The Lost Painting (7 page)

By the time the Marchesa had told her story, it was dark outside and the cellar had grown chilly. The Marchesa seemed dispirited. Francesca and Laura decided it was time to leave for the night. The Marchesa accompanied them up the stone steps to the front door. They asked her permission to return the next morning, and the Marchesa, looking sad and distracted, merely assented with a nod.

8

T
HAT EVENING,
F
RANCESCA AND
L
AURA ATE IN A RESTAURANT
next to the hotel, sitting before windows that looked out over the countryside toward the Adriatic. They knew Correale would be pleased with the citation of the
St. John
in Ciriaco’s inventory. Laura had a feeling that tomorrow they might find something even better in the account books: the actual date and record of payment. It was just a matter of time and persistence. It was a good thing they had gotten to the archive now, Laura said. The Marchesa was turning it upside down. No one would be able to find a thing after she finished her work. And, besides, there was always the risk that she might set the entire palazzo aflame. She was so absentminded she might leave a smoldering cigarette in a cellar full of old paper.

The Marchesa greeted them at the door the next morning, in distinctly better spirits. She offered them coffee; she seemed to want to chat, especially with Francesca, as if this were a social call. Francesca felt inclined to humor her, but Laura said they really should get to work on Ciriaco’s account books. The Marchesa, suddenly looking a bit out of sorts, accompanied them down to the cellar.

She fixed them with a stern look as she donned her white gloves. “Now, tell me,” she said, “what is it exactly that you are looking for? What is the subject?”

They opened the account book to the place where Laura had left off the previous night, on the page that marked the start of the year 1600. It was at the end of that year, or perhaps in the spring of 1601—no one knew for certain—that Caravaggio left Del Monte’s palazzo and took up residence with Ciriaco Mattei. The parting with Del Monte had been amicable. Caravaggio saw him again several times and relied on him when he got into trouble with the law.

In Ciriaco’s household, as in Del Monte’s, Caravaggio would have lived on the third floor of the palazzo. He would have had a room to himself, one large enough to use as a studio, rather than sharing cramped quarters with other servants. His circumstances had vastly improved. He lived under the protection of a powerful and wealthy patron, he received free room and board, and Ciriaco would have paid him the going rate for his paintings. Furthermore, Caravaggio was free to paint for others, not just for Ciriaco. By then, his fee was the highest of any painter in Rome. After the success of two public commissions, in the churches of Santa Maria del Popolo and San Luigi dei Francesi, his work was in great demand. He was twenty-eight years old, and the talk of Rome.

Francesca and Laura worked their way through the entries for 1600, but found nothing concerning Caravaggio. Laura grew momentarily excited when she found a reference to a “Mich’ Angelo pittore.” But it was for work in the garden, and for only ten scudi. Caravaggio commanded much higher sums.

They went slowly and carefully through the year 1601, but again found nothing. By then, Caravaggio certainly was living in Ciriaco’s palazzo. They each began to feel a sense of resignation, although they said nothing of it to each other, as the possibility grew that they might not come across anything more significant than they’d already found.

Francesca had gotten up from her chair when she heard Laura softly exclaim, “Ecco!”

The date was January 7, 1602, and Ciriaco had written in a clear, unmistakable hand the name “Michel Angelo da Caravaggio pittore.” The payment was one hundred fifty scudi for the painting of—and here they had difficulty deciphering Ciriaco’s handwriting. It seemed to say, “for the painting of N.S. in,” and then two words that were unclear. One of them looked as if it began with a “p”—could it be “padrone,” meaning master or owner? The “N.S.” probably meant “Nostro Signore,” a common reference to Christ.

The Marchesa, her attention attracted by their excitement, looked on with curiosity. “You’ve found something interesting?” she asked.

“Possibly,” replied Francesca, “but there are some words we don’t quite understand.”

They each copied out the entry in their notebooks as precisely as they could, mimicking Ciriaco’s handwriting for the words they couldn’t decipher. The entry was four lines long, a record of payment to Caravaggio that no one had seen since the moment Ciriaco wrote it almost four centuries ago. Almost certainly it referred to the painting known as
The Supper at Emmaus,
which Baglione had seen in Ciriaco’s palazzo. It now hung in London, in the National Gallery.

Two pages later—it took Francesca and Laura half an hour of reading to get there—they found another payment to Caravaggio. The date was June 26, 1602, and the sum was sixty scudi, but this time Ciriaco did not specify the reason for the payment. Could it have been for the
St. John
? Sixty scudi seemed a rather small sum for Caravaggio, but the
St. John,
after all, depicted just a single figure.

They worked quickly, skimming through the entries, occasionally sharing a glance with each other. Now they knew for certain that Ciriaco had been a diligent bookkeeper and that they would find the other payments to Caravaggio. Such a find was the grail for all art historians, the closest one could come to the past creation of a work of art.

The next payment came at the beginning of the year 1603, on January 2. And this time they understood immediately which painting Ciriaco had bought. One hundred and twenty-five scudi “for a painting with its frame of Christ taken in the garden.”

“La Presa di Cristo,”
murmured Francesca.

The Marchesa looked over with inquiring eyes.

“Another painting by Caravaggio,” explained Francesca.

“Now, is that the one you’re looking for?” asked the Marchesa.

“Not exactly,” replied Francesca. “It’s been lost for many years.”

“Ah,” said the Marchesa, narrowing her eyes. “What happened to it?”

“No one knows for certain. Several people have looked for it, but they haven’t found it.”

“Such a pity that we have lost everything,” said the Marchesa in a dolorous voice.

Francesca and Laura had found three payments, and Baglione had written that Ciriaco had owned three paintings by Caravaggio. And perhaps Ciriaco had bought even more. Baglione said that Ciriaco had owned
The Incredulity of St. Thomas
—a painting now in the Bildergalerie in Potsdam, Germany—but they’d found no reference to it in any of the inventories. They pressed on. Several pages later they saw Caravaggio’s name again, a payment of twenty-five scudi. A small sum, given the other payments, and a little mystifying. Ciriaco once again did not specify what he had paid Caravaggio for.

By now it was early afternoon. They had not taken a break for coffee or for lunch, but neither of them felt hungry. They read through another year of payments—1604—hoping to find more, but not expecting it. By that year, Caravaggio had left Ciriaco Mattei’s palazzo. They went back to the first payment and slowly checked through the entries again to make sure they had overlooked nothing about the
St. John.

Laura was not completely satisfied. She felt troubled at not having found a specific mention of the painting. Correale will not be happy, she told Francesca.

Francesca was not much concerned about Correale. They had found enough to set the world of Caravaggio scholars—those with the Caravaggio disease—into a frenzy. And the payment of sixty scudi without mention of a painting was, in all probability, for the
St. John.

The archive was almost too good to leave, a trove of discoveries waiting to be made. But it was almost four o’clock in the afternoon and they decided to return to Rome with what they’d already discovered. They would have to come back, and that meant convincing the Marchesa, but Francesca sensed that the old woman liked her. And the Marchesa’s trust in them seemed to have grown. She’d spent part of that day upstairs, apparently feeling it wasn’t necessary to monitor them.

They were just about to leave when Francesca, holding Ciriaco’s account book, paused for a moment. “I think we should hide it,” she whispered to Laura. “There are three hundred other books the same size. If the Marchesa changes the number, it will take us hours to find it again.”

The Marchesa had several piles of books on the table and on top of boxes on the floor, work that she’d already completed. Francesca slid the book into the bottom of one of those piles. The Marchesa had been working in the archive for years, and she’d made slow progress. Francesca figured there was a good chance those piles would remain untouched until she and Laura returned.

9

T
HEY ARRIVED BACK IN
R
OME AROUND MIDNIGHT.
O
N THE RIDE
home, they discussed what they should do with their findings. They would, of course, call Correale tomorrow morning. Francesca suggested they also talk to Maurizio Calvesi, their professor at the university. He had been head of the art history department for many years and was just then finishing a book on Caravaggio. Francesca thought he would want to have these dates and records of payment.

Francesca’s mind kept returning to the payment for
The Taking of Christ.
She recalled sitting in the Bibliotheca Hertziana just before the trip to Recanati and reading in the art journal
Paragone
a brief article by Roberto Longhi, only three pages long. It had attracted her attention because Longhi had commented on Gerda Panofsky-Soergel’s research at the Mattei archive.

Francesca remembered the article clearly, partly because of the disdain with which Longhi had treated the German scholar. Age had not mellowed his acid temperament. It had irritated him that Panofsky-Soergel had gotten access to an archive which had been, he wrote, “long precluded to Italian scholars.” It apparently further irritated him that she was a woman. He kept referring to her as the “kind lady,” and the “illustrious woman,” although he clearly meant neither. Worst of all, Longhi implied, Panofsky-Soergel had no idea what she was looking at, and she had compounded her ignorance by making no attempt to understand what she had uncovered.

Francesca recalled that Longhi had made a particularly interesting deduction from one of the documents that Panofsky-Soergel had found in the Mattei archive. The document was dated February 1, 1802, and it concerned the sale of six Mattei paintings to a rich Scotsman named William Hamilton Nisbet. The first painting on the list was called
The Imprisonment of Christ,
and it was attributed to one “Gherardo della Notte”—Gerard of the Night. Longhi recognized this as the Roman nickname of Gerard van Honthorst, a Dutch artist who had come to Rome in 1612, two years after Caravaggio’s death. Honthorst had stayed in Rome for eight years, earning a living by imitating the style—a shadowy scene illuminated by a single light—that Caravaggio had made famous.

The attribution of this painting to Honthorst had struck Longhi as curious. For one thing, he knew of no Honthorst painting of that subject, and he had a vast and encyclopedic memory for art. But Caravaggio, wrote Longhi, had painted just such a work for Ciriaco Mattei. Longhi had never seen the original—the painting, he pointed out, had been lost long ago. But he knew it almost as well as if he had seen it. He’d read a detailed description of the painting written in 1672 by an art critic named Giovan Pietro Bellori. A description so lucid, so precise, Longhi wrote, “that it would enable me to recognize the painting at first sight, were fortune to allow me to encounter it.”

Pietro Bellori had seen Caravaggio’s original more than three centuries earlier, in the Mattei palazzo. “Judas lays his hand on the shoulder of the Lord after the kiss,” Bellori had written, “and a soldier in full armor extends his arm and his ironclad hand to the chest of the Lord who stands patiently and humbly with his arms crossed before him; behind, St. John is seen fleeing with outstretched arms.” Bellori had criticized Caravaggio for his “excessive naturalism,” yet he had admired the realistic touches in this painting: “Caravaggio even imitated the rust on the armor of the soldier whose head is covered by a helmet so that only his profile can be seen; behind him, a lantern is raised and one can distinguish two more heads of armed men.”

Longhi had read that description while just a boy and it had stayed vividly in his mind ever since. He had recognized a copy of the painting—“weak and lifeless,” he called it—at the shop of a dealer in antiques named Tass in London, on Brompton Road. That was in the 1930s, when Longhi had been forty years old. Since then he had come across several other copies, but even the best of them did not possess the spark, the vitality, that he knew he would see when he finally came across the original. Back then, he expected it would turn up in his lifetime.

Francesca imagined Longhi reading Gerda Panofsky-Soergel’s article. He had written his critique of her in 1969, when he was seventy-nine years old, and he had died the next year. From everything Francesca had heard about him, he had been a thoroughly unpleasant man, given to grudges and malicious comments about colleagues. But he was a brilliant scholar. In his later years, thought Francesca, he’d probably given up hope of finding Caravaggio’s original picture. And then, by chance, he had come across that single line about the sale of a painting by Honthorst to a Scotsman. His pulse must have quickened. Was it not possible, Longhi speculated in his critique of Panofsky-Soergel, that the painting had been mislabeled? And that the Scotsman, Hamilton Nisbet, had actually purchased the lost painting by Caravaggio? In which case, Longhi surmised, the original
Taking of Christ
was likely somewhere in the British Isles, possibly still in the unwitting possession of Hamilton Nisbet’s descendants, or perhaps hanging in obscurity in some small parish church.