by Mary Malloy
“I hope my nephew Beppe is working hard for you. My niece Pina Corelli will be available to help you when you are in Bologna next month, and of course Beppe will be here to help prepare the collection to be shipped in May.”
“Beppe,” Lizzie said softly. “Beppe, how did you become Justin?”
As if to answer her question, Justin Carrere appeared at her door.
“I got a copy of a genealogy,” he said. “But it only goes up to 1940.”
“Can you add the rest of the names up to the present?”
“How?”
“Don’t you at least know the names of your aunts, uncles and first cousins?”
He said that he did.
“Show me what you have,” she said.
He asked if he could use her computer to check his email, as it was in an attachment from his mother.
Lizzie let him use the office computer and then printed out the five-page attachment. It was a genealogy of the Gonzaga family from 1407, showing the Dukes of Mantua, Dukes of Nevers in France, and several cardinals and bishops. The Bologna branch divided off in 1590 when one Adino Gonzaga moved there and married into the powerful Bentivoglio family. Adino was the student of Aldrovandi and his son Lorenzo, born in 1608, was the founder of the cabinet and the one who had the picture drawn in 1677. There was a clear line of eldest sons down to Lorenzo Gonzaga, born in 1874, who married Maggie Kelliher in 1912. Their children were listed, and familiar to Lizzie from the family photographs she had looked at with Jackie: Eleonora, born in 1913; Margherita, born in 1914; Adino, born in 1915; Cosimo, born in 1918; Patrick, born in 1921; and Giuseppina, born in 1923, whom Tony Tessitore had called Gianna.
“Your great-aunt Giuseppina died in the war,” Lizzie said to Justin, “though since this document was made before the war it doesn’t show her death date.”
“I know.” Justin said. “She was some sort of resistance fighter. I’m named after her.”
“Your name is Giuseppe?” she asked.
He gave his familiar almost noncommittal nod.
“Your uncle, Cosimo, referred to you as Beppe in a message to me; is that what your family calls you?”
Same nod, accompanied by chin scratching.
“When did you start calling yourself Justin?”
“When I came here. It just sounded better.”
Lizzie returned to the family tree. “So which of the people on here are your grandparents?”
Justin pointed to the name Margherita and said, “I think she was my grandmother. I barely knew her. She died when I was just a kid.”
“Maybe you can get more information from your mother,” Lizzie said hopefully. “And there is a file in the library with pictures of the last generation listed here. You might like to take a look at them.”
He said he would do that and left quickly without taking the papers.
“What a dope,” Lizzie said under her breath.
In need of an antidote to Justin, Lizzie walked across campus to meet with John Haworth, St. Pat’s only Egyptologist. She didn’t know him well, but he always injected a welcome humor into faculty meetings and what she knew of him she liked.
He greeted her like an old friend, even kissing her on the cheek when she entered his office. He was a big man, with a shock of white hair and piercing blue eyes. “Love that picture you sent me,” he said instantly, “and can’t wait to see the sarcophagus. Am I right in thinking that you’re bringing it here for the exhibit you’re working on?”
“If it’s in good enough shape to travel I absolutely will.”
“When will you know?”
“I’m heading to Bologna in a few weeks and will go over the whole collection with a conservator from the University Museum to see what can travel, but it is at the top of my list.” She pulled a copy of the 1677 image out of her bag and showed it to him. “The sarcophagus was already in the collection in the seventeenth century, and I’d like to try to assemble as many things as I can that are in this drawing.”
He took off his glasses to look more closely. “I can almost see some additional details here,” he said. “But as soon as you can, send me pictures of the whole case and I will translate the hieroglyphs for you.”
“Can you tell me anything from the picture I sent you?”
“A fair amount, actually,” he answered, bringing the picture up on his computer screen. “It’s a classic Eighteenth Dynasty piece,” he said.
“Ah!” Lizzie interrupted. “My ineffective student assistant translated that as eighteenth century, which I knew wasn’t correct since we have it here in a seventeenth-century image.”
“It’s from the age of King Tut,” John continued. “A very good sarcophagus for a well-placed functionary in the court. Since I can’t yet see the whole of the inscription, I can’t tell you exactly what he did, but it is consistent with several other pieces in museum collections here and abroad. The fact that it is illustrated in that early drawing makes it very special.”
“I’ll have better pictures for you in a few weeks,” she said.
“Is there a mummy in the case?”
“I have no idea,” she said, surprised that it had not yet occurred to her to ask that question. “Should there be?”
“I doubt it,” he answered. “Most of the mummies that came into Europe in the Renaissance were cannibalized for medicinal purposes.”
This was a statement for which Lizzie was unprepared.
“Are you serious?” she asked, her voice expressing her surprise.
“I am,” he answered, unfazed. “It was a common cure-all in the Renaissance and appears in a number of medical texts.”
John Haworth then began to rattle off early references to “mummy” or “mumia” as a medicinal agent.
“The tenth-century Arab doctor Avicenna was the first to mention it. He was pretty enthusiastic in prescribing mummy for bruises and wounds especially, but also for almost everything else that could go wrong in a human body: broken bones, palsy, congestion of the lungs or throat, problems with the heart, spleen, stomach, liver, and it could even be used as an antidote to many poisons. There were few things it wouldn’t cure, and because he was an important figure in the medical world, doctors all over Europe and the Middle East began to demand it.”
“For how long?” Lizzie asked.
“The New Jewel of Health, from around 1560, was still prescribing mummy for everything from the grandest problems of all, plague, poison, and arrow wounds, to the most mundane things—headaches, eye problems, gout and worms.” He pulled a book off the shelf, speaking all the time. “Amboise Paré, who was one of the great scientific thinkers of the late sixteenth century, and clearly a doubter of the efficacy of mummy, said it was ‘the very first and last medicine of almost all our practitioners’ to treat severe bruising at that time.”
He opened the book. “This is one of my favorites,” he said gleefully. “William Bullein’s Bulwark of Defense Against All Sickness, from 1562. I think Bullein was probably considered something of a quack even in his own day, but he was a great proponent of the curative power of ground-up mummy parts.” He read aloud a recipe that included mummy, honey, poppy juice, carrots and fennel to treat epilepsy as well as a number of other less serious ailments. He looked up at Lizzie with a sly smile. “If anything worked it was probably the poppy juice.”
“I have heard that Julius Caesar was epileptic and that one of the Roman treatments was to drink the blood of young gladiators killed in the games at the Coliseum,” Lizzie said. “At an intuitive level, I kind of understand the idea that fresh blood from a young healthy athlete might make you stronger.”
John chuckled. “Though of course from a medical perspective drinking blood does you no good at all. It goes into your digestive system, not your circulatory system. Of course Bullein also thought that you should squirt some of his mixture up
your nose.”
“Of course,” Lizzie said quickly. “I’m only saying that I understand the idea of drinking fresh blood. What I don’t get is why anyone would have thought that ingesting parts of a thousand-year-old desiccated corpse would be good for you.”
“For an answer to that, let me give you a quote from Bullein. He writes that mummies are made of the dead bodies of ‘noble people, because the said dead are richly embalmed with precious ointments and spices, chiefly myrrh, saffron, and aloes.’”
“So he thought that the preservatives that kept the corpse from deteriorating would somehow keep the living person preserved as well?”
John Haworth clasped his hands on the book in front of him. “It might be that,” he mused. “Or it might be the notion of immortality, which was clearly so important to the ancient Egyptians. Maybe those later Europeans were inspired by that and wanted to capture something of the effort that went into it.” He closed the book. “Our friend Bullein went too far, of course, as is in the nature of quacks. A later recipe in the book calls for a mixture of mummy and dragon’s blood as a cure for bruising.”
“Maybe the dark color of the preserved mummy’s skin was the connection to bruising,” Lizzie ventured.
“That’s not a bad notion,” John answered. “Certainly that was one of the most commonly mentioned reasons for using it. The king of France in the early sixteenth century is said to have carried a purse full of ground mummy with him at all times in case he fell off his horse.”
Lizzie stood and walked to the window as she thought about the unexpected education she was getting.
“Most of the examples you are giving me are from the sixteenth century,” she said. “How long do you think the Gonzaga mummy was in Italy before this picture was made?”
“Impossible to say,” John answered. “There was a guy, da Carpi, who reported seeing numerous mummies in Venice before 1518, so certainly there was a trade in them from Egypt across the Mediterranean very early in the sixteenth century. The oddest thing about the Gonzaga piece is that it has a sarcophagus, which was not common.”
“It seems very consistent with the seventeenth-century notion of collecting exotic rarities, however,” Lizzie responded.
John nodded. “Even so, it’s a very early example in Europe.”
“And I haven’t seen one illustrated in other collections of the time.” She paused and thought about this for a moment. “Venice isn’t all that far from Bologna, however,” she said slowly, “and the Gonzagas in Bologna made their fortune in trade, so how they got it isn’t too hard to imagine. I just wonder when they got it.”
Her companion asked her if there was a catalog of the collection.
“Sadly, the earliest one I’ve seen so far is from 1959. But I’m hopeful when I get there I might find an earlier one.”
“Well keep me in the loop on this,” he said. “More pictures when you get them, of the sarcophagus, certainly, and of any mummy parts you might find in it.”
“Mummy parts?”
“Oh sure,” he said. “If you’re going to make medicine out of a mummy you need to pull it apart and grind it up. And I should warn you that by the end of the Renaissance there were a lot of false mummies on the market, mostly recent corpses that had been either buried in the desert sands or baked in an oven to dry them out.”
“How absolutely astonishingly gross,” Lizzie said. “If I find a finger or toe lying around in the sarcophagus and bring it back, would you be able to tell the nature of the mummification process and give me a date on when it was done?”
“I would,” John said. “But be warned that shipping any human remains as part of your exhibit will require some special paperwork. I wouldn’t worry about it,” he said with a grin. “I’ll be surprised if there is anything of the mummy left at this point.”
“This has been a real education,” Lizzie said, stretching out her hand to shake his, but he came around his desk and hugged her.
“I look forward to more pictures,” he said. “Maybe I’ll even write something about this if it doesn’t tread on your work.”
Lizzie was inspired by the idea. “How about an essay for the catalog?” she asked. “I’m sorry the timeframe is short, since we need to wrap up everything in the next eight months, so we’d need to be ready to go to print by May.”
He told her that if she could get him good pictures within a month, he could turn something around for her by the end of the spring term, and she left his office feeling she had made a great stride forward on the work.
The information on the cannibalization of mummies as medicine was too interesting not to share immediately with Jackie, and Lizzie made her way quickly to the library. To her surprise, Justin Carrera was sitting at the table with the Gonzaga folders spread out around him and he was looking at pictures. She pulled out a chair and sat next to him.
“Are you finding it interesting, looking at these pictures of your family?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he answered. “My mom sent me some more information and I’m trying to put it all together.”
“Excellent,” Lizzie said. “I look forward to seeing what you find.”
Jackie was sitting at her usual desk and Lizzie approached her with a broad smile on her face.
“What are you up to?” Jackie asked.
“I’ve been talking about mummies with John Haworth.”
“And?”
“And did you know they used to eat them in the Renaissance as medicine?”
Jackie raised an eyebrow. “I seem to remember reading something about that.”
“Dammit, Jackie! How come I can never surprise you even with the most unusual and gruesome information?”
“Because I’m a librarian and I sit here looking at information all day. Besides,” she added, “I saw a mummified hand once in a pharmaceutical jar at a museum in London and it has stayed with me.”
“Anything else about mummies you want to share?”
“They are mentioned a couple of times in Shakespeare.”
“They are? In what plays?”
“Macbeth, of course. The witches put some mummy in the cauldron that they ‘boil, boil, toil and trouble,’ etcetera, and I think there is a reference in Othello as well, which I will look up for you right now.”
Lizzie walked around the desk so she could look at Jackie’s computer screen.
“See,” Jackie said, pointing, “Othello had a handkerchief that his mother dyed with mummy, which must have given it some curative powers.” She continued to type as she talked and with a Google search of “mummy powder” brought up a witches’ supply store in Manhattan that had it on their inventory list. “Oh my God, Lizzie, look at this,” she said with a groan. “You can order some if you want it.”
“No thank you,” Lizzie said. “I wonder what it is. It can’t actually be ground up mummy.”
“They claim it is, but how would you ever test it?”
“I guess you’d have to see if it cured your bruise,” she said with a laugh. She looked up to find Justin staring at them, but he quickly looked away. She put a hand on Jackie’s shoulder. “Enough of this unseemly talk, madam. We both have real work to do.”
“This is real enough for me,” responded Jackie. “And I have an excuse, because I’m helping you with your exhibit.”
Lizzie reminded her that they had a date the following day with Rose and her father for coffee.
“Ah yes, to speak about the Principessa della Gonzaga.”
“I told you not to call her that,” Lizzie whispered. She looked again at Justin, who was staring intently at the pictures on the table in front of him, but she had the feeling that for once he was paying close attention.
Chapter 9
Martin’s opinion on matters of art was always influential to Lizzie, and when he had a chance to look at the original drawing
of the Gonzaga cabinet he noticed many things that she and Jackie had overlooked. He was interested in how the artist had used line to create perspective and give dimension to the vaulted corners of the ceiling, and how both the cases on the wall and the tiles on the floor drew the eye to the collection.
They sat with Jackie in the library and Lizzie opened the book on the Cospi collection to show him the print that covered the two center pages. It had been drawn the same year and Martin not only agreed it was by the same artist, but argued that he had used the same template for both pictures.
“This isn’t so strange for an artist who did this kind of work,” he said. “But it means that you can’t consider this drawing like you would a photograph. The artist was trying to capture the essence of the collection and it might not reflect the actual architecture of the room.”
“There are differences in the collections, though,” Lizzie said, hoping that this new information would not scuttle her plans to try to recreate the drawing in her exhibit. “Look especially at the alligator and the mummy. They are really key elements in the Gonzaga picture, and the family still had those in the 50s.”
“Don’t worry, my dear,” Martin reassured her. “There’s enough difference in these assemblages of weapons along the top wall, and of the vases along the bottom to make me think that having created a general template, the artist then put in the specific details to reflect what the customer actually had in his house. Otherwise there would be no reason to hire him.”
“Who knows how many collections in Bologna might have been drawn by this guy that we don’t know about,” Jackie added. “Because they don’t survive or they are lost in some archive, filed in the wrong drawer.”
She took the picture when Martin had finished looking at it and slipped it into a Mylar sleeve that she had made to protect it. “I assume you’ll have this framed for your exhibit, Lizzie,” she said. “And when you’re done with it, I think I’ll transfer it to the museum collection rather than keep it in the library.”
“The same artist made a sketch of the Gonzaga family’s private chapel as well,” Lizzie said. She had printed a copy of the scanned image sent to her by Cosimo Gonzaga and now she pulled it out. “In this case we can compare it to a photograph of the same room from the 50s, and see that the drawing here is more realistic and less emblematic than the drawing of the cabinet.”