The Lost Painting

by Jonathan Harr

  Correale, dressed for the occasion in coat and tie, moved about briskly and with an air of authority, smoking his small cigars and issuing a steady stream of commentary and observations as he watched the technicians prepare their equipment. Paola Sannucci, the restorer working for Correale, was examining the painting through a large magnifying lens on a metal stand. Correale would pause now and then in his officiating to peer through the magnifying lens. After watching the examination of the Capitoline painting, he had acquired enough knowledge of the scientific jargon to sound like an expert even though without the real experts, the technicians, he would have been lost.

  The Doria painting had been shorn of its frame. It lay on a soft white cloth draped over a table. To Francesca, it had the aspect of a creature of advanced age and in grave health. At this angle, the paint surface seemed lusterless and appeared worn. The tacking edges of the painting, where the raw, unpainted canvas was nailed to the stout wooden stretcher, were concealed by strips of dark wood, apparently applied long ago to ensure a tight fit within the frame. The original canvas, whether by Caravaggio or not, was almost four hundred years old, and the fabric itself was not readily visible, even from the back of the painting. Age and the effects of gravity would have caused it to sag on the stretcher, distorting the surface of the picture. To remedy this, a second, newer canvas had been glued to the back of the original—a process called relining—during a restoration performed thirty years ago.

  Close up, Francesca could see the damage caused by time. Over its entire surface the picture had lost many tiny particles of paint, mere pinpricks—puntinature, Paola Sannucci called them—not discernible from a normal viewing distance. These particles had fallen at nearly regular intervals, at the intersections where the threads of the canvas, the warp and the weft, crossed each other and formed small nodules. The canvas had been cheap, made of poor-quality hemp and carelessly woven. Still, Caravaggio might have used just such a canvas. He had once painted a picture on a bedsheet. Another time, after he’d left the Mattei palazzo and was living alone in a small house off the Via della Scrofa, he had spread a half-finished canvas on a kitchen table and dined off the back of it.

  The earlier examination of the Capitoline St. John had revealed it to be in much better shape than the Doria, in large part because the Capitoline canvas was of higher quality, more tightly woven with linen threads of uniform diameter.

  The technical examination lasted the entire day, and for long periods Francesca and Laura had nothing to do but observe. The portable X-ray machine could capture only a small portion of the painting, and the technicians had to keep repositioning the machine, sixteen times in all, to get a composite of the entire picture. Francesca wandered in and out of the room and tried to dream up an excuse for leaving early.

  Correale had a particular interest—an obsession, one could call it—with finding incised lines in Caravaggio’s paintings. Few other Baroque painters had made these types of lines, scored with the butt end of a brush into the wet undercoat, and no one had made them in quite the same way as Caravaggio. He painted from life, from models sitting before him, and most art historians believed that he didn’t make preliminary drawings. In this, he had departed from a long-established tradition by which painters made detailed studies before applying brush to canvas. The scored lines, it was surmised, had served as a guide for positioning his models. In the finished paintings, the lines were sometimes visible to the naked eye, usually at a certain angle, in a raking light. Not every one of his paintings revealed signs of these marks. But to Caravaggio experts, their presence was almost as good as the artist’s signature.

  Two weeks earlier, during the examination of the Capitoline St. John, Correale had hoped to find incised lines, and thus add to the proof that it was Caravaggio’s original. He and Paola Sannucci and the technicians had scrutinized every inch of the painting, but in the end they had not found a scoring mark. True, there were a few faint ridges on the borders of the boy’s figure, and for a while Correale maintained that these could be scoring marks, but everyone else interpreted them merely as brushstrokes in wet paint, places where Caravaggio had defined the boy’s flesh against the dark background.

  But evidence of a different kind had emerged from beneath the surface of the Capitoline version, and it seemed to confirm the painting’s authenticity. The X rays and the infrared images had revealed a ghostly image—a pentimento—at the precise point where the boy’s arm and the curved horn of the ram intersected. The artist had painted the arm first, and then had painted the ram’s horn over the finished arm. This constituted a clear sign that the painting was the authentic one. A copyist, following the outlines of an original painting, would not have bothered to paint the arm and then paint the horn over it. The infrared images also revealed other pentimenti, in the folds and drapery of the red and white cloths, and in the foliage in the dark background. These were false starts and adjustments that no copyist would have needed to make.

  So Correale had come to accept the Capitoline as the original even before the technical examination of the Doria version. All the same, the paintings were so strikingly similar—the outline of one placed atop the other matched in almost every contour—that it seemed necessary to examine the Doria picture as fully as the Capitoline. But how, Correale wondered, could anyone make such a near perfect copy?

  This question interested Francesca, too. She thought of all the copies Roberto Longhi had found of the lost Taking of Christ. None of them had been good enough for Longhi to mistake for the original. Yet the Doria St. John had fooled him completely.

  Paola Sannucci offered an answer, based on a technique described in a seventeenth-century manual on painting. A copyist, she explained, would take a piece of paper large enough to cover the original painting, and grease it well with walnut oil, which would make it translucent. The copyist would lay the greased paper on top of the original and trace the outlines with charcoal or a soft pencil. Once he had a complete tracing, he would lightly sprinkle the reverse side of the greased paper with charcoal or some other black powder, and place the paper on a fresh canvas already primed with the ground. He would then go over the traced outlines with a stylus and transfer them precisely to the new canvas. Then, of course, he had to possess the talent to replicate Caravaggio’s colors, the sense of volume and the play of light, a task more difficult than the mechanical act of tracing contours.

  Obviously the Doria copyist would have needed both skill and unfettered access to the original painting, and this would have meant seeking the approval of Ciriaco Mattei. Francesca wondered whether the Recanati archives might contain some document, or perhaps just a notation buried among the thousands of entries, authorizing the making of a copy. It was possible that Ciriaco had commissioned the copy himself, as a gift to a powerful friend such as Cardinal Savelli’s father, who might have admired the original. One more thing, thought Francesca, to search for when she and Laura returned to Recanati.

  It was mid-afternoon when Francesca finally invented an appointment and got away from the Doria Pamphili. By then, the technical work was drawing to a close. Some items, such as a chemical analysis of the paint, would require laboratory work and specialized equipment. Whether Caravaggio himself had copied his own painting remained unresolved, a matter still left to speculation. If the paint proved to be the same used by Caravaggio in the Capitoline St. John, it would support that hypothesis. But by now, none of the investigators still believed that Caravaggio had touched this canvas, or even seen it. He had only made two known copies of his own paintings, and neither was a literal and precise copy, as this one was. It seemed unlikely that an artist of his skills and temperament, who had plenty of commissions, would spend time laboriously making an exact copy of his own work.

  13

  FRANCESCA AND LAURA BEGAN MAKING PLANS FOR ANOTHER TRIP to Recanati. They had a long list of items to look for, and they expected to spend several more days in the basement archive. That depended, of course, on the Marches
a’s good graces. It fell to Francesca to make the telephone call and ask permission for another visit.

  The Marchesa seemed pleased to hear from her. Francesca spent the first twenty minutes asking after the Marchesa’s health, the state of her garden, her nieces and nephews. Finally she brought up the subject of the archive. Had the Marchesa made progress in her new system of ordering the past? Ah, not much, the old lady replied, family matters had occupied her. Would the Marchesa mind terribly if Francesca came for another visit to the archive?

  “Oh, you may come and look around,” replied the Marchesa. “Now, tell me,” she added, “what is it you’re looking for?”

  THEY STARTED THE TRIP ON A MONDAY MORNING IN JUNE. LAURA drove her own car this time, an old Fiat Uno, which climbed the Apennines only slightly faster than the one Francesca had borrowed from her sister. By late afternoon, they had checked in to the Hotel La Ginestra, the same room as before, with two small beds. Notebooks in hand, they set out for the Mattei palazzo.

  A young woman in her thirties answered the door. In the background Francesca and Laura could hear the voices of children. A moment later the Marchesa appeared, in a long summer dress, red lipstick still smudged at the corners of her mouth. She held out a fluttering hand in greeting and introduced Francesca and Laura to her daughter-in-law. The family had come from Rome for a stay in the country, and the Marchesa, smiling and in good humor, was clearly delighted to have her relations around her.

  She led Francesca and Laura down the stone steps to the archive. It appeared unchanged from the time they’d last seen it a month before. The same bare bulb and stale, damp fungal odor of stone and earth, the same opened boxes of documents and stacks of volumes on the floor, the same piles of folders and books on the table. An ashtray full of the Marchesa’s cigarette butts, each with the crimson mark of her lipstick, lay on the table where Francesca last remembered it.

  The Marchesa donned her white coat and cotton gloves and took her customary seat at the head of the table. While she opened folders and held up old documents to scrutinize them, Francesca went over to the stack of volumes piled on top of a box on the floor, in the corner of the archive, where she’d hidden Ciriaco’s account book. It was still there, untouched.

  They began where they’d left off, going through Ciriaco’s account book to see whether they had missed an entry concerning the St. John. By the end of the day, they concluded that they had overlooked nothing. Correale would have to content himself with the record of two smaller payments that Ciriaco had made to Caravaggio for unspecified works. Clearly at least one of those payments must have been for the Capitoline St. John.

  Their research for Correale was nearly complete. The painting’s voyage across nearly four centuries of time was documented thoroughly enough to satisfy almost any art historian. The St. John had remained in the Mattei family for only twenty-two years, until 1624, before passing on to other hands. The rest of the archive would contain nothing more about the painting.

  Even so, Francesca and Laura had no thought of leaving Recanati. They knew that they were at the doorstep of an even more intriguing narrative—the story of the lost painting by Caravaggio. Had the Scotsman Hamilton Nisbet really bought the original Taking of Christ, as Longhi had speculated? And if so, how had the painting come to be attributed to a minor Dutch painter named Honthorst? The archive might reveal the answer to that.

  They spent the end of the day gathering together all the family’s inventories and account books from among the hundreds of volumes. They cleared a place on the table and arranged them chronologically, always under the curious eye of the Marchesa. That night they ate dinner at the same small restaurant near the hotel, this time on a terrace looking out toward the Adriatic, a soft summer breeze coming from the sea. Afterward they walked around the town, joining residents and the few tourists in the evening passeggiata—the promenade—traditional in small cities all over Italy.

  THE NEXT MORNING, DOWN IN THE CELLAR WITH THE MARCHESA, they started going through more inventories. They knew the earliest ones quite well now, up to the death of Ciriaco’s son, Giovanni Battista, in 1624.

  Of the paintings Caravaggio had made for Ciriaco Mattei, The Taking of Christ had remained longest with the family. Ciriaco had given The Supper at Emmaus, probably in exchange for a favor, to his powerful friend Scipione Borghese, an avid art collector and also nephew to the Pope. And in his will, Giovanni Battista had left the St. John to Caravaggio’s first patron, Cardinal Del Monte. But Giovanni Battista had specified that his cousin Paolo, the son of Asdrubale, should receive The Taking of Christ.

  Francesca and Laura came across their first surprise late that morning, in an inventory of 1676. Along with The Taking of Christ, duly noted as by the hand of Caravaggio, they saw, several pages further on, an entry that read “Copia della presa di Giesu nell’orto del Caravaggio”: “Copy of The Taking of Christ in the Garden by Caravaggio.” The entry supplied no other details about the copy, no measurements, no description of the frame.

  The next inventory, some fifty years later, cited the original by Caravaggio, and also the copy, this time as “by a disciple” of Caravaggio.

  A day later they stumbled across more information about the copy, in the account books of Asdrubale, Ciriaco’s younger brother: a payment of twelve scudi made in September 1626 to one Giovanni di Attili, a painter. The entry explicitly stated that Attili was being paid to make a copy of Caravaggio’s Taking of Christ. Asdrubale must have greatly admired the painting. He’d had the copy made soon after the death of his nephew Giovanni Battista. Perhaps he had been disappointed not to have the original, to see it go to his son instead of himself.

  Neither Francesca nor Laura had ever heard of Giovanni di Attili. He was a painter unknown to history, his life and death a mystery. But as a copyist he must have had the necessary skill to get the commission from Asdrubale. Perhaps he had also been commissioned to make the Doria Pamphili copy of the St. John. It would please Correale to find such a citation and clear up the murky origins of that painting.

  Caravaggio was one of the most copied of all painters, and The Taking of Christ was, as Roberto Longhi had discovered, one of the most frequently copied works. Most were of low quality, like the one Longhi had found in London in the 1930s. But one very good version had surfaced in Odessa, Russia. A Russian art historian had published photographs of that painting more than thirty years earlier, back in 1956, advancing it as the original. A Russian count had acquired it in Paris sometime before 1870, but its earlier history was largely unknown. Longhi and other Caravaggio experts had studied the photographs. All had agreed that it was a very good painting. A few had even embraced it as the original. But without inspecting it “nose to the canvas,” as Denis Mahon would say, most Caravaggio scholars were not willing to make a definitive judgment one way or the other. And it was difficult to inspect close up. The trip was long and complicated, requiring visa negotiations with the Soviet authorities and then several connecting flights to Odessa.

  Longhi, for one, had remained unconvinced by the Odessa version. He believed until his death that the original was probably somewhere in Scotland, masquerading as a Honthorst. If that was true, and the Odessa version really was just a very good copy, good enough to give some experts pause, then it might be the work of Giovanni di Attili. Like the copyist of the Doria St. John, Di Attili had enjoyed unfettered access to the original.

  LAURA AND FRANCESCA WORKED IN THE DARK ARCHIVE FOR three days, glimpsing the summer sun from the small grated windows above their heads. The Marchesa kept them company, and when she grew weary, she would summon the elderly housekeeper who always wore two heavy sweaters even on the warmest days. Sometimes the Marchesa would send down her daughter-in-law, who would chat with them and leaf in desultory fashion through one of the volumes.

  By the third day Francesca began to yearn for the sun. She felt she had grown pale and sickly-looking after so much time in the clammy cellar. She had plans to attend the wedding
of a friend in Rome the following week and she knew that a young man she’d met the previous fall would also be there. She’d had a brief fling with him. She didn’t want to have another, but all the same, for reasons of vanity, she thought a few hours at the beach, under the Adriatic sun, would make her look better.

  She tried to convince Laura to go with her. Laura wasn’t interested in the beach. Francesca explained her ulterior motive and the young man.

  Laura said, “I thought you and Luciano were together.”

  Luciano was a boy Francesca had known since her first year in high school, when they were both fourteen years old. Laura had never met Luciano, but she’d heard Francesca talk about him. He was in England, studying philosophy at Oxford. The previous year, Francesca had spent time with him in London, when she’d had a two-month grant to study at the Warburg Institute. They’d had a romance, which had grown complicated because Francesca didn’t take it seriously, but Luciano did.

  “Everyone seems to think we’re together,” replied Francesca. “But it’s not really so. He’s more of a really good friend.”

  “Oh,” said Laura. “I thought it was more than that.”

  Laura still wouldn’t go to the beach. But they did agree to take some time off and visit the town of Loreto, a few miles away, to see the famous basilica. It was said that Caravaggio had gone there once. He had later painted a picture of the Madonna of Loreto for a chapel in the church of Sant’Agostino near the Piazza Navona. Baglione and others had criticized it as lacking in decorum because it depicted the dirty feet of the pilgrims kneeling in front of Mary.

  THEY FOLLOWED THE TAKING OF CHRIST THROUGH ONE INVEN-tory after another. The language varied slightly—in some places the painting was called The Taking of Christ in the Garden, in others The Capture of Christ, and in yet another Christ Betrayed by Judas—but it was always attributed to Caravaggio. Most entries also mentioned its size—eight palmi by six—and its black frame decorated with gold filigree.