“America is not pouring out those crazy people anymore. They were very amusing. They had a sense of theater. They were inventive, creative. Today Americans are not so amusing.
Va bene.
We will just have to amuse ourselves.”
Directly ahead of us in the canal lay the walled platform where the Fenice stored its cement mixers and other equipment. We drew up alongside the mural of the Fenice that had been painted on the plywood enclosure. De Luigi came out from under the
felze
and stood up. He was holding a can of red paint and a paintbrush. He looked up and down the Grand Canal.
“Does anybody see a police boat?”
“Not yet,” said Zucchetta. He and the gondolier at the stern swirled their oars to steady the gondola and keep it close to the mural.
De Luigi dipped his brush into the paint. Then, as he lifted his hand, he looked at me.
“You know so much about the fire,” he said. “Where were the first flames seen?”
“Front façade, upper left window,” I said.
With broad strokes, De Luigi painted great tongues of brilliant red flames coming out of the window on the upper left. Then he painted them in the middle window, then the right.
A water taxi coming up behind us made a wide turn and pulled up next to us so that its partygoing passengers could get a better look.
“Bravo! Fantastico!”
they called out. De Luigi turned and bowed. The wash from the taxi struck the gondola amidships and sent us rocking. Paint sloshed out of the can but fell into the water as De Luigi regained his balance. Then he turned and went back to work. He painted flames in the ground-floor windows and the main doorway, then he continued until all the portals on the front façade were filled with flames. They matched the flames painted on his dinner jacket. De Luigi’s flaming jacket and the mural with its flaming windows had become an ensemble work of art. He was the torch setting the painted Fenice on fire.
Two more boats pulled up, then another and another. The gondola bobbed and pitched amid sounds of laughter, applause, idling motors, and sloshing water. De Luigi kept on painting. He was now standing in front of a cutaway view of the foyer and the Apollonian rooms, painting wherever his brush would reach. As he was painting flames on the ceremonial stairway, the mural was suddenly illuminated by a pulsing blue light. A police boat nosed through the flotilla around us. De Luigi, very much aware of its arrival, went on painting.
“What are you doing?” one of the policemen shouted.
De Luigi turned around, the incriminating paintbrush in one hand, the paint can in the other. “I am telling the truth,” he said with triumphant defiance. “The architect’s commission for the new Fenice came out of the flames. I am turning his rendering into an honest statement.”
“Oh, it’s you, maestro,” the policeman said.
“Well, are you going to arrest me?” De Luigi asked.
“Arrest you? Again?”
“I have vandalized this mural,” said De Luigi.
“I’m not sure I’d call it that.”
“Am I not a public nuisance?” De Luigi looked bewildered.
“During Carnival, maestro, everyone is a public nuisance. The rules are different. Come back and do this again next week. Then maybe we’ll arrest you.”
{12}
BEWARE OF FALLING ANGELS
FROM THE TOP OF A SMALL BRIDGE, Lesa Marcello watched as workmen removed the last of the scaffolding from the five-hundred-year-old Church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli. The building had been wrapped in a cocoon of canvas for the past ten years while the restorers did their work, and now it stood revealed: a multicolored, early-Renaissance jewel box sheathed in panels of inlaid marble and porphyry.
Like a gem itself, the Miracoli Church was set into a tiny niche at the heart of a maze of streets so intertwined and out of the way that one often came upon it by surprise. A small canal ran along one side, serving as a reflecting pool. The Miracoli was, in short, irresistible. Even John Ruskin, who detested Renaissance architecture, had to admit that it was one of the most “refined” buildings in Venice. Small wonder that Santa Maria dei Miracoli—“St. Mary of the Miracles”—had been the church of choice for weddings as long as anyone could remember.
The restoration was financed by Save Venice, the American charity devoted to the preservation of art and architecture in Venice. As the director of the local office, Countess Marcello had been coming to the church several times a week for some years to check on its progress. She conferred with artisans, workmen, contractors, and city officials. At times she even climbed the scaffolding to get a closer look.
As with all such projects in Venice, the restoration of the Miracoli had not been a simple matter of putting up the money and telling the restorers to go to work. Venetian bureaucrats never shared the donors’ sense of urgency. They could delay a project indefinitely if they felt the slightest challenge to their authority or their expertise. Understanding this, the officers of Save Venice had wisely hired Countess Marcello to run their Venice office. They had also elected several Venetian nobles to their board of directors, including Lesa Marcello’s husband, Count Girolamo Marcello.
Countess Marcello was a woman of quiet, unassuming grace and had proved exceptionally valuable to Save Venice. She knew the local superintendents personally; more than that, she knew about the rivalries within the bureaucracy and was therefore able to maneuver deftly, without treading on toes. She was practiced in the art of negotiation, Venetian style, which began with the understanding that one could accomplish more over a cup of coffee at Caffè Florian than across a desk in an office. In conversation Lesa Marcello raised issues obliquely. She compromised, and if there happened to be any impatience percolating among the officers of Save Venice, and there usually was, she never let the Venetians know about it.
“One always has to do these things privately,” she said when I came to see her in her office one afternoon, “not in an official way. For example, if Save Venice pays to restore a painting, one of the art experts on its board of directors might want to come to Venice and say to the superintendent, ‘You know, you shouldn’t use this chemical.’ The superintendent will think he’s being criticized, so he replies, ‘But that’s what we want to do.’ And then the project is stalled. I prefer to broach the subject by saying, ‘I’ve been asked if this or that might be possible.’ And then I would simply compare the two ideas rather than oppose one against the other. It’s a very subtle difference, but it’s important. It’s our nature, our way of moving, of navigating. It’s gentle, not aggressive. The superintendents are willing to discuss new ideas with other experts, but only if it’s done in an evenhanded way. And, of course, only in private.”
“How do you mean ‘in private’?” I asked.
“One-to-one,” she said. “If a third person is present, then it’s no longer private. It’s public, and the superintendent, being only human, would be embarrassed.”
Normally Save Venice selected restoration projects from a list drawn up by the superintendencies, but in the case of the Miracoli Church, Save Venice had originated the idea itself. It had not been on any of the usual lists. The church had become black with oily grime, inside and out. Save Venice proposed using experimental methods to restore it, and the superintendent of monuments was at first very much opposed. He wanted to conduct an exhaustive study of the whole building before allowing any work to start, and that could have taken decades. Finally Save Venice suggested proceeding in stages: open up a small portion of the walls, see what they found, and continue, or not, from there. The superintendent agreed, and the project went forward.
Save Venice had hoped to be finished in two years, by 1989, in time for the five-hundredth anniversary of the church. But even Save Venice’s own experts insisted on preliminary research that consumed two years by itself. Technicians analyzed samples of every structural substance in the building, made scale drawings with the aid of laser measurements, took soundings of the walls, and recorded humidity and temperature levels throughout.
When they detached the first marble panels from the brick walls, they discovered that salt from the canals had seeped up through the porous bricks and permeated the marble. The marble slabs had become 14 percent salt. Many of them were on the point of exploding. Each piece of marble had to be removed and desalinated by soaking for months in specially built steel tanks filled with circulating distilled water.
The restoration had taken ten years, not two, and the cost had ballooned from an estimated $1 million to $4 million. But none of that mattered now. The completed Miracoli was already being hailed as a masterpiece of restoration and a model of cooperation all around. The project had been the most ambitious ever undertaken by any of the thirty private committees that were doing restorations in Venice. The spectacular results had occasioned an outpouring of goodwill toward Save Venice. Members of the prestigious Ateneo Veneto, the supreme council of the Venetian intellectual community, had voted to present their highest honor, the Pietro Torta Prize, to Save Venice and its chairman, Lawrence Dow Lovett.
Lesa Marcello had spoken with Lovett earlier in the day to let him know that the award had been confirmed. Lovett, a native of Jacksonville, Florida, had endeared himself to Venetians by buying a nineteenth-century palace on the Grand Canal, restoring it, and taking up residence in it. The palace was sumptuously furnished and had a spectacular view of the Rialto Bridge from its broad terrace, the largest terrace on the Grand Canal. Lovett frequently gave elegant dinner parties for twenty or more, catered by Harry’s Bar and served by a squadron of white-gloved waiters.
Countess Marcello also sent word of the Torta Prize to the president of Save Venice, Randolph “Bob” Guthrie, who lived in New York. Guthrie was a well-known plastic surgeon, one of two doctors who had invented the standard procedure for reconstructive breast surgery. He and his wife, Bea, lived in an Upper East Side Manhattan town house; their ground floor served as the headquarters of Save Venice.
Lesa Marcello was in high spirits as she walked back from the Miracoli to the Save Venice office. She knew that, in her own way, she had contributed to the success of the Miracoli restoration. At the office, she found a fax waiting for her. It was from Bob Guthrie. She read the first line. Then she read it again. “The news that the Torta Prize has singled out an individual,” Guthrie had written, “is shocking.”
She continued reading with a sinking heart. “Please tell the head of the prize committee that the restoration of the Miracoli was the result of efforts by a great many people in Save Venice and that his committee’s proposal to single out one individual is not acceptable to the Board of Save Venice. The award, if given, must go to Save Venice as a whole. Otherwise, Save Venice will formally request that the prize for its work not be given at all.”
Without ever mentioning Larry Lovett by name in the letter, Guthrie told Lesa to inform the committee that “the person” they had selected to receive the award had not been the chief executive officer (in other words, the president) of Save Venice for nearly ten years and that, in any case, it would be presumptuous for one person to accept a prize for the work of so many others.
Guthrie’s letter was blunt, peremptory, and unyielding. He closed by telling Lesa that unless the prize-committee members changed their minds, she was not to give them any information, photographs, or documents, or to cooperate with them in any way. “I want there to be no mistake in Venice about how we feel.”
The reasons behind Bob Guthrie’s fax were many and complicated, as Countess Marcello was well aware. But for the moment, the letter meant only one thing: that a panel of distinguished Venetians had voted to honor Save Venice and its chairman, Larry Lovett, with their most coveted award, and Bob Guthrie, the president of Save Venice, was prepared to fling it back in their faces.
TENSION WITHIN SAVE VENICE, between the chairman and the president, had been mounting for the last two years, since 1995. The first outward sign of it was so slight that few people even noticed: Bob Guthrie’s name, as president, had appeared for the first time above Larry Lovett’s at the top of a list of the Save Venice board of directors in a glossy journal put out by Save Venice and edited by Bob Guthrie. This sudden reversal of the pecking order had come as an unpleasant surprise to Lovett.