The first alteration in this description came in 1753, when the painting was recorded as measuring only six palmi by seven. By then, the Taking had been moved twice to new locations in the palazzo. Possibly the inventorist had made a mistake in the measurement. Or perhaps the picture had been cut down slightly to fit its new quarters.
Near the end of the 1753 inventory, they found an entry for a “large painting” called The Betrayal by Judas. It hung upstairs, in a room in the family’s private apartments. Was this the copy by Giovanni di Attili? It seemed so, but there was no way for Francesca and Laura to know for certain, since the entry contained no other details and no measurements, merely a valuation of less than two scudi.
It is in the nature of such inventories, performed over two centuries and by different hands, to vary in style and detail. For the most part, however, each new Mattei inventorist appeared to have consulted the work of his predecessors. But when Francesca and Laura began examining the inventory of 1793, they found themselves confronted with a new and completely strange landscape, a collection that bore only a faint resemblance to the Mattei galleries. It was here that they saw the attribution for The Taking of Christ suddenly change, after almost two hundred years, from Caravaggio to Gherardo della Notte. Moreover, the painting was said to measure “6 palmi riquad.ti”—it was now recorded as square instead of rectangular.
The particulars of the Caravaggio painting—if, indeed, it was still the same painting by Caravaggio—were not the only details scrambled in this inventory. Many other works had new attributions, new measurements, different titles. It was a tossed salad of an inventory, jumbled and confused, and utterly untrustworthy.
Before long, Francesca and Laura discovered how this had happened. In the archive, they came across a guidebook called An Instructive Itinerary of Rome, published seven years before the 1793 inventory. Written by one Giuseppe Vasi, it was replete with errors, the same sorts of errors that later infected the inventory, among them the attribution of The Taking of Christ to Honthorst. The family was in decline. The inventorist they hired was either incompetent or lazy. He had clearly relied on Vasi’s guidebook alone, perpetuating one confusion after another.
Another guidebook of that era, by a German named Von Ramdohr, took note of the mistaken attribution to Honthorst. Von Ramdohr had no doubts about who had painted the picture. “Judas betrays Christ with his kiss, by Caravaggio,” wrote Von Ramdohr, adding, “Others say it is by Honthorst, which is less likely.”
So Longhi’s intuition appeared to have been correct. The Scotsman Hamilton Nisbet had bought Caravaggio’s Taking of Christ, believing it was by Honthorst. But what had happened to the copy, which had disappeared from the records? In an inventory so confused, could the original have been mistaken for the copy? There was simply no way to tell.
Francesca and Laura spent another full day in the archives, wading through more inventories and account books. Each noticed that the other had dark circles under her eyes from the poor light and eyestrain. Their hands felt cramped from hours of copying entries into their notebooks, their backs ached from bending over the old volumes.
They left Recanati on the afternoon of the fourth day, their notebooks full. In Rome the next evening, they went together to see Correale. He had a new task for them. The exhibition catalogue would contain several essays on the history, iconography, and technical investigations of the two St. John paintings. Correale had planned at first to incorporate their findings into the essay by Rosalia Varoli-Piazza on the paintings’ histories. But now, with the smile of someone bestowing an award, he told them that they should write a separate essay on the archive and their findings.
This pleased Francesca and Laura. They had made the discoveries, and they deserved the credit for them, not just a footnote in someone else’s article. But they had already made a commitment to write a short article for Art e Dossier. They had not yet told Correale about that.
14
THE REST OF THE SUMMER PASSED QUICKLY. FRANCESCA ATTENDED her friend’s wedding and saw the young man she knew at the reception. They smiled and flirted, which was all she had wanted. She and Laura divided up the task of writing the essay for Correale. Each worked on her own. They saw each other infrequently, meeting only a few times at the library to coordinate their efforts and review what each other had written. It was a good time to work, the season of tourists, the time of year when most Romans made plans to leave the city, when shops and restaurants shuttered their doors in the August heat.
Francesca was also busy planning for another trip to London in September. She had won a second research grant, this time for a year, to the Warburg Institute, part of the University of London’s School of Advanced Study.
The Warburg was familiar ground to her. Luciano had convinced her to come the previous year. He’d described the libraries at the universities in England, open until late at night and on weekends, where you could wander from floor to floor and take down whatever books interested you. He told her about how he’d spent the entire night in a library at Oxford, eating in the cafeteria and studying and writing until the sun rose. They were both accustomed to the national library in Rome, always crowded, closed on weekends, where you could request only two books at a time and then had to wait, sometimes for hours, for a bored civil servant to fetch them. Compared with that, Luciano told Francesca, “England is like arriving in paradise.”
ON THAT FIRST TRIP A YEAR EARLIER, FRANCESCA HAD ARRANGED to rent a room in London with another student. But those plans had fallen through at the last minute, and she’d arrived having no place to stay. Luciano was in Oxford, an hour away by train. She called him, and he gave her the name of a friend in London. One friend led to another, until finally Francesca had the address of a large house on Sloane Square, in Chelsea. She’d been told that the owner, a young Italian named Roberto Pesenti, often took in boarders.
Bags in hand, Francesca rang at the door of the house on Sloane Square, but no one answered. A sign tacked to the door informed her that there was a key under the mat. She opened the door and wandered in. In the dining room, she encountered a small, irate-looking woman wearing an apron and vigorously vacuuming a rug littered with crumbs. On the table was a tub containing the remains of a sangria—wine dregs and rotting fruit. The woman, evidently the maid, looked up at Francesca. Smiling politely, Francesca asked in English if Roberto Pesenti was present. The woman’s eyes narrowed at Roberto’s name, she brought up a wagging finger and spoke rapidly and with obvious disapproval in a language that Francesca recognized as Portuguese. Francesca tried Italian, to no avail. The maid went back to vacuuming. Francesca looked around the house—three floors, wide hallways, impressive staircase, many bedrooms, and a plethora of nooks and crannies. Francesca found a small room, no bigger than a closet, with a narrow bed. It was the only bedroom that seemed unoccupied.
The house, it turned out, had an ever-changing cast of residents. Many were Italians, but at any given time there might also be Spaniards, Swiss, French, Swedes, Germans, and Americans. People came and went. The cooking was communal, big dinner parties routine. In the course of her first day there, Francesca met several of the residents, all young, mostly graduate students. Roberto, she learned, was himself studying finance and working at Goldman Sachs. No one seemed to know precisely where he had gone. Spain, someone thought. He often took business trips, she was told.
The room with the narrow bed was too small for Francesca to work in, so she installed her books and files on a credenza in the now spotless dining room. She used the dining room table as her desk.
The next morning she found her way to the Warburg Institute. She was greeted by a member of the staff and given a tour of the facilities, something that would never have happened in the milling, chaotic halls of the University of Rome. In the library, order and quiet reigned, the study areas seemed vast, and everything was available to her for the asking. She looked around in amazement. For someone who loved libraries, it was, as Luciano had promis
ed her, a type of paradise.
Late that afternoon, back at the house on Sloane Square, Francesca was at the dining room table working when she heard someone come in the front door. Behind her she heard a voice ask in English, “Excuse me, but do we know each other?”
Francesca turned and saw a man a few years older than she, small in stature, sparrow-like with a narrow face and thin, dun-colored hair. He was dressed in a dark blue business suit. She replied in English, heavily accented, saying her name and that she had just recently arrived. Immediately the man spoke to her in fluent Italian, with a Milanese accent. It was Roberto Pesenti. He looked a bit perplexed, perhaps even exasperated, as she explained her circumstances, that she just needed a place to stay briefly until she found other lodgings.
He asked what she was studying.
Art history, she replied, at the Warburg Institute.
His eyes lit up. He had just taken an art history course at Christie’s, the auction house. He’d wanted to study art, but his family thought he should get a background in finance. Most of his friends worked in investment banks or were studying to become lawyers.
Francesca went out to dinner that night with Roberto and another resident of the house, a young man from Naples. Roberto explained that he was on a campaign to curb the chaos in the house. The Portuguese maid had given him a lecture. But he told Francesca she could stay until she found another place. They talked about art and the Warburg Institute and nightlife in London, a subject the man from Naples seemed to know a lot about. Roberto spoke English with near fluency and could mimic the refined diction of the upper class. He told Francesca that he’d known immediately she was from Rome because of her strong accent. She frowned, a little offended. Most Italians considered Roman accents coarse and uncultured, the equivalent of a Cockney accent in Britain. The man from Naples said, with genuine surprise in his voice, “Oh, really? I thought she was from Tuscany.” Tuscan accents are viewed as elegant, the purest form of Italian. Francesca clapped her hands with delight and laughed at Roberto, who laughed along with her. She realized he had been teasing her.
ON WEEKENDS LUCIANO TOOK THE TRAIN IN FROM OXFORD TO see Francesca. During the week, they talked often on the telephone, long conversations about life, art, and philosophy. She found it easy to talk with him, “about anything and everything,” she once said. When he came to London, they went out to dinners, to movies, to parties, often in the company of other Italians and foreigners.
Luciano had once told Francesca that he’d fallen in love with her when they were in high school, the moment he’d laid eyes on her, on their first day at the Liceo Lucrezio Caro. She’d dismissed that with a roll of her eyes as romantic exaggeration, but he insisted that it was true. He had been too shy ever to ask her out, too shy that first year to say anything to her. He came from a rural district north of Rome where his father had a medical practice, an area of agricultural fields alternating with large, bleak concrete apartment blocks known as dormitorios. As a teenager, he’d been tall and skinny, with elbows and knees that sometimes felt as if they didn’t belong to his body. He wore glasses and he dressed differently from his classmates, in clothes that looked, Francesca would later say, as if they had been bought by his mother.
Francesca had been the best student at the liceo, winning one academic prize after another. She had been invited to compete for a position in the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, the most prestigious university in Italy. But her scholastic achievements embarrassed her and she did her best to conceal them. Her boyfriend back then rode a motorcycle, wore the right clothes, was handsome, outgoing, athletic, and in constant danger of failing at school. Luciano said that Francesca was the smartest person he’d ever met, but his classmates had widely regarded him as the school genius for the way he challenged the received wisdom of their textbooks and their professors.
They’d gone their separate ways at the University of Rome. They found their own paths through the chaos of the university, through the milling crowds of students and the interminable lines, the lecture halls and libraries so packed that every chair, windowsill, and bit of floor space was occupied by a warm body. The university, the second largest in the world after Cairo’s, offered no orientation, no advisers, counselors, or tutors to guide students. It was, Luciano once remarked, “a true Darwinian context—only the fittest survive.”
And then one day, after three years, Luciano called Francesca. Would she mind giving his younger brother some advice on courses and professors? At the end of the conversation, they agreed to meet for dinner with some of their old acquaintances.
They began seeing each other more often, always in the company of other friends. Their relationship was chaste, involving nothing more than the customary kiss on the cheek in greeting. They were friends, not lovers.
That changed during Francesca’s first stay in London. One night, she and Luciano went to a dinner party at the apartment of another Italian studying in England. They both knew everyone there. It was a night like any other. Luciano tended to be quiet at such gatherings, Francesca talkative. Luciano, by his own admission, had little talent for the idle, good-humored chatter of dinner parties. Francesca, on the other hand, moved with ease from one person to another, full of gaiety and laughter, able to make each conversation seem personal. At the end of the evening, they walked out together. On the street, they fell into a deep discussion and walked for several blocks. Finally they arrived at the house on Sloane Square. Francesca paused and turned to face Luciano. It was late, and the street was silent and dark. She looked intently at him, eyes serious, as he talked. He noticed a change in her demeanor and saw that her gaze had grown soft and expectant. He looked down at his shoes, and mumbled that it was late, he should be on his way. She blinked and looked at him quizzically. “Yes, of course. I’ll see you soon,” she said, and turned to go up the steps.
Luciano told himself that he was a fool. She had expected him to kiss her. Or at least, he thought that was what she expected. He had wanted to kiss her; he should have kissed her. But what if he’d read the situation wrong? If he had kissed her and she had not expected it, it might ruin a friendship.
The following night they again met with a group of friends. After dinner at a restaurant, they again walked together to the house on Sloane Square. They did not get far before Francesca stopped abruptly and turned to Luciano. She leaned forward and kissed him full on the mouth. She pulled back and smiled at him. “I had to kiss you,” she said with a laugh, “because last night you should have kissed me.”
“Yes,” he said, “but it seems that I never do the obvious thing.”
They spent that night together. To Francesca it was not an event of great consequence. She still considered Luciano her friend, not her lover. “I’ve just never thought of him in that way, as a possible boyfriend,” she’d said to Laura and others.
For Luciano, it was different. Not long after, he told Francesca that he had been in love with her since high school. Francesca claimed she didn’t really believe him, even when she heard him say this to others. She made light of it. “You only think you love me,” she told him. “You just don’t want to take the time away from your books to find anyone else.”
But in time she came to understand that he was serious. “I was not being honest with him,” she said later. “I knew that for him it was different. But I pretended that I didn’t know. I pretended that it was just friendship when I knew that it was something more for him.”
He’d say to her, “Okay, you’re not in love with me now, but you will be. I’m persistent.”
FOR HER SECOND TRIP TO LONDON, FRANCESCA FOUND A BASEment apartment near King’s and Fulham roads. The Sloane Square house had been too distracting for serious study. And this time Francesca was coming with a Roman friend, Caterina, who also had a research grant in London. They had known each other since their first years as undergraduates at La Sapienza, the University of Rome. Apart from an interest in art history, they shared the same sense of humor a
nd, being roughly the same size, they also shared their clothes. Neither had a propensity for neatness. They were, in short, ideal roommates.
The apartment was small and dark, but efficiently organized, far enough from the noise and tumult of central London and yet convenient to the Warburg. It was, Francesca told Luciano, ideal for her purposes.
She made a second home of the Warburg’s vast library. She usually arrived late morning—she was a late riser, eyes soft and occluded with sleep and dreams until almost noon—and stayed among the books at her favorite table until long after nightfall. She was working on several projects at once, fulfilling her obligations for the Warburg grant, still writing the unfinished essay for Correale, and pursuing the fate of the Mattei paintings.
Between projects, she looked for information on William Hamilton Nisbet and his art collection. Her first efforts, searching under the family name, yielded no interesting results. She changed tactics and began searching for catalogues of Scottish exhibitions in which Hamilton Nisbet’s collection might have appeared. The earliest listing was for a catalogue entitled Old Masters and Scottish National Portraits, published in 1884 in Edinburgh. She went into the stacks to retrieve the catalogue. Standing there, book in hand, she flipped through the pages. It contained an introductory essay about the exhibition and lists of paintings and their attributions, but no reproductions. She scanned the long list of paintings and her eye lit on the name Honthorst. The painting, now called The Betrayal of Christ, had been lent to the exhibition by one Miss Constance Nisbet Hamilton. Curious, she thought, that the name had been inverted, but it could only be the same painting that William Hamilton Nisbet—Constance’s great-grandfather—had bought in Rome from the Mattei family.
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