Secretum

by Rita Monaldi;Francesco Sorti

  Palazzo Spada, one that could not fail to be shown to the benevolent guest in the course of a humble visit.

  It was a fairly spacious gallery, in the form of an elongated rectangle. On the one side, the walls were covered with frescoes and paintings, while the opposite side was subdivided into a series of great windows which in the daylight hours brightly lit the whole space, with, between them, a series of fine marble busts. The ceiling consisted of a curved vault which was adorned with an imposing fresco, the order and meaning of which I would, however, have been unable to understand at first glance, were it not for Abbot Melani's explanations.

  Atto explained that the magnificent imagery on the ceiling stood for Astronomy and Astrology. I saw cherubs holding up a white velarium on which were drawn lines intersecting on the surface of the earth; at one end of the fresco, one saw Mercury bearing a meridian in the heavens, while the whole assembly of the pagan gods looked on in wonderment. At the opposite end were four female figures representing Optics, Astronomy, Cosmography and Geometry who were also intent upon creating a catoptric meridian, 'midst many other splendid and praiseworthy anthropomorphic figures.

  On the walls there was an extensive and unusual series of splendid paintings, for the most part faithful and highly realistic portraits of illustrious men. Although I could not yet make out the details, it did seem almost as though there were a multitude of real faces looking down upon us. A great whitish crab was perched above our heads on the vaulted ceiling and seemed to be sternly observing us.

  "Good heavens, Signor Abbot, look up there. Never have I seen so huge a crab, and what's more, creeping along a ceiling. And all white!"

  "Well, my boy, here now is an opportunity for you to learn something. This is Palazzo Spada's celebrated Gallery of the Anacamptic Astrolabe."

  "Ana- what astrolabe?. . ." I tried in vain to repeat after him, still keeping a wary eye on the great white crab which did not, however, for the time being show any sign of leaping on us.

  "Or catoptric dial, if you prefer, to use the terminology of the learned Father Kircher."

  For a moment, I fell silent.

  "Did you say Kircher?" I asked, recalling how we had come into rather close contact with that personage in the course of our adventures seventeen years ago.

  "If you were to read newspapers from time to time," was his only reply, "you would sooner or later learn something about the marvels of your city."

  "Yes, I knew that Palazzo Spada abounded in architectural marvels and that people come to admire it from all the world over, but. .."

  "I imagine that you at least know what a sundial is," said the Abbot, cutting me short.

  "Of course, Signor Atto. It is a clock in which the shadow cast on given points by a certain object, like a stone or a piece of metal, enables one to tell the time."

  "Correct. This, however, is a special dial: it functions catoptrically, to employ Kircher's terminology. In other words, not thanks to the sun's rays but to reflection. Do you know what there is down there, outside?" said he, pointing to a sort of little window that gave onto the courtyard.

  "I do not know."

  "A stand with a mirror on it which reflects the light of the sun and the moon. The Spada household has mirrors of various forms and designs which reflect sun or moon-rays and project luminous images like your white crab. This, as you can now see, is nothing but light refracted onto the ceiling of the gallery, which thus gives the exact time."

  I looked up again: he was right, the beast was white because it was drawn on the ceiling by a ray of light.

  "And it tells the right time?" I asked incredulously.

  "Certainly. You too can surely see those lines marked on the vault, which permit anyone who can read them to follow the hours and minutes on the ceiling of the gallery, so long as the light is a little stronger than this candelabrum. For the whole thing is an immense sundial, but upside down. The light does not reach it from above but rather from below. That crab is reflected moonlight, and I suspect that it takes the form it has because in these July days we are in the sign of Cancer, the Crab. This is probably done by using a mirror of the right shape."

  Atto's explanation was interesting, but it was I who interrupted it with a cry of surprise.

  "Look, there's the Flemish globe! Indeed, there are two of them."

  We drew near the better to examine our find. Further down the gallery, there were in fact two wooden globes, one representing the terrestrial regions, the other, the heavens. We read the name of their maker, a certain Blauew of Amsterdam.

  "Alas, if this is indeed a terrestrial globe like that of which you have heard tell, it has nothing to do with Capitor's globe," said he in weary, opaque tones.

  "It is not the one?"

  "No."

  The globe which stood before us did not in fact much resemble that in the picture, and it did not even have a golden pedestal.

  "So, what now?" I asked.

  "It is no good. We have made a mistake. Once again, we have got everything wrong," groaned Atto, sitting wearily on a chest.

  I raised my eyes, drawn by something on the wall opposite. My gaze drew near to the series of portraits decorating the windowless wall and stopped deep in thought at one of them. This was the likeness of an individual with a severe face, whose expression was strong but gentle, his forehead broad, the mouth decisive and the beard bristling. He wore a tricorn hat similar to those of the Jesuits, and an embroidered surcoat with on its breast a heart betwixt two branches.

  "There he is. I present to you Virgilio Spada. As I have told you, he was a member of the order of the Oratorians, followers of Saint Philip Neri, and the portrait here is in accordance with their precepts. He was a wise soul, and quite pious. He helped his order in many ways, above all materially."

  All around, I saw portraits of other members of the family, but

  Atto barely deigned to spare them a glance. For a while longer, he remained pensive, then he shook his head.

  "No, we are mistaken. This is not it."

  "What do you mean?" I asked, without knowing where to turn my thoughts.

  "Have you looked around you, my boy? Where the Devil is Virgilio's collection of curiosities? I can see no trace of it here. We've not even found one tiny bit of it here. And yet it must be clearly displayed somewhere, seeing that the family loves receiving distinguished visitors and showing them its possessions."

  "And so?"

  "This portrait tells me something."

  "What?"

  "I do not know. I must think on that, now I am too tired. Let us go, Cloridia may have finished."

  After saying this, the Abbot moved slowly towards the door, bent by the weight of years and fruitless searching.

  As I followed him, I continued to feed greedily on the marvellous, but to me, incomprehensible, decorations of the catoptric sundial.

  "Signor Atto, all those signs and numbers painted up there, what are they?"

  "Those numbers are the houses of the zodiac with the astrological tables for the compilation of the celestial figures, or the birth chart and horoscope, while the other lines that you see show the times in various parts of the world," explained Atto, stopping and looking up.

  "Was Father Virgilio also interested in all these things?" I asked perplexed, being well aware of the deadly risks that a churchman could run for showing an interest in horoscopes, especially half a century ago.

  "Oh, if that's all you want to know, the Spada have always had a passion for the celestial sciences. Virgilio and his brother loved astrology, including the forbidden forms of it. As I have already told you, I was in Rome when Virgilio died in 1662. It is said that he even possessed books placed on the Index by the Holy Office, as well as some writings regarded as heretical, which, however..."

  The Abbot broke off and stood there staring at me as though seized by a sudden thought.

  "Boy, you are a genius!" he exclaimed.

  I gazed questioningly at him.

  "I k
now where we shall find Capitor's dish," said he.

  So it was that Melani explained to me, in a barely audible voice, that Virgilio's great passion had been for judicial astrology, or that which dealt also with horoscopes and predictions; he had studied his own celestial chart and his father's, and many others too. In 1631, however, this science had been condemned by the Barberini Pope, Urban VIII.

  "I remember that well, from the tales I heard at the time when we met, at the Donzello."

  "Then you'll remember the ugly death that Abbot Morandi met with when they discovered all those books on astrology in his possession."

  I repressed a shiver as I recalled what I had learned at that time.

  "When that happened, many prelates with an interest in the subject took fright. Among their number were Father Virgilio and his brother Bernardino: it was said that Virgilio had moved a number of dangerous books by night from Palazzo Spada to the Oratory, where they were kept under lock and key in a great chest until his death."

  "In other words, it is at the Congregation of the Oratory that we shall have to search."

  "Yes. It will be pretty difficult to evade the surveillance of the Philippine Fathers, and I really do not think that your Cloridia can be of any help to us this time."

  After leaving the Gallery of the Catoptric Sundial, we returned to the window whence we could espy my sweet consort. We found her still in full flow of her sermon, while she collected, cleaned and put her things in order together with our two little daughters; while so doing, she turned her sanguine prose to the ever more perplexed Deputy Steward who, in the meanwhile, to regain something of his composure, was caressing and consoling his exhausted spouse.

  "It is even worse when, in order to avoid paying a wet-nurse, or because she has grown weary of giving suck, a mother makes her little one drink the milk of beasts. You may be certain that, once her child has tasted of that poison for body and soul which is animals' milk, it will have difficulty digesting and will thus be too full to be drawn to its mother's breast, which it will come to forget."

  We waved our arms from the window to let Cloridia know that our search was at an end, that she need trouble herself no longer and could put an end to that flood of words with which she was holding back the Deputy Steward, but all in vain. Caught up in the whirl of her pleading, my wife did not notice us. What was more, we had to take care not to be seen by my little ones who might, in their innocence, give us away.

  "The truth is that goat's milk makes children into goats, and cow's milk makes them into oxen. Now, what father or mother would want a child as feeble-minded as a calf or horned like a goat? Or both together? The animal spirit twines itself around the radical humidity of the infant's little body and will not abandon it until it dies. Take a good look at the faces of children who have received cow's milk: the acqueous, bovine stare, the hooded eyelids, the fat head, the swollen members and the flaccid, pallid skin. And what of the nature of these little unfortunates? If it is not tetchy and taciturn, like that of a goat, it will be placid and temperate, like that of a calf. And how proud their stupid mothers are of them! They can do what they will without being bothered by their stolid, bastardised little ones, while they look on with disgust at other mothers, exhausted by giving suck and weary with caring for their tireless, lively little earthquake of an infant."

  At long last, Cloridia caught sight of us.

  "In conclusion, have a care before giving animals' milk to a being whom God had endowed with a soul!" said she with a voice almost broken by her bombast, while she began to put her equipment back into her bag. "Until three years of age, no child should touch a single drop of the milk produced by beasts. And even after the age of three, this will be most harmful. So everyone, both fathers and mothers and their little sons and daughters, should keep well away from beasts' milk throughout their lives, if they mean to live in good health and clarity of mind. Deo gratias, we have finished."

  She crossed herself, as she did after every birth, and we heard her impart her last recommendations to the new mother as Atto and I rushed to the stables and the mule which was to take us back, weary and disappointed, to the Villa Spada.

  We were already in the inner courtyard, still asleep under the mists that herald the early morning, when we heard a grim, disquieting sound. It came from our left, where there stretched out an immensely long gallery of singular magnificence, followed by an equally long avenue, flanked by hedges and terminating in a garden.

  It was then that we caught sight of a dreadful colossus, a quadruped higher than two men and as long as a carriage, as black as night and covered with thick, disgusting hair. For a few interminable moments (at least so it seemed to me) I was paralysed with terror, almost hypnotised by that infernal monster. I saw it leap over the hedges in the avenue and rush at an unimaginable speed towards us, again emitting the thunderous roar which we had just heard.

  With a superhuman burst of speed, I fled, forgetting even Abbot Melani, and in the twinkling of an eye I had shut myself into the stables.

  Atto was already there: unlike me, he was clearly unperturbed and had got out of the way at once.

  "The monster... the colossus..." I panted, my face contorted with terror.

  I looked at Melani. He had a grin imprinted on his face.

  "What do you find so funny?" I asked, thoroughly irritated.

  "What you too will soon see. Follow me."

  A few minutes later, Atto was at the opening of the gallery, seated on the base of one of the columns, tranquilly caressing the colossus. For it was no colossus at all, but a nice little dog. The creature had been sleeping out in the garden beyond the gallery and, surprised by my arrival, had reacted with a typical canine growl, then drawn near to challenge the invader. What had seemed to me a monster of incredible proportions was in reality a little animal that came up to my knee.

  "Do you understand?" asked Melani.

  "I think so, Signor Atto."

  Yet it still seemed incredible to me. The gallery from which the dog had emerged was a masterpiece of the great Borromini, whom the Spada had often employed to improve and enlarge their palace. It was so constructed as to delude the observer, through a clever play with perspective which only someone who knew the trick could detect. As the visitor entered the gallery, it grew steadily smaller: the pairs of columns by either side became lower, the black and white chequerboard paving went upwards and grew narrower, while the squares themselves became smaller, imitating the flight towards infinity which painters know so well how to simulate in their creations when they depict roads, cities and temples.

  Even the stucco mouldings on the semicircular vaulting were formed into an ever smaller quadrangualar grid, so as to keep in proportion to the shrinking of the vault itself. Beyond the other end of the gallery, there was no spacious garden stretching out to infinity, but a modest little courtyard in which, however, imitation box hedges had been carved from stone and painted with two coats of green. With their regular parallelepiped form, these became ever lower and narrower as the distance from the gallery, and thus, from the observer, increased, thus creating the irresistible impression of a distant avenue running to meet the sky. The sky itself, which I had thought I saw behind the hedges, was in fact painted with clever chromatic counterfeiting a few paces beyond, upon the wall that concluded the whole illusion.

  I entered the gallery and timidly caressed the first pair of columns, then the second, then the third. . . each time narrower and lower. Borromini's optical illusion was so cleverly designed and carried out that it had tricked me to the extent even of terrifying me. Besides those sham hedges, even that little dog had seemed to me gigantic. Its growl, distorted and amplified by the echo of the vault, had seemed on reaching me to be the roar of a wild beast.

  "We fear what we cannot understand: here, as in the gallery of mirrors at the Vessel," said Melani in paternally admonitory tones as we trotted on our mule back to Villa Spada.

  "I had heard tell of Palazzo Spada's galle
ry in perspective and of its marvellous optica! illusion: princes and ambassadors come to visit it from all the world over. But I did not know what it might be and, caught unawares, I took fright. . . You know, I am very tired..." said I, trying to justify myself and to cover my shame.

  "You saw an immense portico, which in reality was very small. Within a small space, you saw a long road. The more distant they are, the larger small objects can appear, rightly placed," Atto philosophised. "Greatness is but an illusion on this earth, the wonder of art and the image of a vain world."

  I knew what he really had in mind: the Vessel. But not the gallery of mirrors. Rather, he was meditating upon those mysterious apparitions which we had witnessed, and upon his faint hope of finding a rational explanation for them in the end.

  I therefore said nothing, while we wended our weary way across the Holy City, meeting the first passers-by, still half wound in the coils of sleep, and formless nocturnal cogitations made way for clear thinking.