A Glancing Light

'Of course you can't. You know damn well that art historians don't make that kind of culturally biased value judgment.'

'But I'm an art historian and I make that kind of value judgment, so obviously they do,' I'd said, which I'd thought was pretty good, but which didn't seem to strike him as much of an answer.

This is all by way of saying that Clara was right. I couldn't stand the stuff.

Croce tipped back his head and laughed indulgently. 'You don't like these pictures so much?'

Not like them so much? I wasn't that keen on being in the same room with them. But I didn't want to offend him. 'I work mostly in Renaissance and Baroque art,' I said with what was intended as a self-deprecatory smile. 'Pretty much representational stuff. The twentieth century's a little new for me.'

'Ah!' Croce exclaimed, interpreting my response as one of ignorance and launching into a vigorous discourse on projective spaces and revolutionary perspectival structure. His English wasn't up to it, forcing him to slip in and out of Italian, which left me even further behind. Despite his enthusiasm, I couldn't help feeling there was something inauthentic about him, something a little off. Maybe he was selling too hard, which reputable dealers don't do. Maybe it was the checked coat, polka-dot tie, and glittery rings (and pointed, mirror-shined elevator shoes); he was foppish and raffish at the same time, like an old-time music-hall performer. Maybe it was the way he kept smoothing that plastered-down hair. He just didn't look like a trustworthy dealer to me.

But then I don't look like a bona fide art curator.

I wasn't worried about him putting anything over on Clara, who stood in a corner, impassively watching him go through his paces. 'I don't think you're going to convert Christopher,' she said dryly when he paused for breath.

He laughed, not very emphatically, and blotted his forehead with a handkerchief. 'I think I don't convert you, either, signora. But that's all right. I leave them here for two, three days, and you decide, all right?'

'Fine. Call me Monday.'

'Molte grazie, signora. A lunedi prossimo. Arrivederci.'

A bow to Clara, a tentative, quickly withdrawn motion as if to kiss her hand, a bow and a sweaty handshake for me, and he was gone.

'Are you really thinking of buying these?' I asked her.

'I am, and don't look so damned superior. Do you know what your problem is, Christopher? I'll tell you. You persist in seeing art solely in aesthetic terms; you refuse to consider it from the standpoint of capital investment.'

I smiled. 'That's my problem, all right.'

'Tell me, does your pitifully limited knowledge of this century's art extend to the Italian Transavantguardia?'

     'Mimmo Paladino, that bunch?'

'Yes, that bunch,' she said sarcastically. 'I have two Paladinos. Do you know what I paid for them in 1978? A thousand dollars each. Would you like to know what I sold one of them for this week?'

'I don't think so,' I said.

'I don't think so, either.' She laughed suddenly, and her eyes warmed. Her laugh, not a frequent phenomenon, was one of her few redeeming physical features. When I said that Clara was ill-favored, I was putting it mildly. She was a bulky, shapeless woman with pockmarked skin and bulging, red-rimmed eyes, one of them disconcertingly larger than the other. I had yet to see her dressed in anything but a capacious, dark dress of indeterminate style.

'Well,' she said, 'you're here to talk about the arrangements for your show, yes? So let's talk about them. Come.'

She stumped out of the room. I followed. With Clara, that's what you did. We went to a room with a couple of armchairs and a settee, which was hung with canvases by some of the foremost artists of the Italian Transavantguardia, best left undescribed. As expected, Clara had no unrealistic demands about the security and showing of her pictures, and only a few questions about transportation. These were summarily and satisfactorily dealt with.

She terminated the discussion with a nod. 'So, you want to go look at the paintings, I suppose?' She spoke gruffly, but the light shone again in her eyes.

I had already seen them more than once, but of course I said yes. To say no would have been unkind; every collector loves showing off her treasures. Besides, I really wanted to. What kind of art curator would I be if I didn't enjoy looking at paintings? Most important, I needed to look at some real art (forgive me, Tony) after having been trapped on Clara's ground floor for an hour.

The four pictures she was lending were two floors higher: one by Fragonard, one by Van Dyck, and two by a couple of lesser-known seventeenth-century Dutch painters; all had studied in Italy. To tell the truth, none of them were first-rate examples of the artists' work, but they were pretty enough (surpassingly so, after what I'd just been looking at), and historically instructive. The point of Northerners in Italy, after all, was to demonstrate Italian influences on northern European artists who had lived in Italy.

Those influences were most obvious in the two Dutch pieces, A Village Fair by Jan Baptist Weenix and an evocative Shrimp-Catching by Moonlight by his cousin Nicolaes Berchem, both painted in the 1640s, both set against classical Italianate landscapes complete with the romantic ruins of ancient buildings. Jan Baptist, in fact, had been so thoroughly Italianized he returned to Holland calling himself Giovanni Battista. An early soulmate of Max's.

The Van Dyck was a portrait of Maria de Medici done in 1627, at the end of a six-year stay in Genoa and Venice. In it Van Dyck was not at his elegant best; it was almost as if the intense color borrowed from the Venetians had overwhelmed his own restrained good taste.

Finest of the lot was a mid-sized painting by the young Fragonard. Not one of the congenial, fluffy pieces that would briefly make him the toast of Paris later on, but a classical landscape obviously painted to please his master Tiepolo, airy and alight with clean, clear colors.

This we stood looking at for some time. 'I love the sunlight in this picture,' Clara said. 'Not lush, like the Caravaggisti, but—what would you call it, Christopher?'

'A glancing light,' I said after a moment, 'like real sunlight on real water and trees. It's not of the objects; it's reflected off them. You feel as if it all depends on your own perspective. I'm not quite sure how he did it.'

She nodded, smiling. 'A glancing light. Well, come on, it's almost one. I owe you the best lunch in Ferrara.'

'You owe me a lot more than that, but, okay, I'll settle for lunch.'

She drove me herself, in an unpretentious blue Fiat, to La Provvidenza, a restaurant so exclusive there was no sign outside, nothing to indicate there was a restaurant behind the blank white wall. Inside, it was elegant- rustic, with used- brick walls and gleaming wooden floors. It was filled with dark-suited businessmen at the tables, and humming with lithe, sloe-eyed waiters in peach dinner jackets, any of whom might have served as the model for Donatello's svelte, young David. A bottle of Soave was opened and poured without our asking as we sat down.

'To the Rubens,' Clara said, lifting her glass.

'To the Rubens.'

She drank a third of the wine and put down the glass. Immediately a peach-sleeved arm reached between us to top it off. A few seconds later it returned to lay down menus.

Clara lifted hers without looking at it. 'Will Max really never walk again?'

'Not well.'

'Well, I'm sorry for him. It's a hard thing.' This inadvertent moment of human kindness was quickly made up for. 'But he has no one to blame but himself. He's a careless man, not discreet. He shouldn't be in the business he's in.'

'Clara, Max said that there were five people who knew his security systems well enough to disengage them. Amedeo Di Vecchio was one. Do you know who any of the others were?'

The question surprised me almost as much as Clara. What was I doing, starting my own investigation?

'Me?' Clara exclaimed. 'How should I know that?' A cigarette jiggled at the corner