The Lost Painting

by Jonathan Harr

  The Bibliotheca Hertziana stayed open until nine o’clock every night, and Francesca rarely left before then. At her table, she collected dozens of articles and monographs about Caravaggio and began reading through them. Many offered nothing particularly new or interesting, just the background noise of art scholars going about the business of advancing their opinions or disputing the opinions of their colleagues. Sometimes in an article, a real piece of information—an actual fact, a date, a contract—would emerge from the vast tangled swamps of archives. Then it would be scrutinized and interpreted by the confraternity of Caravaggio scholars, and if it withstood examination, it would assume its place in the assembled landscape of Caravaggio’s life.

  That landscape was a mere patchwork of moments. Only recently, for example, had scholars discovered that Caravaggio had been born in 1571 and not 1573, as they had long assumed. It was known from documents found in Milan, near his birthplace in the town of Caravaggio, that he had been apprenticed at the age of thirteen to a painter of minor consequence named Simone Peterzano. No one knew whether he’d finished that apprenticeship, or why he’d left Milan to come to Rome. He could read and write—an inventory of his possessions taken at the time of his eviction from a house in the Campo Marzio listed a dozen books, although none of the titles—but not a single letter or document written by him had survived. Only the police records captured a few moments with the sort of immediacy and detail that Caravaggio himself had captured in his paintings. There was the afternoon of April 24, 1604, when he flung an earthen plate of cooked artichokes in the face of a waiter named Pietro de Fosaccia at the Osteria del Moro. Or the night of November 18, when he was stopped by the police near the Piazza del Popolo for carrying a sword and dagger and, after presenting a permit for the arms, told the police, “Ti ho in culo,” “Shove it up your ass.” On the evening of July 29, 1605, he struck a young lawyer named Mariano Pasqualone with his sword in the Piazza Navona. The lawyer, wounded in the head, told the police that he and Caravaggio had argued the day before over a girl named Lena who worked as a model for the painter—“She is Michelangelo’s girl,” the lawyer said.

  From her table on the third floor of the Hertziana, Francesca could look out the French doors and see the places where these events and a dozen others in the police reports had occurred. The layout of the streets and piazzas of central Rome remained more or less the same today as four hundred years ago. Yet for all these details, pieced together like a mosaic to construct a narrative of his life, Caravaggio himself remained unknown, an enigma.

  7

  FRANCESCA BORROWED HER SISTER SILVIA’S CAR FOR THE TRIP TO Recanati. Silvia had just bought the car used, a type known as an A 112. It was tiny, with a forty-three-horsepower engine that coughed and shuddered when Francesca shifted gears. The bumper was loose and there were rust spots on the fenders, which had once been blue but had faded to gray. Through a hole in the floorboards, Francesca could see the pavement passing beneath her feet.

  She left home on an April morning, a week after Easter. In Rome, the day was sparkling and the skies a deep blue, the temperature sweetly springlike. Francesca drove through crowded streets to the apartment where Laura lived with her mother and brother in the south of the city, near Via Marconi. Francesca was not, as she herself readily admitted, a skillful driver. She drove slowly, not out of caution but because of distraction: her mind was forever wandering to issues more interesting to her than driving. Motorists behind her would honk their horns and gesticulate angrily as they passed her. She always looked mystified—large eyes opened wide—at their ire.

  Laura put her overnight bag in the backseat and they set off, their spirits high, laughing and looking forward to an adventure. Within a few minutes, however, Laura began to get worried. It seemed that Francesca had no idea where she was going. She made one wrong turn, and then another. Laura began giving directions. When Francesca reached into the backseat to retrieve a book she wanted to show Laura, talking all the while, the car veered toward the sidewalk. Laura gasped. She could endure it no longer.

  “Listen, Francesca,” she said, “I think it would be better if I drove.”

  Francesca happily agreed.

  In Laura’s capable hands, they left Rome without incident, heading north on the Via Salaria, following the ancient Roman route toward the Adriatic. The trip to Recanati would take them over the Apennine Mountains, the spine of Italy, to the Adriatic Sea. In little more than an hour they reached the foothills. Ahead of them lay snowcapped peaks, shrouded in mist. A chilly breeze came up through the holes in the floorboards. The car’s tiny engine rattled, the gears made grinding sounds. As the grades grew steeper, traffic on the two-lane road began to back up behind them. Laura pulled over to the right, to the edge of the pavement, and they climbed in slow motion. Laura said they might have to get out and push the car to the top. Francesca looked worried, but Laura laughed.

  Cresting a long rise, they could see off to their right the great peak of Gran Sasso—the Big Stone, the highest of the Apennines. On the descent, the car gathered momentum. Laura discovered that the brakes were not much better than the engine, but the road was wide and the curves gentle, and Laura liked speed. In the far distance, they saw the dark blue horizontal line of the Adriatic, dividing sky and earth. At the coast, at the small town of Giulanova, they turned left and drove north along the shoreline to Ancona. The day was so clear and bright that they could see the faint outlines of the Dalmatian coast across the Adriatic.

  THEY ARRIVED AT RECANATI SHORTLY AFTER TWO IN THE AFTERnoon. The town was eight miles inland from the coast, built a millennium ago on a hilltop. The little car struggled up the winding road, past groves of olives, in the shadow of an ancient defensive wall, crumbling in places, that still encircled the town. As they climbed, the countryside spread out before them like a storybook land—the Adriatic to the east, the Apennines to the west, and neighboring towns shimmering in the sunlight on their own hilltops, rising from the undulating plains below.

  They entered the town through the remains of an old gate and drove down a narrow street paved in cobbles. They had made reservations at La Ginestra, a hotel named after a famous poem by the nineteenth-century writer Giacomo Leopardi. They went down Via Leopardi and past the central piazza of the town, Piazza Leopardi, which was of course dominated by a bronze statue of Leopardi. The poet, who had died young—he was partially blind and suffered a spinal deformity that had bent him nearly double—had repeatedly tried to escape the place of his birth. He regarded it as a virtual prison. Now he was permanently entombed there. The town was small enough that they didn’t bother to ask directions. It’s the sort of place, remarked Laura, where everybody knows if you bought a new scarf, or how many lovers your mother had.

  The hotel was run by a family, the same family that had run it for generations. From a door in the rear emerged a middle-aged woman, smiling and wiping her hands on an apron. All twenty-eight rooms had been occupied over Easter with tourists, said the woman. Now Francesca and Laura were the only guests. There was a small breakfast room, each table with a pink tablecloth and a vase of flowers, and windows looking out onto a garden. The sitting room had an upright piano and a TV. It looked as if it was used more by the family as their living room than by paying guests. Children’s drawings and schoolbooks and homework papers were spread on the desk. Correale had agreed to pay the bill—forty-five dollars a night—for a single room with two beds.

  The woman gave them directions to the Palazzo Antici-Mattei. “Just a short walk,” she said. Everything in Recanati was just a short walk away. Turn right outside the hotel, go past the bar Il Diamante, past the church of San Vito, and then right again on Via Antici. They couldn’t miss it.

  They set off promptly, encountering only a few people, mostly elderly, on the street. A breeze from the sea made the air feel cooler in Recanati than in Rome, and they wore their jackets. In five minutes they reached the palazzo, at number 5 Via Antici. It was three stories high, built
of brick and covered by an old stucco finish that had fallen away in places, stained with streaks of rust and moss. The large wooden door had been painted green, but the paint was cracked and peeling now, as were the closed, sagging shutters along the row of windows on the upper floor.

  Laura rang the bell. They stepped back and composed themselves, wanting to present a pleasing aspect to the old woman. A minute passed, and then another. Laura rang the bell again. They could hear it sounding distantly inside the building, but no one came to the door. Francesca peered through the heavy iron grating that covered the ground-floor windows, but she could see nothing. Once again they rang the bell, and this time Laura made a few heavy thuds of her fist on the door. Nothing.

  “What should we do?” asked Francesca, gazing around.

  Another, smaller door fifteen feet away seemed to be part of the building. They decided to knock there. They heard voices and movement inside, and at last an old woman, bent over a cane, hair gray and wispy, appeared. She was wrapped in several sweaters and wore two pairs of glasses, one atop the other, which had the effect of greatly magnifying her eyes. She was missing several teeth. She peered up at them suspiciously.

  “We have an appointment to visit the Marchesa,” Laura said. “But no one seems to be home next door.”

  “Yes, yes,” said the old woman, “the Marchesa is there.” She told them to wait and disappeared into the darkness of the room. A moment later she returned with a large key in her hand. When the Marchesa was away in Rome, she explained, she and her husband took care of the palazzo.

  She led Francesca and Laura a few paces down the street to the green door, moving with surprising speed and agility on her cane. They followed her into the entryway. In front of them a large courtyard with a few small lemon and fig trees lay open to the sky. In another era, it would have been a gracious setting, but now it had a dilapidated, untended look, with a pile of dead leaves blown into a corner, weeds sprouting here and there from cracks in the tiled floor. They stood in the entryway while the old woman went in search of the Marchesa. They could hear her high, raspy call—“Maria! Maria!”—fading down one of the corridors, and then silence.

  “One old lady in search of another,” Laura whispered to Francesca.

  A few minutes later they heard voices coming toward them and the stumping of the old custodian’s cane on the tiled floor. Then two women appeared side by side. To Francesca, they seemed to be about the same age, but they were a study in contrasts. The Marchesa was tall and thin, her carriage erect, and she wore a colorful spring dress, a bit out of style perhaps, but still elegant. Her face was long and narrow, her eyes deep blue, blond hair turning to gray, cut short and neatly coiffed. There was something about her appearance that put Francesca in mind of British aristocracy, of the way, Francesca imagined, that Agatha Christie might have looked. Except, of course, the Marchesa’s ancestry was Roman as far back as anyone could trace.

  The Marchesa greeted them politely but with reserve. Francesca felt a momentary impulse to curtsy. She introduced herself and Laura, and the Marchesa held out a frail, trembling hand. On closer encounter, the Marchesa showed her age. Her face was deeply lined, and her lipstick, thickly and inexpertly applied, had smudged at the corners of her mouth and the margins of her narrow lips.

  “So,” said the Marchesa, “you have come to see the archive? Now, what is it that you are searching for? What is the subject?”

  They explained—the origins of Caravaggio’s painting of St. John, once owned by the Marchesa’s ancestor Ciriaco Mattei. Francesca had already explained this to the Marchesa some weeks ago on the telephone, but she did not seem to remember.

  “Well, since you are here,” the Marchesa said, “I will let you enter. But in my opinion, it will be a waste of time. This German woman has already gone through everything. We have become friends. She has seen everything and done everything.”

  The Marchesa led the way to the archive, down a flight of stone stairs to the cellar. They entered a large rectangular room, dimly illuminated by the daylight that filtered through two rectangular windows high on the opposite wall. There was no glass in the windows; they were covered only by a rusted iron grating and opened directly at street level. The Marchesa turned on a light—a single bare bulb suspended from the high ceiling. At the center of the room there was a long wooden table, squarely placed under the light of the bare bulb. Several opened cardboard boxes sat on the table, along with a few large leather-bound volumes and folders containing loose sheets of paper. Many more boxes sat on the brick floor. Along the walls, the Marchesa had installed—recently, by the looks of it—gray metal shelves to hold the archives.

  Francesca thought of the Doria Pamphili archive, with its high ceilings, shaded lamps, and tiled floors. This place felt damp and smelled musty, the odor of decay.

  The Marchesa lit a cigarette. She was, Francesca and Laura would soon learn, an inveterate smoker. For the last few years, she told them, she had occupied herself with reorganizing the archives according to a new scheme she had discussed with the German woman. “Un grande impegno”—“a big undertaking”—the Marchesa remarked, gazing at the hundreds of volumes and folios on the gray metal shelves.

  She opened a small notebook and asked them to sign their names. “Now, what is it you are looking for?” she asked again. And again Francesca explained. They would start with the inventories of the 1600s, and then try to find the account books.

  The Marchesa donned a long white cotton shift that buttoned up the middle, the sort of coat a doctor might wear, and a pair of cotton gloves. “To protect myself from the dust,” she explained. Indeed, the room was dusty. In the weak shafts of sunlight from the small windows, Francesca could see motes of dust, and the table was covered with a fine grit blown in from the street.

  Francesca’s eyes went to the leather-bound volumes on the steel shelves. Most were identified with labels on their spines, the legacy of an archival organization created in the early nineteenth century, when the documents were still housed in the family palazzo in Rome. But that organization had been turned topsy-turvy with the transport of everything to Recanati. Francesca ran her hand along the books. She felt as if she were touching history.

  The Marchesa directed them to a collection of inventories from the early 1600s. Most of these were contained in bound volumes, but a few were simply loose, in boxes that opened much like books. The first inventory, from 1603, concerned the possessions of Girolamo, the second of the three Mattei brothers. He had been a cardinal, an able administrator who had directed the city’s Department of Streets and then the Department of Prisons. Some scholars believed that he had been Caravaggio’s patron, and not Ciriaco. But his inventory recorded only eighteen paintings at the time of his death at age fifty-six, and these were devotional images of little consequence. It was clear to Francesca and Laura that Cardinal Girolamo Mattei had little interest in art.

  The second and third inventories, dated 1604 and 1613, belonged to Asdrubale, Ciriaco’s younger brother. Both had been compiled during his lifetime, at Asdrubale’s request, by his maggiordomo, who oversaw the operations of the palazzo. They were bound in leather and much lengthier than Girolamo’s. Asdrubale had built his own palazzo, a grand and imposing edifice, next to that of his two brothers, and had spent a fortune furnishing and decorating it. The German scholar had already examined Asdrubale’s inventories at great length. Francesca and Laura leafed through them quickly and put them aside.

  It was the inventory of the oldest brother, Ciriaco, that they most wanted to see. He had died in 1614, at the age of seventy-two, an advanced age in that day. He had left his entire estate to his son, Giovanni Battista. But it wasn’t until two years later, on December 4, 1616, that the son ordered an inventory of his own possessions and those he’d inherited from his father. The volume that contained this inventory was also bound; it ran some one hundred and fifty pages, on heavy paper. It had the name “Giovan Battista Mattei” on the cover, but it had somehow e
scaped the old filing system by which the archive had been organized. Francesca and Laura realized that they were the first to lay hands on it in decades.

  They sat at the table, shoulder to shoulder under the solitary lightbulb, and opened the book. It was organized by category—furniture, statuary, books, jewelry, rugs and tapestries, silverware, carriages and horses, property of every conceivable sort. The list of paintings began on page twenty-one. The handwriting, by a notary named Ludovico Carletti, was bold and clear, the ink as fresh-looking as if it had been applied a week ago. Laura moved her finger down the list of paintings, reading each aloud in a soft voice. The Marchesa sat at the far end of the long wooden table, smoking a cigarette and casting an inquisitive eye at the two young women.

  At the bottom of the page, Laura’s finger stopped. They read the line together: “A painting of San Gio. Battista with his lamb by the hand of Caravaggio, with a frame decorated in gold.”

  Francesca let out a small cry of delight. They had found it, the earliest mention of the painting to come to light.

  They began whispering excitedly together. At the end of the table, the Marchesa looked up sharply. “What is going on?” she demanded. “What have you found?”

  Francesca felt compelled, for some reason she herself could not explain, to diminish the importance of their discovery. “Oh,” she replied to the Marchesa, “it is just a word in the inventory that we didn’t understand.”

  “Ah,” said the Marchesa, nodding her head. She puffed on a cigarette and went back to her work. She had three files opened in front of her and shifted papers with her white-gloved hands from one file into another. Occasionally she made a comment. “I found something concerning the building of the palazzo,” she said. “Is that something you are looking for?”