A Deceptive Clarity

by Aaron Elkins

  "No. But I'll find it."

  "Right on. And Chris? You really want to be–"

  "I know." I swallowed the rest of the brandy. "Careful."

  Chapter 9

  I have been to Florence a dozen times, first as an impoverished graduate student grinding out a dissertation, and then as an expenses-paid curator from a rich and acquisitive museum, but I have never stayed anywhere except at the Hotel Augustus. When I was a student, it was a little more than I could realistically afford; now it is a lot less. Whenever I turn in my expense account after a visit, Tony predictably fumes and tells me I ought to put up at the Excelsior ("At least think about appearances, Chris. Jesus Christ, what will the Uffizi people think?")

  One reason I stay there is that it's interesting; a sixteenth-century town house that's been altered so many times you can't figure out where the original rooms were. The exterior is nothing to write home about: a plastered facade of mustard yellow—plain, peeling, and ugly—with a few touches of old stonework that are next-to-invisible under all the grime. But inside it's a clean family hotel with Florentine touches that never fail to please me: vaulted ceilings, worn stone, seats tucked in corners, surprising little reading niches, handsome but transparently fake antique furniture old enough to be antique in its own right. There is a tiny bar with a domed ceiling on which is a creditable fake seventeenth-century fresco of birds and foliage.

  The other reason I stay at the Augustus is that it's on the Via della Scala, just around the comer from the ancient church of Santa Maria Novella, to which I never fail to make my own personal pilgrimage as soon as I arrive. This time was no exception, even though the taxi let me off at the hotel less than half an hour before Lorenzo Bolzano, Claudio Bolzano's son, was due to pick me up.

  Five minutes after I'd checked in and been effused over by the ancient receptionist like the old client I was, I was inside the church, standing before a shadowed fresco in pale browns midway down the left wall of the nave. Inconspicuous, washed-out-looking, pretty much ignored in this city crammed with fabulous art treasures, it is a landmark in the history of art.

  There have been a lot of landmark artworks and a lot of landmark artists, but only once has a painter single-handedly launched with a single painting a movement that changed art forever. The painter was Masaccio, the painting was The Holy Trinity, and the movement, if that's a strong enough word, was the Renaissance. In painting, anyway; Donatello and Brunelleschi had already gotten the ball rolling in sculpture and architecture.

  The twenty-four-year-old Masaccio's innovations were stunning. He used light as no painter before him had. Even the great Giotto's light had been flat, sourceless, an obvious necessity but no more. Masaccio illuminated with it, hid with it, molded with it. And Masaccio's figures are the first "clothed nudes"; they look as if they could get out of their robes if they wanted to, and nobody in a painting had ever looked that way before. Even more important, the chapel in The Holy Trinity is the first painted space that is not "on the wall" but an extension of the space in which the viewer stands. The awestruck Vasari said it was like peering into a cave in the wall. And Masaccio accomplished this not merely with an artist's cunning but with a deft, precise application of Brunelleschi's new insights into the laws of perspective.

  The fresco hit Florence like a thunderbolt. Seventy-five years later young artists like Michelangelo were still coming to study it.

  And another five hundred years after that, so was I. It is a hell of a feeling for an art historian to stand a few feet from it (no, not to touch it; I have my limits), just where Masaccio himself stood, and Michelangelo and Ghirlandaio and the rest, and to know that it all started right here, right on this wall, right in front of you.

  A couple of elderly women, one fat and one thin, but sisters from the look of them, plodded up beside me on tourist-weary feet. They held a shiny green guidebook open between them and looked from the fresco to the book, and then back again.

  "It's not much to look at," the thin one finally said in a Midwestern accent. "This can't be it."

  "Yes, it is," the other replied, and read aloud from the book: " 'On the wall of the third bay in the north aisle, one will find Masaccio's timeless masterpiece, the magnificent and deeply moving Holy Trinity.'' This has to be it." But she didn't sound too convinced herself.

  "Well, I don't think it's so magnificent," the thin one said, querulous, perhaps, after too many timeless masterpieces. "Anyway, it looks too new. This must be a copy. I mean, the original must be in a museum."

  I wasn't unsympathetic to her reaction. The innovations that had stood fifteenth-century Florence on its ear were old hat now. To twentieth-century eyes, the Trinity was one more drab religious painting, not notably different from thousands of others. Its importance is historic, not aesthetic, and the average tourist mooning over it (unlike this honest woman) is only mouthing so many vaguely comprehended platitudes.

  You know, I think I just achieved a new acme of snobbery: If I like an old painting, it's acute perception; if you do, it's ignorant hypocrisy.

  "Per piacere, signore," the plump one said uncertainly, turning to me and clearing her throat, "questa pittura ... e la Trinita ... la Trinita Sacra?"

  "Si, signora," I said.

  "La ... la originale? De Masaccio?"

  "Si, signora. Ha proprio ragione." She was so timidly pleased with being the linguist of the team that I enjoyed being able to tell her she was right in Italian.

  "Grazie tante, signore," she said.

  "Prego, signora."

  'This gentleman says," she explained to her sister, "that this is the original."

  "That much I can understand," said the other ungraciously. "Anyway, what does he know? I say it's a fake."

  And off they shuffled toward the more popular Ghirlandaio frescoes in the chancel.

  "It's a delicate point, don't you think so?" asked a high-pitched, Italian-accented voice behind me. "The fresco has been rather zealously restored, you must agree."

  The speaker was a tall, hollow-chested man with a bald, domed head, wearing wire-rimmed glasses mounted on a long, pinched nose. He stared amiably at me with the button-eyed gaze of an alert and optimistic dog that has just heard the refrigerator door open.

  Lorenzo Bolzano. Although I had never met his father, I knew Lorenzo slightly, having encountered him at art symposia now and then. Lorenzo had a reputation of his own, quite apart from being the son of the eminent collector. He was an art scholar of the more abstruse variety: adjunct professor of the philosophy of art criticism at the University of Rome. He was also European editor of the frighteningly intellectual, usually incomprehensible (to me) Journal of Subjectivistic Art Commentary, to which he sometimes contributed his own incoherent (to anyone) monographs ("Reality as Metaphor"; "Is Art 'Real'?").

  "Hello, Christopher," he said. "I was told at your hotel that you would be here."

  "Hi, Lorenzo. I'm glad to see you."

  And I was. His views on art were laughable but harmless, and he himself had an agreeable daffiness that made him fun to talk to if you didn't mind pursuing learned theoretical circumbendibuses that never got you much of anywhere. I was also glad to see him because I hoped he might help when it came time to deal with his father.

  That hope was short-lived.

  "My father?" he said with an unmistakable stiffening of his small mouth when I asked about Claudio Bolzano's health. "Much better, thank you."

  "That's good, Lorenzo. And is he really serious about taking the paintings back?"

  "With my father, who knows?" he said curtly. "Anything is possible."

  "But what about you, Lorenzo? How do you feel about it? Surely you've got some say in it, too."

  "How do I feel about it?" He laughed shortly. "What difference would that make? Perhaps we should go now?"

  Lorenzo was not one to stay grumpy for long. As we began to walk over the vast, echoing tiled floor of the church, his mood lightened perceptibly. "All right, then, tell me," he said.
"What do you think about the Trinity!"

  "What do I think about it?"

  "Real or fake?"

  "The Holy Trinity? Real, of course. There's never been any doubt about it."

  "Ah, I think you miss my point, you miss my point."

  "I think maybe I do," I said, looking forward to some Lorenzian hairsplitting.

  "My point is, Christopher, that the question involves far more than a distinction between 'authentic' and 'inauthentic,' you know? There are many gradations. Trinity has been restored more than once over the centuries, true? Parts have been removed, parts have been too thoroughly cleaned, parts have been, shall we say, amplified, parts have been completely redone—"

  "As with any old painting."

  "Yes, exactly, exactly. And so the question is, how much of an old painting must be the work of the original maestro for it still to be authentic—that is, in this case, still to be a genuine Masaccio? Or let me put it another way: What percentage must be the work of restorers before you would call it inauthentic?"

  "Well, I don't think it's a question of percentages. The Trinity—"

  "Ah, ah, but, as you suggest, the issue is broader than the Trinity, broader than restoration. Consider Rubens, for example, with his vast student workshop, all right? Well, is a portrait in which the head and hands were done by Rubens and the rest by his students a genuine Rubens or merely a school project? What if Rubens signs it?"

  "Well—"

  "What if the head alone was painted by the maestro? What if only the mouth? What if only the signature is his entirely?

  "Well—"

  "For that matter, who can distinguish with certainty how many square millimeters of a painting are by Rubens, and how many by his pupils? Can I? Can you? Ah-ha-ha."

  "Well—?"

  "Or consider a thoroughly authentic Piero della Francesca that was 'improved' in the nineteenth century, as so many fine paintings were, to make it more salable? How would you classify that? Eh?"

  As interesting and important as these questions are, they're unresolvable. They have to be handled case by case; there aren't any generic answers. But Lorenzo was attacking them with all his usual relish for abstract and insoluble problems.

  I laughed, cheered as always by his enthusiasm. "Well ..." I paused automatically, but this time I was allowed to go on. "In the first place, there aren't any 'authentic' Pieros in that sense. We're talking about the mid-fifteenth century. In those days, as you well know, an artist's signature was more or less a trademark for the products of a sort of mass-production workshop. It wasn't until da Vinci that the idea of artistic individuality—"

  This descent into the concrete did not keep his interest. "But!" he cut me off excitedly. "But! Take the case of an artist undervalued in his own time—Vermeer, Manet, Degas—to which a more famous, more marketable signature has been added. What then? How do we classify that? Art or fake? Eh?"

  "Well—" I began, and this time I interrupted myself with a start. Was this merely Lorenzo's usual academic babbling, or was there a point to it? It had just occurred to me that every artist he'd mentioned was represented in The Plundered Past. Did he know something I didn't know? Was this his roundabout way of getting to it?

  "It's both," I replied. "A work of art and a fake. And a forgery. Like the de Hooch signature on your Vermeer."

  I said this as meaningfully as I could, but all I got in return was a continuation of his wacky smile and an absent-minded nod of the kind that tells you you didn't get through.

  I tried again as we stopped before the door of the church. "Lorenzo, are you trying to tell me something?"

  'Tell you something?"

  "About art forgery? About one particular forgery?"

  "I'm not talking about particularity at all, Christopher, but about universality—the universal absurdity of objectivist definition, with specific relevance to authenticity in art."

  What could I say to that?

  What could anyone say?

  Outside, in the welcome winter sunlight, we strode over the ancient, uneven paving stones of the Piazza Santa Novella, scattering the grumbling pigeons before us. Lorenzo was waving his bony arms and ranting about synthetico-functional intuitions of reality, but my mind was going back over what he'd said. Whether he had intended to or not, he had me thinking about forgeries from a highly particular perspective indeed.

  Was it possible that what I was hunting for wasn't a forgery in the ordinary sense at all, but something else? A legitimate if "overzealous" restoration, for example, perhaps centuries old, that had obscured the work beneath and could now be cleaned away with modern techniques? A painting that had gotten by until now as a Rubens or a Reynolds, but that Peter had spotted as a apprentice project? Was that why he'd been so ambiguous when I'd tried to pin him down?

  "As to defining forgery from a historico-contextual perspective," Lorenzo raved on, "you have to remember that the lex Cornelia de falsis wasn't formulated until the last century B.C., so forgery as such didn't—Urp!"

  He yelped as I grabbed him by the arm and yanked him back onto the curb of the piazza. Without even glancing at the murderous Florentine traffic, he had started across the Via della Scala.

  "—become a criminal act until quite late in the development of Roman law," he continued, unshaken. Was he aware that three drivers were screaming obscenities at him? Had he noticed that I had saved his life? That I still had him firmly by the arm? I doubted it.

  When the traffic light permitted, I nudged him, and he moved trustingly into the street, still going on about forgery in ancient Rome. He stopped, however, when we came to an old red Fiat, dented (as all cars must soon be in Italy), weathered, and indifferendy cared for. "Here we are," he said.

  I must have looked surprised, because he said, "In Italy people of wealth are wise not to draw attention to themselves." He opened the passenger door and motioned me in. "I think you will agree," he said dryly, "that this automobile has been well chosen in that regard."

  I laughed, but I was sure Lorenzo Bolzano wouldn't care—or notice—whether he were driving the old Fiat or a new Alfa-Romeo. He edged the little car out of its cramped parking spot, first crunching against the car behind, then scraping the rear fender of the one in front, muttering peevishly at them all the while.

  Driving in Florence is not quite as terrifying as it is in Rome or Naples, but it is still less a matter of skill and judgment than of raw courage. Lorenzo was one of the people who made it that way, undergoing his Jekyll-to-Hyde transformation the moment he grasped the wheel. Once out in traffic, he drove his little clunker with defiant bravado, zigzagging around other cars when there was no need, aggressively thrusting timid pedestrians back onto the curb, contemptuously forcing gigantic trucks to slam on their brakes to avoid pulverizing us.

  We drove down the Via de Fossi toward the Lungarno, that highly civilized avenue of walled, guarded private palazzos where there was reputed to be more great art than in the Uffizi and Bargello combined. It was where I had always imagined Claudio Bolzano to live, but we passed it and drove over the Ponte alla Carraia into the distinctly less tony section of the city south of the Arno. After a few blocks, we turned onto the Via Talenti, a nondescript street lined with huge square-fronted Renaissance palazzos.

  If you've never been to Florence, you're wondering how anyone could call a street lined with Renaissance palazzos nondescript, right? But in Florence you'd have a hard time finding a city block without a few of them, and many blocks are made up of nothing but. Some of these old town houses are very beautiful, among the most beautiful buildings in the world; others, like those on this drab, grimy street, are not. People understandably assume that anything erected during the Renaissance was a work of art, but of course that isn't so, any more than it is so that something built in the twentieth century is necessarily ugly, although there you'd have a better case.

  With a final unnecessary lurch around and in front of the car ahead of us, resulting in a quick, expert exchange of ra
ised fists, Lorenzo jerked the car to a stop half-in and half-out of the vaulted entryway to a gloomy, boxlike pa-lazzo. This prompted one more yelp of outrage from the other driver, who swerved around us and continued on his way, one hand leaning on the horn and one fist sticking out the window, raised and quivering. It didn't occur to me to wonder who was steering.

  "Maniac," Lorenzo muttered happily. Then he sat quietly for a few moments while the fur on the back of his hands faded away and his fanglike canines receded.

  The only way into the building was this old carriage entrance, an arched passage fifteen feet high and ten wide, firmly blocked by great wooden double doors—the original ones, I thought, studded with iron, and with two great, rusty door-knockers at head height, shaped like lions with wreaths in their mouths. As eye-catching as all this may sound, it wasn't. The neighboring old buildings had similar entrances, and all of them were dusty and black with age, like the buildings themselves. The impression the street gave was of a back alley running between the rear entrances of two rows of dilapidated warehouses; not the kind of places anyone would want to live in.

  On the left door of this one, just below the knocker, was a plaque that read DIVIETO DI SOSTA—No parking—and on the door opposite was the sign beloved by privacy-seeking Italians since Pompeii: a picture of a snarling dog above the words ATTENTI AL CANE. (CAVE CANEM, it would have said in Pompeii, but the sentiment was the same.)

  Lorenzo reached a gangly arm out of the car window and pressed a button on a brass plate attached to the wall of the passageway. There were five other buttons on it, each with an engraved name next to it, as if each of the three stories of the palazzo had two tenants. That I doubted, although there was certainly more than room enough. The buzzer he had pressed was labeled Uffici Tacca: Studio di Architettura e Grafica; not the sort of sign likely to bring drop-in visitors. In addition, the square ceramic address-tile above the plate was artfully broken so that nothing but a fragment of the last number—a 3—was visible. Or was it a 5? Whatever else they might be, the Bolzanos were masters at not calling attention to themselves.