“There’s no record of who bought any of these paintings,” Brigstocke told Francesca. “And Dowell’s doesn’t exist anymore. It was bought in 1970 by another auctioneer, Charles Phillips & Sons.”
“Perhaps the heirs of Constance Nisbet Hamilton would know something more?” asked Francesca.
Brigstocke said he had contacted the family. They knew nothing. “Maybe it’ll turn up someday. I hope so, but many paintings have been destroyed.”
Francesca said she planned to go to Edinburgh and see what she could find. Did he have any suggestions for her?
Brigstocke gave her a level gaze. “You look like the sort of person who won’t be discouraged,” he said. It didn’t sound to Francesca as if he meant it as a compliment. But he smiled at her as he rose from his chair to signal the end of the interview.
20
IT WAS MAY IN ENGLAND, THE DAYS WARMER AND SUNNY, THE tulips in riotous bloom in Hyde Park. Francesca received a reply, formal and brief, from her letter to the Ogilvy family, the distant descendants of William Hamilton Nisbet. As Brigstocke had already told her, the family had no information about the paintings that had gone up for auction seventy years ago. The letter suggested that Francesca direct her efforts to the archives of the National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh.
Francesca told Luciano about her plan to go to Edinburgh, and he offered to go with her. They were both busy with their studies, Francesca writing a paper on the iconography of Renaissance depictions of mythology and studying for an exam in medieval art. They decided to go at the end of the school term, in June. Francesca found a small, inexpensive hotel, family-run with only a dozen rooms but in the center of the city. With the help of a guidebook, she planned her itinerary, circling on a street map of Edinburgh the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, the National Library, the Scottish Record Office, and the location on George Street of what had once been Dowell’s auction house.
On a Sunday in late June, they set off in Luciano’s car. For Luciano, this was purely a vacation, an opportunity to be alone with Francesca for the next few days. And she also regarded it as a vacation, even if she had brought along a suitcase heavy with art history books for the exam she would have to take back in Rome. She told herself not to expect too much from this trip. She didn’t really think that she would find the painting, but she did hope to find something, some clue, that would take her a step further.
They spent four days in Edinburgh, in the small hotel with bow windows and pink steps located just behind the National Portrait Gallery. The old center of the city reminded Francesca of an anglicized Rome—narrow cobbled streets, eighteenth-century buildings, the ruins of an ancient castle on a hill overlooking the city—but Edinburgh was well-ordered and clean, with traffic that actually obeyed the rules.
Luciano accompanied her on her rounds. First to the National Gallery, where a heavyset Scottish woman with thick spectacles narrowed her eyes in puzzlement at Francesca’s accent. Finally the woman took in hand the photocopy of the page from the Dowell’s catalogue that Francesca had gotten from Brigstocke. She held it close to her nose, scrutinized it, turned it this way and that, disappeared for twenty minutes, and came back empty-handed. She suggested that Francesca try the archives at the National Portrait Gallery or the Scottish Record Office.
At the Scottish Record Office, another bespectacled, middle-aged woman cocked her head at Francesca’s accent. Francesca finally made herself understood, and then spent an hour in fruitless search for documents from Dowell’s. She did find a thick folder on Hamilton Nisbet, his forebears and his heirs. She leafed through the pages, taking notes on Hamilton Nisbet’s life. He had been enormously wealthy, as rich as the Mattei family in Ciriaco’s day. He’d owned three grand estates on vast tracts of land in East Lothian, east of Edinburgh. His primary residence had been Biel House, a sixty-six-room mansion where, according to an inventory, The Taking of Christ by Honthorst had hung in the dining room. All very interesting, thought Francesca, but nothing in the folder revealed what had happened to the painting after the auction.
Her last stop of the day was the archive at the National Portrait Gallery, and it was there, with Luciano patiently at her shoulder, that Francesca came across dozens of old catalogues from Dowell’s. Her heart quickened when she saw the one dated Saturday, April 16, 1921, the date of the Hamilton Nisbet auction. The title page read: “Catalogue of a Collection of Valuable Pictures in Oil and Water-colour Removed from the Mansion-House of Biel, East Lothian.” There were several copies of the catalogue, all identical except for one that had been annotated with a list of figures, handwritten in the margins next to each painting. The sum next to The Betrayal of Christ, by Gerard Honthorst, was noted as £8-8-0—eight guineas. Francesca did not know the precise value of eight guineas in 1921, but it seemed like a paltry sum. Luciano guessed it would be no more than fifty English pounds in current value.
Francesca searched the entire Dowell’s folder, looking for records of sale, some accounting of the disposition of the paintings, of who had bought them. Nothing. She felt a sudden sadness, like a wave of fatigue. She put her head in her hands.
“Eight guineas,” she murmured to Luciano. Had the painting actually sold at that price? Or had the auctioneer merely noted in the margin the reserve prices for the paintings? One way or the other, the sum of eight guineas was a measure of how time had eclipsed Caravaggio’s fame. She remembered the opening of Longhi’s famous essay “Ultimi Studi sul Caravaggio e la Sua Cerchia,” written some fifty years earlier: Longhi said that by 1900 Caravaggio had become one of the least-known painters in Italian art.
The next morning Francesca and Luciano walked over to 18 George Street, the former site of Dowell’s, now owned by Charles Phillips & Sons. The building, several stories tall and constructed of stone with a pinkish hue, dated from the turn of the century and had spacious windows on the ground floor through which one could see a display of paintings and antique vases.
Francesca approached a young woman seated behind a desk. Using her best English diction, she asked whether, by chance, Charles Phillips & Sons had kept any old records from Dowell’s.
The girl tilted her head in perplexity, either at the substance of the question or, more likely, thought Francesca, at her accent. She told Francesca to wait a minute and went to summon help. A moment later, she returned with an older woman. More frowning and tilting heads. Finally they understood the words “Dowell’s” and “documents.”
The older woman shook her head and smiled merrily. “Dear me, those old records, we wouldn’t keep them. Maybe some of them went to the archive at the Record Office or the National Gallery, but I imagine they’ve been burned.”
“Nothing at all?” said Francesca. “You are certain?”
“Oh yes, quite certain,” said the woman, still amused.
On the sidewalk outside the building, Francesca turned to stare at the gallery. “No records,” she said to Luciano, her voice tinged with bitterness. “You always tell me how precise and orderly this country is. In Italy, at least, they keep every piece of paper, every document, going back five hundred years!”
Francesca had tracked the painting over three hundred and twenty years. During that time empires had risen and fallen, wars had been fought, fortunes had been made and lost, plagues, famines, floods, and droughts had ravaged lands. A mere seventy years ago, on a Saturday afternoon in April, the painting had been here in this building, and then it had simply disappeared. It was not unreasonable to think that it might have perished. It was, after all, a mere piece of cloth, measuring four feet by five.
IT WAS THE FIRST DAY OF JULY WHEN FRANCESCA AND LUCIANO left Edinburgh. Just one month later, across the Irish Sea, the chronicle of the lost painting by Caravaggio was about to take a new turn.
1
THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF IRELAND STANDS NEAR THE CENTER of Dublin, directly across from the large green expanse of Merrion Square, with its paved walkways, flower beds, and copses of neatly pru
ned trees. From Merrion Square, the gallery presents a stolid, institutional aspect—it is a heavy gray stone edifice with a squat portico and four blocky columns. On the gallery’s roof, barely visible from the street, there is a curious structure of wood and glass. It is clearly a late addition, boxy and utilitarian, bearing no architectural relationship to the gallery’s nineteenth-century Georgian façade. Some gallery employees refer to it as the penthouse.
The penthouse has long been the domain of the gallery’s two restorers, the studio where they cleaned and repaired old and damaged paintings. It was accessible by means of a freight elevator, but the restorers usually climbed up an old marble spiral staircase that led to a dark landing and a stout metal door. Its interior was luminous, even on cloudy days, with light filtering in through an expanse of large windows high up on three of the walls. The concrete floor was stained by years of paint splatters. The room was spacious. In it stood a broad table, also paint-stained, three sturdy easels, a binocular microscope mounted on a wheeled tripod, and several powerful lamps. In one corner, a tall metal cabinet held jars and tins of solvents, varnishes, lacquers, and oils. A smaller wooden cabinet with wide, shallow drawers, the sort of cabinet one might have seen in a dentist’s office years ago, contained dozens of small tubes of restorers’ paint, fine-tipped brushes, and an assortment of stainless-steel implements. Paintings in various states of distress—flaking, torn, cracked, infected with the white bloom of fungus—stood propped against the walls. One, a portrait of an English nobleman, had a triangular rip in the center, two inches on either side, a wound produced when a security guard backed into a camera on a tripod. Another, a small sixteenth-century Italian panel of the Madonna, lay on the table, its surface mottled and blackened by an early, inept restoration.
It was August 1990. Sergio Benedetti had worked in the restoration studio at the National Gallery for the past thirteen years, along with Andrew O’Connor, the gallery’s chief restorer. Benedetti was then forty-seven years old. He was married and had two children. He had a steady, if low-paying, job, but for some time now he’d found himself growing discontented with his professional lot in life. He had felt that he was destined to achieve something important, to make himself known in the art world, and yet the years had come and gone without presenting him any clear opportunities. At times he felt that life in Ireland was akin to exile, in a land on the far periphery of the art world. He missed Italy, often acutely. He had begun his career there, restoring paintings and frescoes, but the bureaucracy, the endless delays in getting paid, and the constant need to seek out work had finally defeated him.
To supplement his salary at the National Gallery, Benedetti took in freelance work from time to time, by an understanding he had worked out with the gallery’s director. The gallery also had a policy of opening its doors every Thursday morning to offer free assessments on the merits of sundry objects of art carted in by the public. Very little of value turned up, but Benedetti enjoyed these mornings and the diversion they provided from his routine.
On this particular Thursday morning in August, Benedetti had an appointment to look at some paintings outside the gallery. The appointment had been arranged by the gallery’s new assistant director, Brian Kennedy. An acquaintance of Kennedy’s, the rector at the St. Ignatius Residence, where fourteen Jesuit priests lived, had inquired several months ago about the possibility of having some paintings cleaned. At the time, Kennedy had been busy with the details of his new job. He’d put the matter off until just recently, when the rector called again to remind him.
The Jesuit residence was situated at 35 Lower Leeson Street, a ten-minute walk from the gallery. Benedetti and Kennedy set out in late morning, the day sunny and warm. Walking side by side, they presented a study in contrasts—Kennedy in a dark suit, tall and lanky, in his late twenties, with horn-rimmed glasses and a birdlike face, and Benedetti in corduroy pants and cotton shirt, shorter and much stouter, his features growing heavy with middle age. Kennedy had a youthful, energetic manner. He was smart and ambitious, and yet affable, while Benedetti tended to brood. For all their differences, Benedetti liked the young man’s company.
On their way to Leeson Street, Kennedy mentioned that he’d visited the Jesuit residence in the past. The rector, Father Noel Barber, edited a scholarly journal for which Kennedy had written several articles. He recalled that the residence had half a dozen paintings, works with religious themes. “Some dark copies of Old Masters,” he told Benedetti, “the sort of thing you find in lots of Irish religious houses. They have one hanging in the parlor that I think might be quite good.”
They walked past St. Stephen’s Green and turned onto Lower Leeson Street, a quiet, well-kept thoroughfare lined with old Georgian row houses in brick and stone, each four stories tall. The door of 35 Lower Leeson Street was painted bright blue and lace curtains hung in the windows. Father Noel Barber greeted Benedetti and Kennedy and welcomed them in. He explained that they were in the midst of cleaning and refurbishing the house—pulling up old carpeting, polishing the floors, and painting the walls. They had taken down all the paintings and moved them to the library on the second floor. He led the way up the stairs.
The library was a large book-lined room overlooking the street. Benedetti saw seven or eight paintings of varying sizes propped up against the bookcases. His eyes were drawn immediately to the largest one, in an ornate gilt frame. He stared at it for a long moment, and then forced himself to look away to the other paintings. He knelt before each, his eyes registering the details, but his mind remained with the large painting in the gilt frame. He saw several early twentieth-century Irish paintings of little consequence, and an Italian work, possibly sixteenth century but provincial and clumsily executed. All rubbish, he thought to himself. He made no comment. Behind him, he heard Kennedy and Father Barber talking.
Finally he turned his attention to the large painting. It was dark, the entire surface obscured by a film of dust, grease, and soot. The varnish had turned a yellowish brown, giving the flesh tones in the faces and hands a tobacco-like hue. The robe worn by Christ had turned the color of dead leaves, although Benedetti’s eye told him that beneath the dirt and varnish it was probably a coral red. He could see that the canvas had gone a little slack in the frame. He judged that it had not been cleaned or relined in more than a century.
He came close to the painting, squatting on his haunches before it, his face inches from the surface. It was definitely a seventeenth-century work, he thought. The craquelure, the network of fine hairline cracks, was just what he would expect in a painting almost four centuries old. All in all, the picture appeared to be in rather good shape. He could see only a few areas where the paint surface had cupped slightly and flaked, the worst on the right edge of the canvas, on the back of the second soldier. But the most important areas, around the hands and faces, seemed free of damage.
He examined the features of Christ and of Judas, the eyes and ears, and the details of the hands. Could it possibly be? he asked himself. He reached out and touched the surface lightly with the pads of his fingers, feeling the texture of the paint, the slight give of the canvas. If it is not by him, Benedetti thought, it is the best possible copy.
Benedetti stood and turned to Kennedy and Father Barber, who had fallen silent and were observing him. “Of all the paintings,” Benedetti said, keeping his voice neutral, “this one is definitely the best. To understand it better, we should take it back to the gallery for cleaning and restoration. If you care,” he added with a shrug.
Father Barber responded with a smile. “Oh, yes,” he said. “We’ve always thought it to be the best work in the house.”
“A good second-division work,” added Kennedy with a nod.
The painting, said Father Barber, had hung for many years in the dining room, which had a high ceiling, an old coal-burning fireplace, and large windows looking out on the back garden. More recently, the Jesuits had moved it to the front parlor.
Benedetti said he would make
the arrangements to pick up the painting. The restoration process, he told Father Barber, would normally take around three to four months for a painting of this size. But he also had his regular obligations at the gallery, so it would no doubt take longer.
“How long do you estimate?” asked Father Barber.
“Possibly six months or eight months,” said Benedetti. “I can’t say for certain. I think it should be relined first, before I can start cleaning. I’ll know better then.”
Father Barber, a small, trim man in his mid-fifties with lively, intelligent eyes, seemed curious about the restoration process. He asked Benedetti several questions, to which Benedetti responded politely but briefly. None of the other paintings in the residence was mentioned, nor was there any discussion of a fee for Benedetti’s work. A fee was the furthest thing from Benedetti’s mind at that moment. His only thought was to get this painting into the restoration studio so that he could examine it at length and in detail.
On the way back to the gallery, Brian Kennedy noticed a change in Benedetti’s demeanor. The restorer hadn’t uttered a word since they’d left the Jesuit residence, and he was walking at a fast and determined pace.
“Sergio, what’s up?” Kennedy asked.
“The picture is possibly much more important than they think,” replied Benedetti.
“Why? What do you think it is?”
“I think it might be by Caravaggio.”
“You must be joking,” said Kennedy, although he could see that Benedetti was in no joking mood. Kennedy had a doctorate in art history, but his areas of concentration were twentieth-century Irish art and arts policy. He had worked at the Ministry of Fine Arts before coming to the National Gallery. He understood the import of what Benedetti had just suggested. It seemed quite preposterous to him.
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