The Lost Painting

by Jonathan Harr

  Correale laid out his plan. They would investigate every possible aspect of the two paintings, a forensic investigation of the sort usually conducted at the scene of a murder. They would put the paintings under a microscope, both literally and figuratively, using X rays, infrared reflectography, and chemical and gas chromatograph analysis of the paints and the canvases. And they would also plot the history, the provenance, of the two paintings, collecting every reference they could find from the moment each had been created to the present day.

  Correale assigned this task to Francesca and Laura. Other art historians had already done some of this work, but, Correale pointed out, there remained gaps in the early history of both paintings. Caravaggio scholars still argued, for example, about precisely when Caravaggio had painted the St. John. Not even Denis Mahon had managed to track down that information. Who knows? Correale said with a shrug. Maybe you’ll discover something new.

  To Francesca, it seemed that Correale regarded the provenance research as largely perfunctory. His real enthusiasm lay in the scientific and technical aspects of the work. But Francesca liked her assignment. No more tedious forms to fill out. Just two paintings to concentrate on. A perfect job, in her imagination, was one in which she could spend her life in libraries studying art history, the eternal student.

  Along the way, she would discover that, sometimes, when you go looking for one thing, you find another. And every now and then, your reward for persisting is that the other is better.

  2

  FRANCESCA SAW THE WORK OF CARAVAGGIO FOR THE FIRST TIME when she was eleven years old. It was in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi, just a short distance from the Piazza Navona. Her father, an accountant who worked in a law office, used to take her and her two sisters in hand on Sunday afternoons, the girls dressed in churchgoing finery, for excursions around Rome. They would set out to see the ancient ruins in the Forum or the paintings and sculptures in one of the city’s great galleries or churches. Francesca, the oldest of the three, made a game of these excursions, trying to match the paintings with the artists before looking at the attributions. In time she came to know the names of the masters of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque in the way that schoolboys know the names and statistics of professional soccer players.

  Her first encounter with Caravaggio remained vivid, a pinprick of brilliant light in her memory. The three paintings known as the Matthew cycle hung in the dim, shadowed regions of the church, at the far end of the nave, in a recess known as the Contarelli Chapel. It smelled of candle smoke and incense. A pale light filtered into the chapel through a small lunette window made nearly opaque by dust and grime. In Caravaggio’s day, the flickering light of candles would have illuminated the chapel. When Francesca was a girl, illumination required a coin in a box. When the light came on, Francesca felt suddenly as if she were no longer in the church but in a theater. The three paintings seemed to breathe, to pulse with heat and life, capturing a moment in time like a scene glimpsed through a window. She stood with her hands on the smooth, cool marble railing of the chapel, transfixed by the depictions of Matthew’s life. The most captivating to her was the one known as The Calling of St. Matthew—a scene in a Roman tavern of the sort that Caravaggio would have gone to, with wooden stools and a scarred wooden table, the sunlight from an opened door raking across an old stucco wall and settling on the tax collector who would become a saint.

  Later, when she began to study art history seriously, Francesca learned that Caravaggio had painted his self-portrait among the figures in the background of The Martyrdom of St. Matthew. He had been twenty-nine then, but in the painting he looked older than that, bearded, brow furrowed, his mouth contorted in a grimace of dismay, his dark eyes filled with anguish. The Matthew paintings, his first public commission, brought him fame and wealth. Ten years later he would die alone, an outcast, in strange circumstances.

  3

  THE INVESTIGATION INTO THE ORIGINS OF THE TWO ST. JOHN paintings occupied Francesca and Laura all that winter and into the spring. They worked well together, even though they worked in different ways. Correale, comparing the two, once said of Francesca, “She is intelligent and intuitive, but like a nervous racehorse.” As for Laura, “She is methodical and scientific, more like the mule that pulls the plow.”

  Laura was the first in her family to go to the university. She was short and compactly built, and spoke with a heavy Roman accent, a working-class accent that she made no effort to attenuate. Her manner was blunt and direct. The small gestures, the feigned pleasantries that oil most social interactions, were foreign to her. “I try to be polite,” she said of herself, “but even if I don’t say what I think, I cannot hide it.”

  They had both completed their undergraduate work at the University of Rome with the highest honors. Each had her senior thesis published in the prestigious scholarly art journal Storia dell’Arte. They entered the graduate program, the specialization, as it is called, on the same day and took the same classes. They developed a friendship, but of the sort mostly limited to school and work.

  They began their research at the national art library in the Piazza Venezia. They started with a book known informally as the bible of Caravaggio studies, compiled by an art historian named Mia Cinotti. It carried the subtitle Tutte le Opere—“All of the Works”—and its bibliography listed three thousand journal articles, monographs, and books on Caravaggio. In the section on the St. John, they read that most scholars believed Caravaggio had painted it between 1598 and 1601, although a few put the date as early as 1596. There were eleven known copies. Cinotti considered the Capitoline version discovered by Denis Mahon to be the authentic one, although she conceded that the Doria picture—the only important copy, by her lights—could possibly be a replica made by Caravaggio himself.

  The earliest mention of the painting came from another artist, Giovanni Baglione, who had lived and worked in Rome at the same time as Caravaggio. The two men had been rivals and bitter enemies. Neither had anything good to say about the other. Thirty years after Caravaggio’s death, Baglione published a series of short biographies of artists and sculptors in Rome. He recorded that Caravaggio—“a quarrelsome individual,” whose “paintings were excessively praised by evil people”—had painted the St. John and two other pictures for a wealthy Roman collector named Ciriaco Mattei. One of those, as it happened, was the lost Taking of Christ. After Mattei’s death, according to Cinotti, the St. John had a complicated history, passing through several hands over the centuries before finally ending up at the Capitoline Gallery.

  The history of the Doria St. John was at once much simpler and yet more mysterious. There was only a single known owner, the Doria Pamphili family. The picture had been in their possession since at least 1666, when it showed up for the first time in a family inventory, more than fifty years after Caravaggio’s death. The painting’s history before that date was unknown. Several scholars had attempted to track it back further, but nothing had come of their efforts.

  Francesca and Laura talked it over. They decided to start with the Doria painting. Since less was known about its early history, it seemed to offer the greatest possibility to make a real discovery. And besides, the Doria Pamphili palazzo was just around the corner on Via del Corso, a five-minute walk from the library.

  THE PALAZZO OCCUPIED AN ENTIRE CITY BLOCK. IT WAS A MASSIVE edifice of rusticated travertine and brick, soot-streaked and blackened by the incessant traffic on the Corso. At the center of the palazzo, visible through an entryway, the two young students saw a courtyard of orange and lemon trees and towering palms, a garden where barely a whisper of the city outside was audible. The Doria Pamphili family and its descendants had occupied this palazzo for almost four centuries. Their art gallery, with its collection of hundreds of paintings and sculptures, was open to the public.

  The family’s archive lay deep inside the palazzo. At the rear of the building, just off a narrow lane called Via della Gatta, Francesca and Laura entered a battered woode
n door, climbed a flight of dimly lit marble stairs, and went past a warren of small, drab offices, the bureaucratic center of the family’s once great holdings. A man behind a desk directed them down the hall to a pair of tall wooden doors.

  The doors opened into a spacious room with a high, coffered ceiling, a terra-cotta floor, and windows overlooking another courtyard. In the center of the room there was a stout wooden table surrounded by bookshelves filled with hundreds of old leather-bound volumes and neatly labeled boxes. Through a partially opened door, Francesca could see into the heart of the archive, a long, narrow chamber lined with gray metal bookshelves that contained thousands more volumes.

  The archivist who greeted them was a young Englishwoman, only a few years older than they, with long red hair gathered loosely behind her neck and a complexion as white as a porcelain doll. Her voice was soft, no more than a whisper. At first Francesca thought that this was how one should speak in the Doria Pamphili archive, even though there was no one else in the room. Later, when she happened to encounter the archivist on the street, Francesca realized that this was how the woman always spoke. “Like a ghost from another time,” Francesca remarked.

  The archivist explained in her whispery voice the organization of the documents. The earliest dated back to the eleventh century. The shelves contained aspects large and small of a prominent family’s passage through time—wills, contracts, and inventories; documents concerning banking, lawsuits, the arrangements of marriages, the purchase and sale of properties and goods.

  Francesca and Laura asked to see the inventory of 1666 that contained the first mention of the Doria St. John. The archivist went on silent foot to retrieve it from the back room. She returned some moments later carrying a thick volume bound in worn, faded leather.

  Seated at the table, they opened the book and leaned over it, their heads almost touching. The inventory had been drawn up at the death of the head of the household, one Camillo Pamphili, age forty-four, taken ill one day in July and dead the next from a fever of unknown origin. The notary had recorded Camillo’s possessions on heavy paper of good quality. The edges had turned brown with age, and the tome gave off a stale, musty odor, but the pages were still cream-colored and unblemished.

  They found the entry for the St. John on page 325, among a list of more than four hundred other paintings owned by Camillo Pamphili. There was no mistaking its description: “A painting of a young nude boy who caresses a sheep with white fleece, and with red below, with plants at his feet.” The entry also described a frame decorated with a crosshatch pattern and small carved leaves, and recorded the size of the painting in palmi, an old Italian measure equal to eight and a half inches.

  The entry did not name the artist, but that was not unusual. Many inventories failed to note the names of painters and sculptors, in part because artists had almost never signed their works. Up until the Renaissance, they had been regarded merely as skilled tradesmen, practitioners of a manual craft, like shoemakers or potters. And even after they began to achieve individual recognition and ascend the social ladder—after Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael—the idea of signing one’s name to a work of art remained foreign, a practice that wouldn’t fully take hold until the end of the nineteenth century.

  Francesca and Laura began working their way back in time through earlier inventories and account books, hoping to find a citation that might reveal the source of the painting. Their visits to the archive settled into a routine. They came once or twice a week, usually together, after classes at the university. They rarely saw other researchers there, just the archivist, who would appear and disappear so silently they never heard her footsteps.

  It took them hours to check the pages of a single inventory. Some of the old volumes had held up well over the years, but in others the ink had turned feathery brown on the brittle pages. They bent over the documents, trying to decipher the handwriting of notaries and bookkeepers, which was, it seemed, invariably small and difficult to puzzle out, with some entries in Latin and others in old Italian, full of abbreviations and curious spellings.

  They found no mention of the painting in any of the inventories before 1666. They broadened their search. Camillo Pamphili had been an enthusiastic collector of art. He’d bought dozens of paintings from the estates of aging cardinals, minor nobility, and other collectors. They combed through account books, receipts, and sales documents, looking for some indication of how Camillo might have obtained the St. John. The trails they followed branched out in bewildering complexity, full of detours and false leads.

  When they grew discouraged, they reminded themselves that this painting had not simply materialized out of thin air. It had a history, if only that history could be known.

  4

  CORREALE CALLED FRANCESCA AND LAURA SEVERAL TIMES A WEEK, usually during the evening. His calls always began with an announcement of some new development. “Una cosa tremenda!” he would exclaim, and then go on at length about some scientific detail that researchers had discovered in an X ray of one or another of Caravaggio’s paintings.

  To Francesca, it never seemed like a “cosa tremenda.” Even worse, Correale seemed to call just as she was walking out the door, or late at night when she was about to fall asleep. She’d hear in his voice the tone of someone who was settling in for an hour-long chat. She thought of him living alone in his tiny apartment with unpacked boxes, thinking about his wife, who was living with another man. He had a precarious air about him, Francesca once remarked, as if the ground beneath his feet had shifted. In moments of good cheer, he addressed her and Laura as “tesoro” and “cara,” while at other moments, when something small happened to upset him, he’d fly into a fury, eyes bulging and hand smacking the table. He scared Francesca at those moments. She started avoiding his phone calls. Laura tolerated him better. She didn’t hesitate to yell back at him. Once, when he called after midnight, she said in an angry voice: “Giampaolo! Don’t you know what time it is? Don’t you think I sleep?” He apologized, Laura told Francesca, but then he kept talking anyway and Laura didn’t have the heart to hang up on him.

  ONE WINTER AFTERNOON, ALONE IN THE DORIA PAMPHILI archive, Francesca came across a large collection of letters bound with string, written by Girolamo Pamphili, a cardinal who had died in 1610. He had lived in Rome during Caravaggio’s day and he would have known of the painter’s celebrity. His circle of acquaintances included men such as Ciriaco Mattei, the owner of the other St. John, and Cardinal Del Monte and Vincenzo Giustiniani, all of whom had bought paintings directly from Caravaggio. Francesca thought it might be worthwhile to read these letters.

  Laura dismissed this idea as a waste of time, but Francesca decided to try anyway. She began at random, picking a letter out of the thick batch. And she succumbed to the delirium of the researcher. Girolamo’s letters contained a portrait of Rome, detailed and domestic, lost to time. He wrote at length about buying a fancy new carriage, about the oppressive heat of the Roman summer and his plans to escape to his country villa, about dinner parties, church politics, and also about his health and hygiene. He fell ill in his early fifties—a problem with his bronchi and lungs, he wrote to a friend. Confined to bed, with time on his hands, he described in detail his treatment, his diet, the periodic bleedings, the leeches applied to his skin to draw poisons out. And then his letters ended abruptly. The ailment, whatever it was, had killed him.

  Francesca was captivated by this account of a life, but she found nothing relating to the painting and no mention of Caravaggio. Of course, she’d read only a small sampling of the letters. She realized that she could spend months sitting in the Pamphili archive reading. Perhaps she would find something important, but the chances were against it. And she didn’t have months. Laura had been right—if she was trying to find the origins of the Doria painting, Francesca was wasting her time.

  FRANCESCA, LIKE ALL STUDENTS OF ART HISTORY, KNEW THE broad outlines of Caravaggio’s life. He had been resurrected from obscurity, in large par
t by Roberto Longhi, who had written in 1941 that Caravaggio was “one of the least known painters of Italian art.” His eclipse occurred with astonishing rapidity. His realism had initially attracted many followers—the Caravaggisti, they were called—but the critics of his era found his paintings coarse and vulgar. They said that he did not understand the true essence of art and beauty, that he merely copied what he saw before him, that his work was no more than a “base imitation of nature.” By the end of the seventeenth century, he was regarded as a minor painter of low repute. The years passed and few art connoisseurs bothered to take note of him. One who did, the nineteenth-century English critic John Ruskin, wrote in disgust that Caravaggio fed “upon horror and ugliness, and filthiness of sin.”

  When Longhi put together his Caravaggio exhibition in Milan in 1951, many of the visitors, art historians among them, knew little or nothing about the artist. His paintings had long been consigned to the back rooms and storage bins of galleries and museums.

  And then, in the years since that exhibition, Caravaggio scholarship suddenly, miraculously, blossomed into an industry. His rebirth into the world of art was swift, the mirror image of his disappearance three centuries earlier. Nowadays, it seemed to Francesca, almost every art historian with an interest in the seicento had a Caravaggio article in the works, and museums everywhere wanted to put on a Caravaggio exhibition, even if they had only one or two of his paintings. She called it “the Caravaggio disease.” Sometimes she feared she would also be infected by it.

  The accounts of much of his life remained sketchy. He arrived in Rome in 1592, in the late summer, or perhaps early autumn. He was twenty-one years old. He had come to Rome from Milan. Most likely he had walked, keeping company with wayfarers who banded together for protection against robbers. He entered the city’s ancient walls through the Porta del Popolo, and from there he made his way to the Campo Marzio, the most densely populated district of the city. It was then, as it is now, a crowded district of narrow, winding lanes and shadowed passageways, opening every so often onto a sunlit piazza. The larger streets, the Via del Corso and the Via di Ripetta, were paved with cobbles, but most others were unpaved, dusty in summer, muddy in winter. There were beggars and alms-seekers at every turn, fortune-tellers, jugglers, minstrels, prostitutes, street urchins, pilgrims, postulants, and, of course, priests in their black robes, and the endless cacophony of voices in dozens of dialects and languages. It was a city of odors, ripe and foul, chamber pots emptied every morning from windows overlooking the streets, in the marketplaces discarded vegetables and fruit rotting in piles on the ground, stray dogs scavenging around the butchers’ stalls and the fishmongers’ markets for offal amid the blood and flies.