The Sixteen Pleasures

by Robert Hellenga

  This instinct did not desert him as he stood at the window of the Vasari Corridor, looking down at the dead cow batting against the pier. It spoke to him of occasions for charity and nobility of spirit and for inspired acts of heroism such as those just performed by the aging soprintendente, Signor Giorgio, a man who in all the years the dottore had known him had thought only of his own comfort and ease; it spoke to him of the possibility of priests and communists and carabinieri working side by side to clean up the mess and alleviate suffering; it spoke to him of vast sums of money that would pour in from England and Germany and America, especially from America, the land of plenty; it spoke to him of a giant step forward—even a leap forward—in the science of conservation, as leading conservationists—men like himself—struggled to deal with the problems posed by the flood.

  “Postiglione? Postiglione?” A voice was calling to him, not the inner voice of his daimon but the voice of the soprintendente.

  “Coming, Signor Giorgio,” he shouted.

  “Do you remember Vasari’s complaint about the grand duke four hundred years ago?” The soprintendente was shouting, too, to make himself heard.

  “Very well, Signor Giorgio. The grand duke didn’t give him time to do the job properly when he built the corridor. He had to settle for inferior materials, inferior workmanship.”

  “So I wouldn’t stand there any longer.”

  But Dottor Postiglione was in no hurry. He had mastered his own fear, or rather, he had forgotten about it—or perhaps the fear had just evaporated. In any case, it didn’t concern him. In fact, he had never been less afraid in his life. What he felt was exhilaration, as if the trembling beneath him were the trembling of a horse and he a triumphant condottiere, as if the trembling beneath him were the trembling of the goddess of love, and himself the great Mars astride her. All thanks to his instinct.

  Now, a month later, he can say to himself, And look what has happened! There has been a great noise in the papers. The problems of the weirs and the reservoirs and the hydroelectric dams at La Penna and Levane, and of the embankments, and of the deforestation of the surrounding countryside, of the need for a river regulation plan, have been rehashed. The engineer who opened the Levane dam has committed suicide. Everybody who had anything to do with anything has found someone else to blame. The Germans have sent equipment and money. The English have sent warm clothes and tea. The French have sent nothing. The Japanese have sent absorbent paper. The Americans have sent clothes and supplies. Even the Russians have gotten into the act with a boatload of toys for the children at Christmas. And the Americans have sent money, especially money. Every American who ever bought a leather purse or a wallet in Santa Croce, or a gold necklace on the Ponte Vecchio, or a cheap scarf at San Lorenzo has reached for a checkbook and given, given, given money, money, money. Such a generous people, and so charming. Especially the women.

  On the upper loggia, now enclosed, of the Palazzo Davanzati is a trap door through which it was once possible to pour boiling oil on those—presumably enemies—in the courtyard below. It would still be possible, of course, if one had a supply of boiling oil at hand, which Dottor Postiglione has not, though there is enough prussic acid in his newly established laboratory to make up a solution powerful enough to discourage all but the most determined visitors.

  But whom does the dottore wish to discourage? The list is too long; the dottore himself couldn’t get to the end of it. But at the top of the list is his immediate (and, in a sense, only) superior, the Soprintendente del opificio delle pietre dure, Signor Giorgio Focacci, whose heroic deeds during the flooding have given him an exaggerated sense of his own importance. Second on the list is the abbot Remo from the Badia, who has been making urgent telephone calls to the laboratory since nine o’clock in the morning. The dottore is not pleased, then, to see the abbot and Signor Giorgio approaching together, the abbot gesticulating wildly, Signor Giorgio nodding his understanding and sympathy.

  There is nowhere to hide. Oh, there are plenty of places to hide physically, but not conveniently. Dottor Postiglione does not wish to spend the day in the Lace Museum on the fourth floor, for example. He hasn’t the stamina for it. Lace does not interest him; it is an oppressive business, lace. Not worth the trouble. It is the product of slave labor and the opposite, therefore, of true art. Besides, he has pressing business to attend to. At any moment the Donatello Magdalene from the Opera del Duomo will be arriving. A space has been prepared. Instructions have been given. He is sorry that he did not go directly to the Opera del Duomo himself, doubly sorry now that it is too late to escape Signor Giorgio and the abbot.

  He is bending studiously over a Madonna and Child, scuola Diirer, when they enter the laboratory. Not only is the abbot still gesticulating, he is crying, actually sobbing out loud.

  Good, thinks Dottor Postiglione. The abbot is a man who has had things his own way too long. But what can the matter be?

  “Signor Giorgio, Abbot Remo.” Dottor Postiglione offers a slight bow.

  The abbot, without prefacing his remarks or giving the slightest indication of what to expect, begins to apologize in the typical Italian manner, with copious tears, self-abasements, self-deprecations, mea culpas. He is sorry for any distress he may have caused Dottor Postiglione in the past . . . , upon mature reflection . . . , realizes that Dottor Postiglione had very good arguments . . .” (which was not the same thing, the dottore notes, as admitting that he, Dottor Postiglione, was right and the abbot wrong).

  “Yes, yes, Abbot Remo. It was silly to have quarreled, but come to the point, please.”

  The abbot dries his tears on the long sleeve of his habit. “Saint Francis . . .” he says. “The frescoes . . .”

  The abbot is a father with a sick child, pleading with the doctor: “What is to be done? What can we do? You must come at once.”

  “Yes, yes, of course, but you must describe the symptoms.”

  “The frescoes, the frescoes,” he cries in anguish. “They are growing off the wall. If you don’t do something we shall be ruined.”

  “‘We,’ Abbot Remo? You mean the frescoes will be ruined.”

  “Yes, we shall be ruined.”

  “Yes,” Dottor Postiglione repeats. “I see. You mean that if the frescoes are ruined your principal tourist attraction will be gone and you’ll have to start manufacturing one of those dreadful aperitifs that monks specialize in. Something with ninety-five degrees of alcohol, like that nasty stuff they make at the Certosa.”

  “You are too severe, Dottore; even monks must eat.”

  There are many frescoed chapels in Florence that could fall to the wrecking ball without eliciting tears of regret from Dottor Postiglione, but the Lodovici Chapel in the Badia Fiorentina is not one of them. Quite the opposite, in fact. Its frescoes are, in their own way, as fine as those in the Carmine, and every bit as dramatic, though a recent (and highly controversial) restoration, carried out against his advice by a charlatan from the ministry in Rome, has rather tarted it up and destroyed some of the original charm.

  “The brothers are praying in the chapel.”

  “You’re hoping for a miracle, is that it?”

  “God is good, Dottore, God is good.”

  “But tell me, Abbot Remo, what exactly has happened? The water damage was minimal, wasn’t it? And I thought the nafta had been removed with great success?”

  Signor Giorgio intervenes. “The heat lamps are your only hope, Abbot Remo. Believe me, you’re too impatient. You have to pull the moisture out from behind the walls. You can’t just snap your fingers and it’s done. No. It takes time and patience.”

  “You command my greatest respect, Signor Giorgio,” says the abbot, “but the situation is desperate and I must ask Dottor Postiglione to assist me.”

  “Very well, Abbot Remo, I wash my hands of the matter.”

  Signor Giorgio, fortunately, is not a man to hold a grudg
e. As long as he receives a salary commensurate with his exalted position as a soprintendente he will not take umbrage at trifling insults.

  “See what you can do, Sandro,” he says good naturedly to Dottor Postiglione to show that he is not annoyed as he leaves.

  The abbot in extremis is more painful to Dottor Postiglione than the abbot in furore. It is hard to believe that this is the same man who denounced him, in a letter to La Nazione, as an enemy of art and of progress.

  “Everything that can be done will be done, I can assure you, Abbot Remo. I shall come myself. I have already telephoned for one of the vans. You should never have used those heat lamps; they work too fast.”

  “But Signor Giorgio—”

  “Yes, Signor Giorgio and I don’t see eye to eye on this question. Remember, Signor Giorgio is an administrator. But don’t give up hope. We shall find something.”

  The abbot groans, and continues to groan, in the taxi that takes them to the Badia.

  The church of the Badia Fiorentina has undergone many reconstructions. It was enlarged by Arnolfo di Cambio, architect of the Duomo, in 1282. The ruined campanile was reconstructed in 1330. The Cloister of the Oranges was added in 1435–40 by Bernardo Rossellino, who also constructed, in 1495, the portal that opens onto the present-day Via del Proconsolo. And finally, in the seventeenth century the entire structure was remodeled in the baroque style by Matteo Segaloni, who completely changed the orientation of the church, which is in the shape of a Greek cross, so that the high altar, once on the west end of the cross, is now on the east.

  The Lodovici Chapel, which one reaches through a door in the west wall, was frescoed by an unknown painter (the “Master of the Badia Fiorentina”) in the early fifteenth century, miraculously survived the radical reorientation by Matteo Segaloni and (even more miraculously) the attention of the nineteenth-century restorers, the same experts who repainted the Giotto frescoes in Santa Croce.

  Dottor Postiglione pays the taxi driver—the abbot carries no money—and they enter the church, which is damp and chilly, through the portico on the Via del Proconsolo, and make their way to the Lodovici Chapel. The dottore experiences what a sinner who has frozen to death might feel upon waking up in hell, a pleasing warmth that almost immediately becomes intolerable. Two fantastical heating machines, like diabolical engines, have been trained at the base of the dado in an effort—evidently unsuccessful—to keep the moisture from rising to the level of the frescoes. This is the first time Dottor Postiglione has actually seen one of these machines, which the Committee to Rescue Italian Art has imported from Germany. The fires roar. The flames shoot blue and orange, licking the pietra serena panels of the dado, like the flames that tickle the feet of Pope Boniface VIII in the Inferno. They provide the only light in the room. Hellish. The noise is equally infernal, a roaring, mingled with the sound of the assembled monks, who have congregated to pray for the salvation of the frescoes. One of the brothers reads from the Ordinary, and the others give the responses in unison. The smell, too, is infernal. Electric, sulfuric, human. Twenty large, sweating, unwashed monks. (Dottor Postiglione suspects that they have congregated in this small room to get warm, the way people used to go to the movie theaters to get warm.) It is impossible to think in such circumstances. The dottore fishes in his pocket for some change and deposits one hundred lire in a little coin box. The electric light goes on and stays on for three minutes.

  Art restorers, like plastic surgeons, learn to steel themselves against the power of painful visual stimuli: harelips, cleft palates, webbed hands and feet and other deformities for the one. For the other: mutilated canvases, deteriorating marble, crumbling stone, flaking pigments. But sometimes even the most hardened professional is caught by surprise, by a visual blow, as it were, to the solar plexus. The wind is knocked out of him, and he experiences a physical convulsion that is impossible to conceal. This is what happens to Dottor Postiglione when the light comes on and he catches sight of the frescoes.

  He switches off the heaters and asks the abbot to dismiss the monks, who leave the warm room reluctantly and resume their prayers in the church itself. The light goes out and he fishes in his pocket for more change.

  “You have to get some light in here,” he snaps at the abbot.

  “Yes, right away. I’ll see to it immediately.”

  “Isn’t there a switch to turn the light on so you don’t have to keep putting change in the box?”

  “Brother Sacristan will know, I’m sure.”

  “Get those heaters out of here.” The dottore mops his high forehead with a handkerchief.

  The abbot was right. The frescoes seem to be growing off the wall. They are moving, shimmering masses, like one of those idiotic religious cards you can buy at San Lorenzo: when you shift the angle slightly the picture changes from (say) Christ on the cross to (say) Christ ascending into heaven.

  Though he is not a religious man, Dottor Postiglione crosses himself in the dark, still holding the handkerchief in his hand.

  The watermark in the chapel is about two meters high. Some fuel oil remains on the lower part of the frescoes and on the clear gray stone at the base. The real problem, however, is not the water damage, or the oil slick, which can be removed. The real problem is that moisture rising through the tremendous walls of the old building not only carries with it salts from the ground, it dissolves the soluble salts that it encounters within the walls themselves, bringing them to the surface, where the water evaporates. The salts then crystallize, forming either superficial excrescences on the surface or cryptoflorescences within the actual pores of the wall. Various types of disintegration can occur at this point, depending on the nature of the salts themselves and the nature of the surface. As the crystals expand, something has to give way. Either the pores of the wall will break, causing the surface of the paint to disintegrate, or the crystals will be extruded in crystalline threads, like cotton candy. This is what is happening now. The crystals are growing so rapidly that you can almost see them forming, like whiskers. Not dark stubble, however, but translucent filaments, so that the surface of the painting, viewed from an angle, looks like a vertical field of wildflowers, something from the brush of an impressionist. But if the pressure exerted by the growing crystals becomes too strong, the paint surface will begin to crumble, and a work of art that has ministered to the needs of rich and poor alike for six centuries will disappear. As if someone were erasing a blackboard.

  You can tear up a musical score without destroying the music. You can burn a novel without destroying the story. But a painting is itself, has no soul, no essence other than itself. It is what it is, a physical object. If it is destroyed it is gone forever. Sic transit gloria mundi. This is why Dottor Postiglione prefers it to the other fine arts.

  “Calcium nitrates,” Dottor Postiglione says to the abbot. “Too many dead bodies in the crypt. Too much nitrogen in the soil. You should have installed a moisture barrier as I recommended.”

  “Yes, Dottore, but where were we to find the money? You yourself know how difficult and expensive . . . What were we to do?”

  The dottore sighs. The problem at hand won’t be helped by getting into another argument with the abbot.

  He tries to conceal the depth of his concern from Abbot Remo, but the abbot, like an anxious father, reads the dottore’s mind easily and resumes his pleading: “Dottore, you must do something.”

  The dottore looks at his watch, an uncharacteristic gesture, for he has never been an impatient man, not a man who got into a frenzy waiting for his wife to get dressed, or to return with the car, though when his wife moved to Rome she took the car. Since then something of the balance of life has been lost. The dottore’s work has become too important. Great works of art in the past have been lost. There are probably too many of them anyway, just as there are too many churches in Florence. But he doesn’t like to see them go, and the Badia is a special place, a nice place to s
lip into and sit for a while if you’re in the centro. There’s a nice quiet cloister that’s difficult to find unless you know where you’re going. No one’s likely to wander in there, not even the monks.

  The abbot, unable to locate a light or an extension cord, stations a monk by the door. The monk keeps feeding hundredlire pieces into the box to keep the lights on until the hastily assembled restoration crew arrives with floodlights and extension cords and the chapel begins to look like the scene of the crime in a detective show. A photographer starts snapping shots; the carpenters begin assembling a scaffolding; the technicians measure the humidity and the temperature. But there is no time for careful measurements and serious photographs to document the problem and the work. No time, even, for proper analysis of the salts, which is crucial in order to determine their exact composition. Something has to be done at once to retard the capillary action that is bringing the salts to the surface. A dramatic trial of strength is being enacted before their very eyes. If the crystals prove stronger than the pores in the wall, the intonaco itself—the surface coat of plaster that actually holds the paint—will begin to disintegrate and the painting will be lost. Student volunteers are bringing in ladders and a portable sink from the truck, and heavy glass bottles of various solvents and gels and fixatives, and boxes of Japanese tissues.

  “Calcium sulfate?” Dottor Postiglione, altering his diagnosis, ventures a tentative opinion in the form of a question to one of the students. “I’m afraid so,” he says, answering his own question. The sulfates are less soluble and therefore more dangerous than the nitrates. “Look at that patch there, and there.” A white, opaque film has begun to form in several places near the lower edge of the fresco, where the donor, a Renaissance merchant, Francesco Lodovici, and his wife, kneel. The patches indicate the conversion of calcium carbonate into calcium sulfate within the intonaco itself, a cancer growing before his very eyes.