The Lost Painting Read online

  “No, it isn’t,” Francesca replied.

  And the Marchesa said, in consternation, “I really don’t understand what it is you are looking for. What is the subject?” Every half hour, it seemed, the Marchesa asked them the same question, and they gave the same answer.

  Francesca watched the Marchesa out of the corner of her eye. The old lady picked up a yellowed card, an index of the documents contained in one file, studied it for a moment, and then ripped it in half.

  “Interesting, this work of yours,” Francesca said. “May I ask what is it you are doing exactly?”

  The Marchesa explained that she was changing the archive from its old chronological system. She was more interested in the people in her family than in a simple chronology. Consequently, she was organizing the documents so that those pertaining to a particular person—Ciriaco, for example—would all be gathered in one place. “After this, it will be much easier to find everything,” she said.

  “Ah, I see,” said Francesca.

  Francesca and Laura talked in low voices between themselves. Watching the Marchesa at work, Laura whispered, was like watching someone clean house by throwing things out the window—plates and silverware, pots and pans—as if that were completely normal.

  They went back to the inventory. Ciriaco Mattei had owned, according to the earliest sources, at least three paintings by Caravaggio, and perhaps more. On the next page, midway down, they saw Caravaggio’s name again, this time for the painting called La Presa di Giesu Cristo—The Taking of Christ—the painting that had been missing for hundreds of years. Francesca and Laura had both seen photographs of the many copies of the painting, and they’d read articles by Roberto Longhi, who had been obsessed with finding it. The inventory described the picture as having a black frame decorated with gold, and a red drapery with silk cords that had been used to cover it.

  They had been in the archive only two hours and they had already found two important entries concerning Caravaggio. They had conclusive proof now that Ciriaco had owned both the St. John and The Taking of Christ. If they achieved nothing else, they could consider their trip a success. But they hoped to trace both paintings back even further. The Mattei brothers had kept careful account of their expenditures. The German scholar Gerda Panofsky-Soergel had found Asdrubale’s libri dei conti, account books, and had published hundreds of items dealing with the cost of constructing his new palazzo. And yet no one, it seemed, had ever looked through Ciriaco’s account books.

  They found three of Ciriaco’s leather-bound account books, each about two hundred pages long, on the same shelf as the inventories. Written on the cover of the first book were the words “Rincontro di Cevole dal 1594 al 1604”—“Account of Expenses from 1594 to 1604.” The second one, similarly labeled, covered the next seven years, up to 1612. The last one contained only two years of expenditures, the last two years of Ciriaco’s life.

  They opened the first account book. Every page, front and back, was densely covered with entries in black ink. The writing was small, but the hand was neat and orderly, and it was consistently the same hand throughout. On the far right of each page they saw a column of numbers, and at the bottom, under a heavy line, a total of that page’s expenditures.

  Ciriaco would have had a bookkeeper, a computista, to keep a record of daily expenses for running the palazzo, for the purchase of food and wine, for payments to merchants and employees. But this book did not contain these sorts of mundane entries. It appeared to record mostly works of art—statues, paintings, frescoes—as well as improvements Ciriaco had made to his palazzo and his garden.

  It took Francesca and Laura time to decipher the handwriting. The entries were full of abbreviations, a sort of informal shorthand, and words spelled in the old manner, the English equivalent of reading Shakespeare. They noticed a distinctly personal phrasing in some of the entries—“thirty scudi paid on my behalf to Franco the sculptor for the price of a statue bought for my garden.” It dawned on them that a bookkeeper hadn’t kept this account, that Ciriaco himself must have written out these entries. To Francesca, they acquired a sudden and beguiling intimacy. She ran her finger across the handwriting, touching the ink on the page.

  Ciriaco had been a diligent accountant. He had noted payments as small as eight scudi and as large as two thousand. In an era when it cost forty-five scudi to rent a house for a year in the Campo Marzio, he had spent astonishing sums—thousands of scudi every year—on his passion for art.

  He could afford it. The Mattei fortune was built on vast agricultural holdings in the Roman countryside, on vineyards, olive groves, wheat fields, and especially cattle, and these had made the family fabulously rich. Ciriaco’s ancestors had a talent for prospering even when times were bad. After the Spanish sacked Rome in 1527, when all was chaos and uncertainty and thousands of people fled the city, the Mattei clan bought up property at a fraction of its value. By the time of Ciriaco’s birth, in 1542, the family was perhaps the richest in Rome, with a household staff to manage its affairs that numbered more than three hundred, second in size only to that of the papal court.

  Francesca and Laura scanned quickly through the entries for the first years. The light coming in the small windows overhead faded to dusk, and their eyes burned with the effort of reading the tiny handwriting by the light of the single overhead bulb. The Marchesa, meanwhile, had grown more loquacious as the afternoon passed. Francesca, trying to be polite, turned her attention to the old woman while Laura continued to read. The Marchesa was smoking a cigarette and reminiscing, talking about her childhood in the palazzo in Rome, the elegant dinner parties and concerts, the tables set with the finest crystal and silver, the beautiful rooms with gilded ceilings and frescoes on the walls, the staff of twenty servants. It had all ended, the Marchesa recalled, her voice turning brittle, on a day in 1933, when she was twelve years old. Her mother told her one evening, just before her bedtime, that they would leave the palazzo the next day and move to an apartment on Via del Plebiscito, into a building owned by their friends the Doria Pamphili family.

  A strange coincidence, thought Francesca, that the two families should be linked by friendship as well as the twin St. John paintings.

  “Imagine,” the Marchesa said to Francesca, “from one day to the next, without any warning, my life had changed completely.”

  Her family had brought with them only their clothes and a few personal items. All of the paintings, the statues, the furniture, the tapestries and rugs—everything that had belonged to the Mattei family for generations—all of that they left behind. Of course, at the age of twelve, she had not understood how this could have happened. Her parents spoke only vaguely of debts. It was only later that the Marchesa learned the details of how her father, Prince Guido, had gambled away everything in card games. He’d lost what remained of the family’s patrimony in a final game with a count named Pierluigi Donini Ferretti.

  The ruin of the family’s fortune was not the fault of the Marchesa’s father alone. The decline had begun much earlier, in the generations after Ciriaco’s death, a common story of folly and indolence, of great wealth sapping the ambition and industry of those born into it. But it was also the consequence of events beyond the control of Ciriaco’s descendants. Napoleon’s army had swept through northern Italy in 1798 and occupied Rome. To pay for the army’s keep, Napoleon’s administrators had levied punitive taxes on the Roman nobility. The Mattei family had been forced to sell many of their possessions, among them the paintings by Caravaggio, Guido Reni, Antiveduto Grammatica, Lorenzo Lotto, Valentin de Boulogne, and Francesco Bassano. They’d had to borrow money at usurious rates, and then sell even more of their patrimony to pay the moneylenders. They had survived that period, much diminished, up until the Marchesa’s father started losing at the card table.

  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 March
esa 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

  THAT EVENING, FRANCESCA AND LAURA 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

  THEY ARRIVED BACK IN ROME AROUND MIDNIGHT. ON 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.