Caravaggio's Angel

by Ruth Brandon

  Nervously, I walked back to the house, rang the bell and waited. Nothing.

  I rang it again. Still nothing.

  I tried the door. It was locked. So was the small door at the back. La Jaubertie was closed. Rigaut had gone, and taken his mother with him.

  Seething with frustration I got back in the car and drove to Angoulême, where the TGV whirled me towards Paris, the Eurostar, and a sleepless night in Kentish Town.

  13

  Freddie Angelo: London, August

  I got back to find London depopulated. At work all those who had children were absent on holiday duty. My inbox was full of spam offering penis extensions, my voicemail harboured legions of bluff Yorkshire voices urging me to call premium line telephone numbers and be ripped off while I waited to learn if I’d won a holiday in Majorca, no extras included. Outside, the rain rained and the wind howled, driving tides of tourists to shelter in the Gallery’s free, dry halls. I loved it all, even Kentish Town High Street, where swirls of old newspapers blew round my ankles as I scudded past the endless estate agents on the way to the tube. It was all so wonderfully normal and ordinary. Although I couldn’t help wondering about Juliette, from the familiar perspective of the mundane workaday world the events of the past few days seemed wholly unreal. Jean-Jacques Rigaut was no ogre, just another overblown politician. Even my moment of passion with Olivier, at the time so all-consuming, had begun to fade, a sort of shipboard romance.

  Amid the nonsense on my voicemail, one message caught my attention. ‘Good morning, Miss Lee,’ it began. The speaker was male, cultured, confident, slightly drawling. ‘You don’t know me, my name’s Freddie Angelo. I understand you’re working on an exhibition around the Caravaggio St Cecilias. Could you call me? I’ve got something here you may be interested in.’ He left a central London telephone number.

  I called him back, but no one was there. On the answering machine the same voice instructed me to ‘Please leave messages for Freddie Angelo after the tone,’ so I did, telling him I was back in the office and awaiting his pleasure, before immersing myself in a conference paper I was sup-posed to have finished last April.

  Half an hour later, my phone rang. ‘Miss Lee,’ said the voice. ‘Angelo here. So kind to call me back so bright and early.’ (Early? I looked at my watch – it was a quarter to eleven.) ‘There’s something I’d like to show you. I wondered if you might like to come round here and see it?’

  ‘Depends what it is,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, that would be telling. When could you manage? Are you free tomorrow?’

  ‘Any time.’

  We agreed that I’d visit him at eleven the following morning. Bright and early.

  The address he’d given me was in Albemarle Street. It had stopped raining, so I walked there under a fitfully lukewarm August sun. In Leicester Square a mournful Mongolian busker made sad sounds on some ethnic stringed instrument, and was comprehensively ignored by crowds of almost-naked schoolgirls, their whole attention concentrated upon their mobile phones. As I progressed down Piccadilly it was noticeable that the ratio of visible flesh diminished sharply – perhaps in deference to all those tailors in Savile Row, perhaps because the passers-by were older, and less inured to the chill of a British summer.

  Freddie Angelo’s directions took me to a shiny black panelled door set between two shops, with a highly pol-ished brass knocker. Beside the door was a round brass bell-push, also very shiny, and a brass plate engraved with the name Angelo. Unfortunately, when I pressed the bell it didn’t seem to be working. That’s to say, I couldn’t hear anything, and there was no response. I looked at my watch: five past eleven. Surely he must be there? I rang the bell again, but still no one answered. The knocker produced no result either, and nor did anyone answer the phone, whose number I’d noted down. That figured, if it was inside the building outside which I now stood. If Mr Angelo had a mobile, he hadn’t given me its number. Perhaps he hadn’t wanted to run the risk of being disturbed before time began at 11 a.m.

  I looked at my watch again. Ten past. Obviously he was-n’t coming. Time to get back to my desk. Doubtless he’d call again sometime. Or not.

  I’d almost reached the Royal Arcade when a cyclist passed me, a portly fellow in a white suit with thinning dark hair and a pink complexion, riding an upright black gentleman’s model. He stopped outside the door at which I’d been vainly ringing, swung his leg athletically over the back wheel, undid the bicycle clips that tethered his trousers to his legs, settled his jacket, opened the door and wheeled his bike inside. By then I was on the spot. ‘Mr Angelo,’ I said severely.

  He wheeled round, his face a picture of unruffled urbanity. ‘Dr Lee? Have you been waiting long? I’m most awfully sorry. I got delayed. When I didn’t see you I thought, Thank goodness, I’ve made it in time. But you’d already been and gone . . . Still, here we are after all. Coffee?’

  I said I’d love one.

  ‘Excellent. There’s a Caffè Nero just over the road – I do have a coffee machine somewhere, but it really can’t compete. Let’s go and get some and take them up.’

  Lattes in hand, he led us up a flight of narrow stairs and into a dark, panelled room looking on to Albemarle Street. There was a sort of dais at one end, in the centre of which stood a painting on an easel, covered with a cloth. The only other items in the room were a couple of chairs facing it, sub-Sheraton or possibly even the real thing, the sort called carver chairs, with wooden arms and padded seats and a narrow padded panel in the back. The effect – the gloom, the panelling, the attention focused on the raised easel – was slightly church-like. To our left an open door led into another, larger, brighter room, with a desk, a sofa, some shelves of reference books, and a large sash window giving on to a flat roof, doubtless the back of one of the shops, from which the sun, which had now come out in earnest, reflected hotly. My host removed his jacket to dis-play a pair of red braces, hung it on the back of the desk chair, pushed up the window’s lower sash to its fullest extent and nodded at the sofa. ‘Do sit down, Dr Lee.’

  ‘Call me Reggie. Everyone does.’

  ‘Fine, and I’m Freddie. Well now,’ and he sat back expansively, sipping his coffee and fanning himself between mouthfuls with a private-view invitation picked off the mantelpiece at random. ‘How very nice to have you here. And how’s the exhibition going?’

  ‘Coming along,’ I said cautiously.

  ‘Good, good. Lots of interesting stuff?’

  ‘Lots.’

  ‘Been talking to everybody, I suppose.’

  ‘Quite a lot of people.’

  ‘Of course you have. That’s the wonderful thing about art historians, always something to say, even if it’s only to slag off another art historian. How old was Caravaggio when he died? Thirty-nine? I could give you the names of quite a number of people who’ve been thinking about him far longer than that. They all know far more about Caravaggio than Caravaggio ever did.’ He chortled with pleasure at the thought.

  There didn’t seem any very obvious reply to this, so I said nothing.

  ‘I expect you’re wondering why I asked you here.’

  ‘I am, rather.’

  ‘All right. Finished?’

  He took my empty cardboard cup, threw it with his own into a capacious waste paper bin, and led the way back into the adjoining room, shutting the door behind us. Sitting me on one of the chairs, he switched on a light over the easel, and whipped off the cloth to reveal the picture it supported.

  It was the, or a, Caravaggio St Cecilia, similar in every way to the others save for a scatter of luscious fruit heaped in the bottom left-hand corner.

  ‘How about that, eh?’ he exclaimed triumphantly.

  I stared at it, no doubt stupidly, and heard myself say, ‘Is it genuine?’

  ‘Oh, absolutely. Not a shadow of doubt.’

  ‘But it can’t be,’ I said. ‘There were only three. There’s no record of a fourth.’

  ‘Indeed. One for the church, one for Del Mo
nte, one for Marcantonio Doria. No records of any more. If there are four,’ he said, with the emphasis on the ‘if’, ‘one of them’s a fake.’

  ‘How d’you know it’s not this one?’

  ‘Easy. I’ll show you. How much d’you know about Caravaggio’s methods?’

  ‘His methods?’

  ‘Yes. His methods of painting.’ He nodded towards the St Cecilia. ‘That was made in 1604 or 5, right?’

  ‘If you say so,’ I said stiffly.

  ‘Oh, believe me, all the tests have been done, it’s the right date, no doubt at all. Original stretcher, right pigments, right canvas. So he was still in Rome, under the protection of Cardinal Del Monte.’ I nodded agreement. ‘Who of course was a friend of Galileo. Up with all the latest in the world of optics.’

  ‘Optics?’

  ‘Lenses. Mirrors.’

  ‘Well, of course I know Caravaggio used mirrors,’ I said. By this time I was feeling thoroughly defensive. I might not have been thinking about Caravaggio for thirty-nine years, but I was not, as Freddie Angelo seemed to imply, proposing to curate an exhibition about an artist of whom I was wholly ignorant. ‘The contemporary accounts all say so. His pictures are full of self-portraits. How else could he do that?’

  ‘That’s not quite what I meant.’ He went back into the office, where he rummaged in a drawer and returned with a powerful magnifying glass. ‘Look at this,’ he said, walking towards the easel.

  I followed him. He was holding the glass over the open music book which lay at the saint’s feet. ‘Here, take it. Have a look. What can you see?’

  I looked, feeling stupid. What I could see were musical notes, a few enormously magnified blobs of black paint on a parchment-coloured ground. ‘What am I supposed to be looking for?’

  ‘The brushstrokes. Which way do they go?’

  I peered through the lens. The brushstrokes were indeed visible, the impress stronger where the artist had first put brush to canvas, then tailing off as he raised it. ‘From bottom to top,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right,’ he agreed, taking the glass and peering at the picture himself. ‘What does that tell you?’

  I felt like a first-former who hasn’t done her homework. What did he expect me to say?

  ‘All right, let’s have a look at something else.’ Putting the glass down he made for a large cupboard in the panelling, from which he extracted a concave mirror and a photo-graphic tripod. ‘Come on!’ Handing the tripod to me, he rushed back into the office, where he deposited the mirror on the sofa, picked up a small piecrust table, climbed through the window and placed it on the flat roof. Leaning back in, he asked me to pass him a vase of pink roses that stood on his desk, set this on the table, then climbed back in, pulled down a dark blind over the top portion of the window, and pinned a large sheet of black paper on to it. ‘All right?’

  ‘All right,’ I agreed, mystified.

  ‘Excellent. Just a couple more things now and we’re ready.’

  Carefully he set up the tripod facing the window, fixed the mirror to it on a sort of flexible stalk, then waggled it until he had it in the position he wanted, climbing in and out a couple of times to slightly alter the position of the table. Finally all was ready. ‘Now. Now what do you see?’

  What I saw was an upside-down image of the vase of roses, projected on to the black paper. Although it was quite faint, and blurred around the edges, the glowing colours and heightened shadows gave it a jewel-like brilliance, nearer to painting than nature. The effect was oddly hypnotic. You wanted to play with it, to try out more images – to catch it.

  ‘You see?’ said Freddie Angelo. ‘The painterliness of it. That’s what they meant when they said he used mirrors. Of course if the room was darker it would be more distinct. But see how the projection simplifies the highlights and tones? People wonder how he got those photographic effects, those amazing foreshortenings – easy, he was using projections. By 1605 he’d probably moved on to proper lenses. The field of view’s much wider, you don’t have to set up your painting in so many little bits. But the effect’s the same. He used mirrors from very early on. Concave mirrors. And of course, mirrors and lenses both do the same thing.’ He swung round, triumphantly twanging his braces. ‘Elementary optics. The rays of light cross at the point of focus. So the projection’s upside down!’

  ‘Yes, I can see that.’

  ‘All right, so where would you start if you were going to make a painting from that projection?’

  ‘I don’t know – top left-hand corner?’ I caught my breath and laughed. ‘I see what you mean!’

  ‘Exactly. If you were going to paint a sheet of music, would you paint it from the bottom up? Of course you wouldn’t! You’d go from the top down. It’s natural. Of course later, when he made copies, he wouldn’t have had any need to do that – he’d just have copied them. So you see what all this means?’ This time he didn’t wait for me to answer. ‘This must be the originario – the first of the series. That’s why it has the fruit. Whoever commissioned it saw one of those gorgeous still-lives he’d done a bit earlier and said, And put me in one of those while you’re about it. So he copied it from whatever picture that was – I could probably find it for you – and stuck it in the corner. If you look, you can see the highlights are all wrong – the light source here’s from the top left, but the fruit seems to be reflecting something from the right, that’s why it looks so odd. It wasn’t part of his original plan, and he didn’t bother with it for the others. Now. Have I convinced you?’

  ‘You’ve bemused me,’ I said. ‘But it certainly seems convincing.’

  ‘That’s because it is.’ He began dismantling his set, taking down the mirror, folding the tripod, replacing the roses on his desk and the table in its spot beside the sofa. ‘Have you seen all the others?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How many? Come on, the truth. I promise I won’t tell tales.’

  ‘Three. Or rather, I haven’t actually seen the one in the Getty, just the photo. But both the others.’

  I have never seen anyone look so wonderfully astonished. His eyebrows moved up his forehead, his eyes widened. Then he threw his head back and laughed. ‘Really?’

  ‘I promise.’

  I could see now why he’d been so patronizing earlier. He’d thought he’d caught me out – assumed I’d been skating on thin ice, that I didn’t know where all the pictures were, that I only knew of two and that he’d found the third. And indeed, as regards the thinness of the ice, he hadn’t been mistaken. Although I had found three pictures, only one of them was available for loan. It was no thicker now, either – just differently cracked. I still only had one picture promised. And one of the ones I’d already found must be a fake.

  ‘Well,’ said Freddie after a while. ‘That certainly is a turn-up for the book!’ He counted them off: ‘There’s the Louvre’s – came from Berenson who stole it from the church in the first place. The Getty got theirs direct from the Doria palazzo, terrible condition, but provenance indisputable – never moved since the family bought it from the chap himself. And the mysterious Other, that appeared mysteriously in 1952 and then dematerialized. Del Monte’s. This one.’

  ‘It wasn’t this one, actually,’ I said smugly. ‘In any case, how could this one be Del Monte’s? Wouldn’t the originario have been the one he did for the church? That was the commission, surely he’d have wanted to do that first and get paid?’

  ‘Del Monte was his patron, they’d been friends for years. Maybe he liked this one best, or persuaded Caravaggio to let him have first pick. You’ve got to agree it’s far better than the one in the Louvre.’

  I nodded: there was no disputing that.

  ‘So,’ he continued. ‘Where’s this mysterious other pic-ture you’ve found? Or aren’t you at liberty to say?’

  ‘In France,’ I told him, truthfully but unhelpfully. ‘It’s certainly the one that was in the exhibition. Where did you find yours?’

  ‘Oh, it emerged
,’ he said airily, ‘the way these things sometimes do. You know how it is. Someone decides to sell, they need the money, or someone’s left them some-thing they don’t like, or haven’t the room for. Why they’re doing it’s no business of mine.’

  We grinned at each other: fifteen all.

  ‘Are you a dealer?’

  ‘In a small way. I just handle a few things. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you,’ he added confidentially, ‘that it’s not just a question of selling, look what I’ve got. You need to set the scene, build up a buzz, create the right atmosphere. I’m rather good at that, though I say it. Caravaggio’s always been a particular favourite of mine, and of course the missing St Cecilia’s one of those things everyone always hopes they’ll find. When I first saw this I couldn’t believe my eyes.’

  ‘Whose is it?’

  He shook his head. ‘A private collector. I think he’d prefer not to have his name known. But you can imagine how I felt when I heard about this exhibition of yours. I met Tony Malahide at a dinner-party and he mentioned it to me. I said to him, but how can she possibly do it when nobody knows where the third picture is? But he insisted you were on to something. Touching faith, I thought, but frankly I didn’t believe him. I knew exactly where it was, and you certainly weren’t on to that. But there we go, you were telling the truth all the time. I think this deserves a drink, don’t you?’ – and he opened yet another panelled cupboard to reveal a fridge, from which he extracted a bottle of champagne. ‘Whether this mysterious find of yours is right is quite another matter, of course,’ he added. ‘Even so, it’s interesting. Very.’

  We clinked glasses, and he said, ‘So tell me, do you have a photo of your find?’