Bluebeard (36 page)

When I got back to my hotel at about noon on my last day in Florence, there was a note for me in my pigeonhole. As far as I knew, I had no friends in all of Italy. The note on expensive paper with a noble crest at the top said this:

And it was signed,
Marilee, Countess Portomaggiore (the coal miner’s daughter).

Wow!

     
I
TELEPHONED HER
at once from the hotel. She asked if I could come to tea in an hour! I said I sure
could!
My heart was beating like mad!

She was only four blocks away—in a palazzo designed for Innocenzo “the Invisible” de Medici by Leon Battista Alberti in the middle of the fifteenth century. It was a cruciform structure whose four wings abutted on a domed rotunda twelve meters in diameter and in whose walls were half embedded eighteen Corinthian columns four and a half meters high. Above the capitals of the columns was a clerestory, a wall pierced with thirty-six windows. Above this was the dome—on whose underside was an epiphany, God Almighty and Jesus and the Virgin Mary and angels looking down through clouds, painted by Paolo Uccello. The terrazzo floor, its designer unknown, but almost surely a Venetian, was decorated with the backs of peasants planting and harvesting and cooking and baking and making wine and so on.

The incomparable Rabo Karabekian is not here demonstrating his connoisseurship nor his Armenian gift for total recall—nor his fluency with the metric system, for that matter. All the information above comes from a brand new book published by Alfred A. Knopf, Incorporated, called
Private Art Treasures of Tuscany
, with text and photographs by a South Korean political exile named Kim Bum Suk. According to the preface, it was originally Kim Bum Suk’s doctoral thesis for a degree in the history of architecture from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He managed to examine and photograph the interiors of many opulent private homes in and around Florence which few scholars had ever seen, and whose art treasures had never before been photographed by an outsider or noted in any public catalogue.

Among these hitherto impenetrable private spaces was, hey presto, the palazzo of Innocenzo “the Invisible” de Medici, which I myself penetrated thirty-seven years ago.

The palazzo and its contents, uninterruptedly private property for five and a half centuries now, remains private property, following the death of my friend, Marilee, Contessa Portomaggiore, who was the person who, according to the book, gave Kim Bum Suk and his camera and his metric measuring instruments the run of the place. Ownership, upon Marilee’s death two years ago, passed on to her late husband’s nearest male blood relative, a second cousin, an automobile dealer in Milan,
who sold it at once to an Egyptian man of mystery, believed to be an arms dealer. His name? Hold on to your hats; his name is Leo
Mamigonian]

Small World!

He is the son of Vartan Mamigonian, the man who diverted my parents from Paris to San Ignacio, and who cost me an eye, among other things. How could I ever forgive Vartan Mamigonian?

Leo Mamigonian bought all the contents of the palazzo, too, and so must own Marilee’s collection of Abstract Expressionist paintings, which was the best in Europe, and second in the world only to mine.

What is it about Armenians that they always
do
so well? There should be an investigation.

How did I come to possess Kim Bum Suk’s invaluable doctoral thesis at precisely the moment I must write about my reunion with Marilee in 1950? We have here another coincidence, which superstitious persons would no doubt take seriously.

Two days ago, the widow Berman, made vivacious and supranaturally alert by God only knows what postwar pharmaceutical miracles, entered the bookstore in East Hampton, and heard, by her own account, one book out of hundreds calling out to her. It said that I would like it. So she bought it for me.

She had no way of knowing that I was on the brink
of writing about Florence. Nobody did. She gave me the book without herself examining the contents, and so did not know that my old girlfriend’s palazzo was therein described.

One would soon go mad if one took such coincidences too seriously. One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the Universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.

Dr. Kim or Dr. Bum or Dr. Suk, whichever is the family name, if any, has cleared up two questions I had about the rotunda when I myself was privileged to see it. The first puzzle was how the dome was filled with natural light in the daytime. It turns out that there were mirrors on the sills of the clerestory windows—and there were still more mirrors on the roofs outside to capture sunbeams and deflect them upward into the dome.

The second puzzle was this: why were the vast rectangles between the encircling columns at ground level blank? How could any art patron have left them bare? When I saw them, they were painted the palest rose-orange, not unlike the Sateen Dura-Luxe shade yclept “Maui Eventide.”

Dr. Kim or Dr. Bum or Dr. Suk explains that lightly clad pagan gods and goddesses used to cavort in these spaces, and that they were lost forever. They had not been merely concealed under coats of paint. They had been
scraped
off the walls during the exile of the
Medicis from Florence from 1494, two years after the discovery of this hemisphere by white people, until 1531. The murals were destroyed by the insistence of the Dominican monk Girolamo Savonarola, who wished to dispel every trace of paganism, which he felt had poisoned the city during the reign of the Medicis.

The murals were the work of Giovanni Vitelli, about whom almost nothing else is known, except that he was said to have been born in Pisa. One may assume that he was the Rabo Karabekian of his time, and that Christian fundamentalism was his Sateen Dura-Luxe.

Kim Bum Suk, incidentally, was thrown out of his native South Korea for forming a union of university students which demanded improvements in the curricula.

Girolamo Savonarola, incidentally, was hanged and burned in the piazza in front of what had been the Palazzo of Innocenzo “the Invisible” de Medici in 1494.

I sure love history. I don’t know why Celeste and her friends aren’t more interested.

I now think of the rotunda of that palazzo, when it still had its pagan as well as its Christian images, as a Renaissance effort to make an atom bomb. It cost a great deal of money and employed many of the best minds of the time, and it compressed into a small space and in bizarre combinations the most powerful forces of
the Universe as the Universe was understood in the fifteenth century.

The Universe has certainly come a long, long way since then.