The Lost Painting (21 page)

“I can’t say at this point,” he replied, shaking his head slowly. “There’s a lot of work to do yet. And I have to ask you again not to say anything about this to anyone.”

Francesca understood then that he had a painting. Whether it was the original, or yet another of the many copies, remained to be seen. She had a dozen questions to ask, foremost among them where he’d found this painting. But it was obvious that Benedetti had come not to answer questions but to ask them.

For the next hour, he went through the
Storia dell
’
Arte
article line by line, footnote by footnote, asking her for details and clarification. He wanted to know what the archive looked like, how the documents were organized, what Annamaria Antici-Mattei was like as a person.

He laughed coldly at Francesca’s description of the old building in Recanati. Did she know, he asked, how they had lost the palazzo in Rome? Gambling, he had heard. Did she know any of the details? These old Roman families, he said, they’d all gone soft. Even the Doria Pamphili, they couldn’t even produce children anymore, the descendants were all bastards!

Francesca felt offended. She had grown fond of the old Marchesa. She didn’t like to hear him making such comments at her expense.

Francesca couldn’t put her finger on a precise comment or any factual error that Benedetti had made, but some of his remarks gave her the impression that he lacked something basic, a broader context, perhaps, of art history. That impression, she realized, might have grown out of his manner to her. He made several remarks—“You, of course, wouldn’t know this”; “This is beyond your scope”—that made her bristle, although she merely nodded and smiled diffidently. Perhaps he was just reacting to her youth, she thought. Or perhaps it was a sign of his own insecurity. Denis Mahon, whose knowledge of art history was beyond dispute, had never condescended to her this way.

As Francesca put on her coat to leave, Benedetti said he would be in touch soon. And he warned her again not to speak to anyone about his inquiries.

He was, thought Francesca, the sort of man who, if you asked him, “How are you today?” would say, “Fine, fine. But don’t tell anybody.”

12

R
AYMOND
K
EAVENEY FINALLY HAD GOOD NEWS FROM
L
ONDON.
The British National Gallery had relented and agreed to lend
The Supper at Emmaus.
Perhaps it had been Keaveney’s persistence, or perhaps Denis Mahon had spoken to Neil MacGregor. No one knew for certain. Whatever had happened, the painting was coming to Dublin for a month. It would arrive in mid-February.

That left only a short time to assemble a show, to write an exhibition catalogue, and to prepare and hang the paintings. Benedetti had already chosen the fifteen Caravaggisti pictures for display. It was a small exhibition of decidedly minor works, except for
The Supper at Emmaus
. Outside of Ireland, the show wouldn’t attract the slightest attention, but it still required considerable work in the next three months.

Benedetti had wanted to write the exhibition catalogue, his first professional attempt at curating an entire show, and Keaveney had agreed to let him. “But you won’t let me down on restoration, right, Sergio?” Keaveney said.

“Always two jobs instead of one,” Benedetti later commented, his voice bitter, outside of Keaveney’s hearing.

The catalogue required Benedetti to write fifteen short essays, one on each of the paintings, as well as a longer introductory piece. He was well prepared. He knew the paintings well and had a dossier on each. He worked on weekends and late into the night. Upstairs in the restoration studio,
The Taking of Christ
stood on an easel, covered by the baize blanket. He had no time to work on it.

He’d sent Olohan’s photos of the painting to Denis Mahon, who had reacted with measured enthusiasm. Mahon said he would come to Dublin in March, at the end of the Caravaggisti show, to take a close look at the painting.

By mid-February, the paintings were hanging in place, the catalogue printed. Benedetti awaited the arrival of
The Supper at Emmaus
. The British were bringing it to Dublin by truck, with an escort of attendants.

On the day the truck pulled up to the gallery’s entrance, Benedetti and Brian Kennedy came down to see the unloading of the painting. The British workers, joined by the gallery’s Working Party, wheeled out a large plywood crate on a dolly. The crate seemed unusually heavy. Once inside the gallery, they had to carry it up the long curved flight of stairs to the exhibition room on the second floor. It took ten men, struggling and swearing, to carry the crate up the stairs. Benedetti and Kennedy looked on in consternation. The Working Party began to disassemble the crate, which had been screwed together and sealed with rubber gaskets against moisture. When the plywood came away, Benedetti and Kennedy saw the painting inside the crate, sitting on foam-cushioned supports. It was encased in glass.

“What is this?” asked Benedetti.

Protective glass, bulletproof, said a British worker.

Benedetti was astonished.

Kennedy felt like laughing. “Incredible!” he said. “Does everybody in London think there are bombs going off up here?”

The chief of the Working Party went off to get brackets strong enough to support the painting on the wall. Lifting and mounting the picture in its thick glass case once again required a team of people. Benedetti and Kennedy looked on, along with Keaveney, who had come to join them.

“It’s insulting,” said Benedetti. “They don’t show it under glass in London.”

Benedetti wouldn’t be able to examine the painting as he had expected to do. He couldn’t move it upstairs to the studio, where he could study it closely, under the same conditions and lighting as the
Taking
. He couldn’t look at the tacking edges and see if the canvas matched the one used for the
Taking
. The British, without intending it, had thwarted him.

O
N AN AVERAGE WEEKDAY, THE GALLERY RARELY HAD MORE THAN
fifty visitors, and often fewer than that. You could wander the spacious rooms in silence and near solitude.

The Caravaggisti exhibition, assembled in a few short months, with little funding and almost no money for advertising, opened on February 19, 1992. From the beginning, it drew two thousand people a day. The guards, the cloakroom attendants, the clerks in the small bookstore were all overwhelmed. Keaveney came down to the entrance and stood nervously by, watching the throngs march in, holding his breath as the gallery teetered on the edge of chaos. “It was really scary,” he said of that time.

The show ran for one month, and its success provided Keaveney with a vivid testament to the power of Caravaggio’s name. He could only imagine what might have happened if the painting in the studio upstairs, under the baize blanket—a long-lost Caravaggio—had also been on display.

The most important visitor arrived the day after the exhibition closed. Sir Denis was escorted up to Keaveney’s office, where Benedetti had set up
The Taking of Christ
on a sturdy easel.

Sir Denis stood before the painting, leaning on his cane, eyes moving quickly. After a minute or so, he shuffled forward and examined first one area and then another with his nose only a few inches from the canvas. Benedetti moved up with him. He directed Sir Denis’s attention to the pentimenti at the ear of Judas and the belt buckle. Sir Denis nodded but said nothing.

A moment later, he turned to Benedetti. He extended his hand and said, “Congratulations, Sergio.”

13

S
IR
D
ENIS RETURNED HOME TO
L
ONDON AND CALLED
N
EIL
MacGregor at the British National Gallery. He told MacGregor that he had just seen with his own eyes the lost
Taking of Christ
. “It looks like the real McCoy,” Mahon said.

MacGregor was delighted. He congratulated Sir Denis, and added that he hoped London would have a chance to display it soon.

Sir Denis told MacGregor that he would have the opportunity to see the painting for himself in the near future, provided he would grant a favor. Sir Denis wanted the British gallery’s scientific department to examine
The Taking of Christ
—high-quality photos, X rays, infrared, and pigment analysis. “The sort of thing you would do for one of your own paintings,” said Sir Denis.

London had one of the most advanced scientific departments in the art world, but London rarely worked on paintings that were not part of its own collection. In this instance, however, MacGregor agreed without hesitation.

A
T DAWN ONE MORNING IN
M
AY, SIX WEEKS AFTER THE
Caravaggisti show, Benedetti loaded the
Taking
into a large rental truck with air-cushion suspension and set out with a driver for London. Keaveney had to persuade the Irish government to indemnify the gallery against damage or loss of the painting with a thirty-million-pound insurance policy. He and Kennedy and Benedetti had planned the voyage with the utmost secrecy. Apart from the three of them, no one in Ireland knew the precise date of Benedetti’s departure.

The driver had recommended going up to Belfast and taking the ferry from there across the Irish Sea. Benedetti didn’t like the idea of carrying the painting through Belfast, but the driver convinced him they would save time because of better roads.

The painting remained in London for only four days, and Benedetti stayed by its side most of that time. The science and restoration departments employed fifteen people full-time and occupied a spacious suite of rooms, along with a huge skylit studio, at the back of the gallery. In the science labs, Benedetti saw a vast array of gleaming machinery and electronic equipment, microscopes, spectroscopes, computer monitors, and beakers of chemicals. He watched as a young woman detached a dozen minuscule fragments from the borders of lacunae in the painting and carried the fragments to a machine that embedded each one in a small block of resin. On a television monitor attached to a microscope, the fragments appeared like landscapes of an alien terrain, jumbled strata of brightly colored boulders and crystals of green, yellow, vermilion, and ocher.

The head of the science department, an organic chemist named Ashok Roy, interpreted the findings. He had taken pigment samples from
The Supper at Emmaus
to compare with
The Tak
ing of Christ
. The chemical composition of the paints in both pictures was similar. Caravaggio had bought his pigments—lead-tin yellow, malachite, red lake, bone black, green earth—at the store of a druggist, perhaps the one near the church of San Luigi dei Francesi. They came either in rough form, in blocks and large granules, or already ground to powder by mortar and pestle. He had mixed the pigments with walnut oil, the most common binding agent of the day. Nothing in the composition of the paints suggested that
The Taking of Christ
had been painted by anyone other than Caravaggio. But that did not prove he had.

One aspect about the
Taking
did strike Ashok Roy as unusual. The priming layer, the ground, had been applied irregularly, thickly in some parts, thinly in others, and it had a gritty texture. That was typical of Caravaggio, but Roy found the composition of this particular ground strange—“bizarre” was the word he used. It contained reds and yellows and large grains of green earth, a pigment composed of iron and magnesium. Grounds usually contained lead-based pigments and calcium, which dry quickly. Green earth dries slowly. This primer looked to Roy like a “palette-scraping” ground—the painter had simply recycled leftover paints from his palette board to make the priming layer.

I
N THE
R
OME OF
C
ARAVAGGIO’S DAY, NEWS TRAVELED LARGELY BY
word of mouth, although both printed and handwritten notices, called avvisi, were also posted from time to time in various piazzas. One such avviso appeared on October 24, 1609. It read: “From Naples there is news that Caravaggio, the celebrated painter, has been killed, while others say badly disfigured.”

Two weeks later, Giulio Mancini, the doctor who had once treated Caravaggio, wrote to his brother in Siena with more information. “It is said that Michelangelo da Caravaggio has been assaulted by four men in Naples, and they fear that he has been slashed. If true, it would be a shame and disturbing to all. God grant that it is not true.”

Caravaggio was a regular customer at the Osteria del Cerriglio, a large tavern in the Carità district of Naples. The osteria, three stories tall and built around a courtyard with a fountain, was renowned for its food and wine, and also for the allure of the prostitutes in the upstairs rooms overlooking the courtyard.

He was assaulted on the night of October 20, in the steep and narrow street leading to the osteria’s door. The men who attacked him apparently did not intend to kill him, but to cut his face and disfigure him. Baglione, the biographer who knew Caravaggio best, wrote that “he was so severely slashed in the face that he was almost unrecognizable.” The identities of his attackers remain unknown, although art historians have speculated at length on the reason for the assault. Caravaggio did not lack for enemies.

It had been more than three years since he fled Rome after the death of Ranuccio Tomassoni. In those years he had wandered southern Italy, from Naples to Malta, then to Syracuse, Messina, and Palermo in Sicily, before again returning to Naples. His reputation as an artist had preceded him. He had been welcomed wherever he went. He painted prodigiously and swiftly, large public commissions for churches and smaller works for wealthy patrons who knew of his fame and clamored for his works. In Naples, for the church of Pio Monte della Misericordia, he painted a huge canvas depicting the Seven Acts of Mercy, for which he was paid four hundred ducats. In Malta,
The Beheading of John the Baptist,
measuring seventeen by twelve feet. In Syracuse, for the church of Santa Lucia,
The Burial of St. Lucy.
In Messina, two more large works:
The Raising of Lazarus
and, for the Capuchin church,
The Adoration of the Shepherds,
for which he was paid a thousand scudi, the highest fee he’d ever received.