I have no doubt that in the smaller common room a servant was already pouring coffee as usual, and the under-butler deploying bottles and decanters and cigars with his customary morose devotion. But all I saw for a moment was one of the leather-clad security men. He was posted with a decent unobtrusiveness in a corner. His presence, nevertheless, was somehow as startling as would have been that of a white rhinoceros or a baby giraffe.
‘Ah!’ Marotta exclaimed softly – and I turned and saw the picture. It was perched on an easel which, I imagine, commonly supported a blackboard in a lecture-room somewhere in college. Just so would the latest bad portrait of a retired fellow be briefly distinguished before some obscure wall received it. Or even, perhaps, a group photograph of a victorious college eight.
But this was neither of these things. I had been brought up among pictures, and I hadn’t much doubt of what I saw. Yet, when I turned to Marotta, I didn’t know what to say. At the same time, I suddenly remembered why his name had rung that faint bell in my head; on just whom he was a prime authority.
‘Is it the real thing?’ I asked.
‘Beyond a shadow of doubt.’ Marotta glanced at me, and must have realised that I was feeling my question to have been crudely phrased. For he added, with instant courtesy, Is it not your own opinion, sir?’
‘Yes, it is, although this is my first glimpse of it. And I’m not an authority.’
‘Only an amateur, Dr Pattullo, in the noble old sense of the word.’ Marotta may have felt that he had now done his best for me, since he turned back to the picture with an absorbed gaze. But this was only for a few moments; then, rather surprisingly, he took my arm and guided me to another part of the room. ‘I hope,’ he murmured, ‘to look at it many, many times. But there is one sense in which a single look is enough.’
‘Its turning up here is almost unbelievably strange. An unknown work by such a painter! But is it unknown? Can you give it any provenance?’
‘Ah, Dr Pattullo, you are a little the sceptic, I can see. Then let me put the philosophical question. Does it matter at all whose hand achieved it?’
‘Of course it doesn’t. Or only in the light of certain down-to-earth considerations.’
‘There indeed you are right! But your college, I believe, is not ill-endowed?’
‘You mean, signore, that it’s extremely wealthy. But we happen to have a somewhat embarrassing liability at the moment.’ I paused on this, for I was perhaps speaking out of turn. And Marotta, I suspected, had just undergone a very powerful experience indeed – a fact which seemed attested by his disinclination to remain in the vicinity of the picture, which was now being milled around by a miscellaneous crowd of instructed and uninstructed persons. He had exchanged a single significant glance with the man from the Brera, but seemed to have elected to keep me company for the present. ‘Let me put an absurd question to you,’ I said.
‘Suppose, Signore Marotta, that you were very hard up. And suppose that your good fairy offered you either this picture or Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne to take along to Sotheby’s—’
Marotta interrupted by touching me on the arm. He was amused – and apparently grateful for this ridiculous diversion of his feelings.
‘My dear Dr Pattullo,’ he said, ‘this one would be the better choice, either for your earthly pocket or to lay up in heaven.’
‘I’m sure about heaven.’
‘Good, good—we are agreed! But to take your point about a provenance. There is none. It is a masterpiece hitherto unknown. So a name must be found for it. I think you will choose The Madonna of the Astrolabe. Yes, that is it! La Madonna del Astrolabio da Piero della Francesco. It is beautiful, is it not?’
I found no reply. Partly, I suppose, the painter’s name (although I had been certain of it) silenced me – but partly, too, I was puzzled by what Marotta had just said. For he had seen more than I had. We had looked at the picture for an equal space of time – but, as if in Kim’s Game, he had been the more practised player. Challenged, I’d have said that the infant Christ held a bauble, or perhaps the links of a chain depending from his mother’s neck. It was in fact a silver astrolabe, delicately miniaturised, and inscribed (it was just possible to distinguish) with Arabic characters.
‘Iconographically,’ Marotta said when he had explained the point, ‘it is, I believe, unique – as unique as the pose of the Madonna del Parto at Monterchi. And yet how simple the symbol and how sublime! The infant Redeemer holds in the palm of his hand the instrument that metes and measures the stars. Cunningly reduced to this scale, it was known as the mathematical jewel. How inevitable, after all, that it should be thus employed by the artist who wearied of painting and occupied his declining years with abstruse geometrical studies.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘A further thought of some interest comes to me. There was undoubtedly a period in which Piero interested himself in intarsie – in which you will have noticed how often mathematical and musical instruments appear. It is a significant point, that.’
I agreed to this too, but not without a feeling that the eminent art-historian was turning a shade informative. As it happened, his colleague from the Metropolitan now came up to him with an obvious wish for urgent conference, and it seemed proper that I should move away. The group of men in front of the Piero was dominated by the Provost. Not that the Provost wasn’t full of all reasonable diffidence in the presence of this majestic thing. But he was permitting himself an occasional restrained gesture, all the same. He certainly knew all about Piero’s mathematical mania. I had an awkward, if momentary, impression that he was explaining the proportions of the composition to the Direttore of the Brera himself.
The oddity of this small spectacle struck me as I watched. When, I asked myself, had it begun to occur to anybody to bring Italian paintings of this sort into England? I thought I could recall Albert Talbert telling me impressively that the poet Spenser had been able to view ‘Renaissance masterpieces’ when he gained the entree to Leicester House. But what could be vaguer than that? And how utterly mysterious this object’s centennial seclusion amid the lumber of an Oxford college. Freed from that now, the Madonna del Astrolabio was due for instant fame. Seashore’s article would be in The Times in the morning, and within days collectors all over the world would be agog. The Provost – there was no denying it – had acted with his maximum of propriety in affording this quiet and restricted preview to his colleagues and a few eminent persons from great public galleries. But that this was so, and that the entire present company consisted of men devoted to disinterested studies and intellectual pursuits, didn’t quite obscure the fact that Mother and Child had tumbled out of darkness to encounter the market place. They would, as the phrase is, come under the hammer and be knocked down during some festival of the higher acquisitiveness in a London sale room. Fortunately both looked as if they would stand up to it. The Child was tough, even a little threatening; by no means likely, one would have supposed, to grow up meek and mild. The Virgin was a peasant girl who had received the highest conceivable promotion and distinctly knew where she stood: a Queen of Heaven whom one couldn’t imagine being presented with a bouquet or going round with bobs and smiles. Taken together, they constituted a composition evoking something more than awe, although awe was there. Doubtless because Piero could do sums, and knew just where to place what, time had here been swept away, and the vast liberation of eternity existed for us as we looked.
Walking back to Surrey, and with my eye on the tower, I had some more prosaic thoughts. Would the Provost and Scholars of the college corporately have to prove their tide to this extraordinary find? If they couldn’t, might it not legally be some species of treasure trove – like a golden helmet, say, that a man digs up in his back garden? Or suppose that some person of ancient lineage, alerted by Seashore’s article, came forward with evidence that just such an aid to devotion had been carelessly mislaid by an ancestor of his in the sixteenth century? But these seemed unlikely contingencies. And,
even so, I had little doubt that Edward Pococke had already taken the measure of them. There had been one slip between cup and hp in the matter of the Blunderville money. Nothing of the sort would happen again.
XVI
I was soon to learn that nothing must be taken for granted about the future of Seashore’s discovery. Through several of the remaining weeks of term, and until the question appeared to be settled for us in a startling way, there was a great deal of debate about the Piero. People took issue over what was to be done with it, and often so vigorously that the word ‘divisive’ – popular in various contexts at the time – might fairly have been applied to the influence the picture had on our society.
Charles Adas, always a stickler for constitutional procedures, felt obliged to disapprove of the Provost’s having divulged its existence and placed it virtually upon public exhibition without a prior resolution of the Governing Body. Nobody paid much attention to this, the general opinion being that which Bedworth had propounded to me: namely that the Provost, having always looked after artistic or aesthetic matters of no academic consequence, had been entitled to continue doing so now that a matter of some weight in that area had turned up. There was a general belief, too, that Edward Pococke’s persuasive air of moral elevation was by no means at war with his being a shrewd business man. He had taken the best means to our driving the best bargain over the astonishing windfall that had tumbled in on us, and that was the important thing. Atlas himself was constrained to concur in this view, perhaps because nobody would be more affected than himself if the dire predictions of Quine came true. There was, in fact, clearly a majority, holding the opinion that the Piero should be turned into cash with all possible expedition, and work on the tower put in hand forthwith. The Piero was something we hadn’t known the existence of; it had in no sense been any part of the life or sentiment of the college; it symbolized for nobody the corporate life of the place. The tower did; a surprising proportion of old members might be shown to have print or etching or photograph of it hung in some domestic sanctum of their own. So the tower must be saved, and to that end the Piero had been sent us by God. This, I say, was the majority view. Equally important was the fact that the Provost, very obviously, had no other conclusion to the matter in his head.
Still, there were other voices. Some people believed that it would be unbecoming to sell the picture, and that the problem it presented us with and the problem of the tower must be regarded as unconnected in any way. Whether the Piero went to public auction or were privately disposed of, somebody would soon gain an export licence for it, and we should thus incur the odium of having alienated what ought to be regarded as a national heritage. These people added – perhaps not very consistently – that the grossly inflated value of such things at present would compound the near-felony we should commit. The only proper course would be to present the Madonna del Astrolabio to the National Gallery. I found that I was myself expected, again without much logic, to support this proposal because there were now so many of my father’s paintings in the Tate. James Gender went one better. With a streak of imagination which I was ashamed to admit finding unexpected in him, he urged that the picture should be donated to the municipio of Borgo San Sepolcro, so that it might there hang in the Palato Communale in company with Piero’s Resurrection, regarded by many as the greatest painting in the world. Those disconcerted at the thought of this splendid gesture to Piero’s home town murmured darkly that pet foods had made Gender an unobtrusively wealthy man, and that none of us would be less affected by what had come to be known as Quine’s Curse.
Amid all this conflict of views, I waited with curiosity for the opinion of the formidable Dr Wyborn. This came to us at a Governing Body meeting largely devoted to inconclusive debate on the issue. Wyborn acknowledged the splendour of our newly recovered aid to devotion as absolutely as he had declined to see any merit in the elegance of the tower. (Indeed, he had formed the habit on the one hand of presenting himself before the picture apparently for the purpose of more or less private prayer, and on the other of pausing in the quad or in the street to regard the tower with frowning disfavour.) It was self-evident to him that the only proper home for the Piero was the college chapel. I felt there was a great deal to be said for this proposal. It received no support, however, except from Lempriere, who approved of it because – as he said – ‘it would put us one up on King’s’. This was a reference to the Rubens owned by that noble Cambridge foundation, and might be regarded as very much a college man’s point of view. The Provost, a member of the higher clergy, was put in an awkward situation by Wyborn’s case, but at once resourcefully adduced the grave problem of security. At present, the Piero was guarded round the clock, something that couldn’t go on for ever. Nobody could walk off with the Rubens, for the reason that it was, one might say, the size of a tennis-court. But Piero’s Madonna del Astrolabio was very little larger than his Flagellation in Marotta’s Urbino, and everybody knew what had happened to that. In short, a portable object worth many hundreds of thousands of pounds was not a practical proposition in an Oxford college.
Meanwhile, and as this debate went on formally and informally, the picture was admired by Oxford at large. Or not quite at large, since it was decided that the privilege must be restricted for the time being to persons known to and conducted by a fellow of the college. Some condition of the sort may have been necessary, but the arrangement hit upon proved to be as vexatious as might have been guessed at the outset. The Times had inevitably given the discovery instant celebrity, and Oxford is full of people who will pursue such an interest at the drop of a hat. Ladies were particularly prominent in the queue. There was even at times a queue in the literal sense, my colleagues conscientiously lining up with women who until that day had been virtually unknown to them. But as a recent arrival it happened that I escaped this particular Frauendienst. The only person I can recollect conducting into the presence of the Madonna was Jimmy Gender’s pupil-to-be, Peter Lusby.
As on the occasion of our first meeting, Peter had come to Oxford for the day, but this time unaccompanied by a batch of schoolfellows. That he should think to call on me in the course of his expedition was entirely agreeable. Though he had lately been discovered by Gender to be almost alarmingly religious, and had even corresponded with Wyborn, mysteriously denominated Pastoral Fellow, on matters presumably arising from this habit of mind, Peter wasn’t in the least a prig – and he was sensitive enough to have gathered that I wasn’t myself at all in the van of the godly. So I didn’t expect that his call would resolve itself into any sort of santa conversazione. I chatted in a general way while making coffee for him just as on our previous occasion.
There was a certain constraint about Peter, all the same, and quite soon I was suspecting that I was myself in some way the main reason for his coming to Oxford that day. As he hadn’t acknowledged this at once he felt himself to be in a false position, and he wasn’t a boy to take anything of the sort in his stride. The duty of absolute truthfulness was without doubt one of the inconvenient things he had to live with.
‘I’ve left school, you know,’ he said suddenly.
‘That’s quite usual, isn’t it, when one has got one’s university place?
‘Oh, yes—I don’t mean they’ve expelled me.’
‘I’d hardly have expected that, Peter.’ For Peter, I felt, this had been quite an effort after a joke, and it increased the effect of an acute strain in him. ‘Are you putting in a month or two seeing the world?’
‘Well, not much of it, really. But I’ve got a job. It’s not a terribly exciting one. But they pay quite decently, and the money’s going to help. Of course I manage to go on studying at the same time.’
‘What kind of a job is it?’
‘It’s in an office in Lombard Street, and I’m temporary office boy. I address letters – I think the ones to unimportant people who aren’t on the addressograph. And I lick stamps. I lick them till my tongue hangs out. But then I’m tea boy as wel
l. That’s useful in the circumstances.’
‘I see.’ This continued facetiousness on Peter’s part held a hint of desperation. ‘What sort of an office is it?’
‘It’s called a Discount House, but I don’t know what that means.’
‘No more do I.’ I managed to say this casually as I poured the coffee, and then I decided that the casual was no good. What had bobbed up was another of Chance’s artistries rather than a meaningless coincidence. ‘Peter,’ I said, ‘out with it.’
‘Well, you see—’ For a moment Peter looked at me, helplessly. Then he squared himself. ‘Do you know anybody called Mumford?’
‘I know several people called Mumford. One of them is an old friend of mine.’
‘No. I mean somebody of about my own age, who was at this college.’
‘That’s Ivo Mumford, my friend’s son. He had the rooms above these last year. He’s in this office of yours, is he?’
‘Yes, that’s it. He seems to be the nephew or something of one of the top men. I don’t know how to begin about this.’
‘It doesn’t matter how, Peter. Just go ahead.’
‘He spoke to me once or twice in my first week there—not very politely.’
‘So I’d suppose.’ I wondered whether I could keep the tone of this relaxed. ‘Does he give himself airs and expect you to call him “sir”?’
‘I wouldn’t do that.’ Peter took this seriously. ‘Of course I call the older people that way. But I don’t think I’d ever say “sir” to somebody my own age. It doesn’t mean I’m discontented and insubordinate. I don’t resent licking stamps all day. It’s a useful lesson in humility, I suppose.’
The Madonna of the Astrolabe Page 23