Ravarino has certainly done his homework.

There is no doubt that these are the kind of drawings a clever forger would turn out if he was trying to "do a Bacon". They are all heads, done in two different styles. The first type is aggressively pointilist, like a join-the-dots puzzle for schizophrenics. Clustered entrails mess up the mouth and nose, or hang down from the chin. The eyes are insect-like. One of these heads looks like a child's drawing of a caterpillar; another like Darth Vader with acne.

The second type of drawing is more fluent, more convincing. The bare essentials of a face have been jotted down, and then overlain by long, rapid, curving strokes of the pencil. The effect is that of long grass in a strong wind, seen from above, as in Bacon's painting Landscape 1978. The focal point (always a face) is worked on and worked over obsessively, nearly erased. The rest is clean, confident and geometric: a suggestion of shoulders and collar, enclosed - in some cases - in one of the box- frames that we recognise from Bacon's paintings.

Since Bacon's death in April 1992, various "official" early sketches have turned up. A group of four scrappy studies for paintings from the Fifties and Sixties was included in the major Pompidou Centre show in 1996. More interesting perhaps is the group of 42 works on paper acquired by the Tate Gallery earlier this year. Dating from the early Fifties to the early Sixties, these include a few sketches in ballpoint pen and pencil as well as others in gouache, oil paint and ink. The style is not particularly close to that of the Ravarino drawings, but the press release put out by the Tate to announce the acquisition makes an interesting point: "Though few post-war works on paper by [Bacon] were known, it has now become clear that this is only because he did not wish the existence of this type of work to be revealed beyond his own circle."

The works acquired also include some pages from a boxing magazine overpainted by the artist. Ravarino, too, has a group of sketches done on the flyleaves of various English and Italian books. Sometimes these take up hints from their surroundings: a rapidly sketched portrait on the title page of Reginald Berkeley's The Lady With a Lamp seems a parody of the portrait of Florence Nightingale on the facing page.

Ravarino believes that the Bacon establishment has closed ranks to keep him out. If so, they have understandable reasons for doing so. The Marlborough Gallery, which represented the artist from 1958 onwards, has had to act on Bacon's behalf more than once in the past when false or abandoned paintings turned up in the marketplace. There is even an Italian precedent: in the mid-Seventies a group of left-wing students in Milan painted and sold a number of fake Bacons, using the proceeds to finance the Glorious Revolution.

Kate Austin voices the official Marlborough Gallery line when she says that "stylistically it seems impossible that these drawings are authentic. The hand is very tight - it's certainly not Bacon's." She also claims that "the artist knew about these drawings and was very upset about them". As for Ravarino, she says that "it is debatable whether he ever knew Bacon personally".

British art critic David Sylvester was (and is) Bacon's Boswell. His conversations with the artist - first published in 1975 - have become the Baconologist's bible. Sylvester has also curated most of the important Bacon exhibitions since the artist's death in 1992, including the recent Hayward Gallery show. He is emphatically not part of the Ravarino camp; in fact, the whole story irritates him. "This is about the eighteenth time I've been asked about these drawings," he says. "They're fakes - you only have to look at them to see it. There is absolutely no documentary proof that they are Bacon's - so in the end you just have to trust your eye."

An assiduous collector of testimonials, Ravarino has his own list of friendly critics and collectors. His chief supporter is Italian writer and self-taught art critic Giorgio Soavi, who has written a book about the whole affair, Viaggio in Italia di Francis Bacon (Umberto Allemandi, Turin). Soavi has also bought two drawings from Ravarino - so he could be said to have a vested interest. Soavi became excited, he says, by "the fictional potential" of parts of the story - including Ravarino's most extravagant claim, that Bacon was involved in the death of a male prostitute in Rome - an "accident" which was immediately covered up by the US secret services.

So convinced is Soavi that the drawings are authentic that he agreed to appear as an expert witness for the defence in the first Bologna hearing on 10 February. Paul Nicholls, an English art dealer based in Milan, was enlisted by the court as a witness for the prosecution. He declared that "the drawings in question were not carried out by Bacon, and are foreign to his whole way of working". Nicholls also believes that "this whole thing should be deflated. I don't think it does Bacon any good."

More than once, Ravarino himself refers to Bacon's legacy as a "curse". He says that his next move will be to "go to England with a couple of hundred drawings and take them around the most important critics". But he is reluctant to do this, he says, because "it's depressing to think that I have to go to ask a bunch of critics whether my story is true, when I know for a fact that it is".

One gets the impression that it is the way Ravarino has dealt with the drawings as much as anything else which, in the absence of any definite proof that they are by Francis Bacon, annoys the critics. There is an etiquette to authentication, and Ravarino has not respected it. He has exhibited his drawings in third-class galleries and hotels around Italy. He has published them in obscure local magazines. He has given them away to lovers and politicians, and sold them outside the gallery circuit at prices which, he says, range from pounds 1,000 to pounds 12,000. If the drawings were authenticated, the best could fetch at least pounds 50,000. Ravarino is coy about numbers, but he hints that he has more than 500 drawings still in his possession.

It would be easy for the experts if Ravarino really was the likeable charlatan he appears to be. But there's a problem here. Reliable witnesses saw Bacon and Ravarino together in Italy, and drawings purported to be by Bacon were given away on those occasions. Ravarino may, of course, have been going around with a Bacon look-alike who was under strict instructions to get drunk and play the crazy Eengleesh artist. Alternatively, he may have been tracking Bacon around Italy and popping up the next day with forgeries to distribute to restaurant owners and wine producers as gifts from il maestro. "Either way," says Bolognese journalist Luigi Spezia, who has been following the case for La Repubblica, "the man would have to be a genius."

So far the only person to have approached Ravarino's claims with any degree of forensic rigour is the writer and art critic Enzo Rossi-Roiss. He has been following Ravarino's sales of the drawings since they began in 1981. He has photocopies of 150 drawings plus, in some cases, copies of the cheques paid for them. According to Rossi-Roiss, Ravarino's own figures are too high: "He's been selling off sketches for as little as 500,000 lire [pounds 170] each." Rossi-Roiss is working on a book about the case, due out this autumn. He believes Bacon did indeed visit Calderino in 1980, where he met Ravarino and left behind a few drawings. He believes that Ravarino then appropriated these, forged Bacon's signature, and used them as models for hundreds of fakes, which were carried out by more than one artist - hence the difference in style.

IN 1975, Bacon wrote a brief tribute to Giacometti, one of the contemporaries he most admired, for a show of his drawings at the Galerie Claude Bernard in Paris. "For me," he wrote, "Giacometti is not only the greatest draughtsman of our period, but one of the greatest of all time." Giacometti himself considered drawing to be fundamental to both painting and sculpture: "I think only about drawing," he once said. French critic Jacques Dupin believes that Giacometti's admiration of Bacon's paintings was tempered by the fact that "he was uncomfortable that Bacon didn't draw".

If Bacon was prompted into trying to produce finished drawings in the last decade of his life, his decision to leave them in Ravarino-limbo could have been a reflection of his own lack of confidence in them. At the same time, though, he would have been reluctant entirely to destroy these traces of an activity in which his masters - Giacometti, Picasso, Michelangelo, Guercino, Velazquez - all excelled.

We know that by the time Ravarino claims to have met him, Bacon was weary of the whole gallery circus. In an interview published in Art International in the autumn of 1989 - soon after one of his triptychs had sold in New York for US$6m - he said: "The whole thing has become so boring and bourgeois. Art is just a way now of making money."

Giorgio Soavi believes that these drawings were left behind as a spanner in the works. At the end of his semi-fictionalised account of the affair, he has a ghostly Bacon return to earth to say: "I left them in the hands of this long-haired rocker simply to annoy my dealers ... to take my revenge on them."

It could just be that these drawings were left behind as a spanner in the works. Bacon loved using calculated chance in his paintings, and the choice of such an unreliable messenger as Ravarino as the repository of his final secret - or last laugh - would do for his life what a careless smudge of paint did for a painting. "I think that painting today is pure intuition and luck and taking advantage of what happens when you splash the stuff down," he wrote in 1953.

Up there in orbit, 500 drawings are still waiting for splashdown. !