The Blue Last

Melrose was already laughing.

“In fourteenth century, one of our principal fountains was the Fonte Gais. A group of Sienese found and dug up a statue of Venus and set it atop the fountain. Then came the Black Death, and the preachers and soothsayers said it was having that pagan statue up there that caused it. So one night, a little group disguised as peasants stole it away, broke it to pieces and then sneaked across the border to bury the pieces in Florentine land, so the Black Death would turn from Siena to Firenze.” Here came that hiccupy, snorty laugh that made the old man shake like a bowl of jelly. He seemed always on the verge of it. Any old joke or prank, good or bad, was better than no joke at all for Signore Di Bada.

“Oh, the panel you brought-” He set it on the floor, holding it at arm’s length. “Hmpf! It looks as if it could be one panel in a triptych-”

“Polyptych,” said Trueblood, eager to move the identification along.

Thick eyebrows floated above black-rimmed glasses as Di Bada peered at Trueblood. “You know so much, my friend, why do you come to me?”

Trueblood washed his hands around in air, saying “No, no, no. Sorry. I only meant it was suggested to me by this antiques dealer that it might be part of the Pisa polyptych… possibly?”

Di Bada rested the panel against the end of his desk and crossed his small hands on top of it. He shook his head slowly back and forth, seemingly at Trueblood’s folly. “Signore Trueblood, you realize how you are an idiot? Oh, it’s true, quite true, that nearly a dozen different parts of that polyptych have turned up, but in places such as ancient churches-”

“I believe that’s where she said she found it. The church in San Giovanni Valdarno.”

Di Bada held up a hand, palm out, as if to push back this absurdity and said, “That is Masaccio’s birthplace. That a painting so important could be overlooked in that church? For centuries?” Di Bada flapped his hands as if wishing them away. “Signore Trueblood, this is ludicrous.”

Trueblood objected. “But isn’t that the way things often are found? By some strange confluence of place, time and person? Several pieces of the Pisa polyptych were found in just that way, weren’t they?”

Di Bada was waving the words away before Trueblood was half finished. “Perhaps, yes, but I tell you, not by somebody in an art gallery. You go to Pisa? No, it is a shame that the St. Paul in the Museo Nationale is taken down. They feared for its safety, I think. You have got in your own country, in London, the center of the altarpiece: Madonna and Child Enthroned. Then there is Berlin, where there must be four or five of the panels, and the predella of Saint Julian; one in Naples; another piece in some city in California no one can remember. No, Signore Trueblood, I fear you have been-” he tapped his temple with a finger “-what is the word? ‘Duped,’ ah yes. Duped.”

Melrose, who thought he would never take up Masaccio’s cause after all of this trouble he’d been put through, still, even he was irritated by Di Bada’s attending more to himself than to the panel.

As if he read Melrose’s brain waves, Di Bada shoved his glasses up on his head, and brought the picture so close to his face his nose was all but touching it. “Masaccio. Hmpf!”

Melrose interpreted the “Hmpf!” not as a sound of dismissal but of curiosity. He watched Di Bada rise, move to one of the many bookcases, reach down a dusty-looking volume and riffle its pages. “Masaccio was a man possessed,” he said, turning pages. “It’s all he cared about-art. He neglected everything else, everyone, including himself. There were long periods when he saw no one. He belonged to this guild-the Speziali-who had grocers among its members, and I’ve always been amused by that. Well, Masaccio got so bad, so afraid others might steal his work, he became-what is the word?” He snapped his fingers several times.

“Paranoid?” Melrose suggested.

“Paranoid, si. So paranoid the only person he would admit to his lodgings was this grocer. For a time when he forgot to eat he enlisted the grocer’s aid, told him to bring bread and cheese. The grocer had no more to do with art than to be a member of the same guild as the painters. He was trustworthy. He was completely disinterested. Why not trust the person who can gain nothing, eh? Why not trust the grocer?” Di Bada returned to his chair behind the desk and sighed. “You know he died when he was very young-”

“Twenty-seven,” Trueblood put in.

Melrose thought he detected a lump in the throat here.

“Imagine what he would have accomplished had he lived even another ten years.” The old Italian meditated on empty air. “The great Brunelleschi; Donatello, perhaps the greatest sculptor since the Greeks; and our Masaccio, the first great naturalist.” He said to Trueblood, “You have been to the Brancacci Chapel? Of course you have. Then you have seen one of the strongest uses of perspective in the St. Peter Healing with the Fall of His Shadow. This is said to be the first Renaissance painting. Your eye plunges down that city street at the same time St. Peter is walking toward you. Things move in this painting; the shadow of St. Peter moves. Masaccio developed chiaroscuro; he was the first to use the cast shadow as a device. You have been of course to the Santa Maria Novella, no?”

“No. I mean not yet.”

Di Bada looked at them as if they were heretics. “You stay in Firenze and not go to see the Trinity? Well, when you go, look at the Trinity from the west aisle. You will see how the great vaulted ceiling seems to open from the space in which you stand. It was Masaccio’s purpose to project his subjects into the earthly sphere to suggest the reality of the supernatural. See, your eyes meet Mary’s eyes. That gaze induces the belief that she is present. It is revolutionary.”

There was a silence suffused (Melrose hoped) with the proper respect. Trueblood finally broke it, saying, “But I wish you would take another look at the panel, Signore Di Bada.”

“If it would please you.” Di Bada ran his eye over the saintly figure, even got so far as to take out a magnifying glass, a big one with a horn handle. He ran this over the painting, his eye making quick little darts. He returned the magnifying glass to its perch atop a small hill of books. He thought for a little while. “Perhaps you shouldn’t rest your case on the opinion of such as I. I am an expert, true. But there is one who knows perhaps even more-”

Melrose tried to keep from slipping down in his chair, but did not wholly succeed. Trueblood was, of course, all ears.

“-this is Tomas Prada who lives in Lucca. It is worth your time to see him. I am sorry I cannot be more helpful. I can only say what I said before, that this is so unlikely to be by Masaccio…” Di Bada shrugged.

He went on, with a shake of his head. “Masaccio had nothing. He owed money to others; he possessed nothing; he had pawned his clothes. Yet was he not one of the chosen? I sometimes envy the mental state that simply forgets the material world. Not ‘denies’ it, for that of course is to acknowledge it before pushing it away. But no, Masaccio forgot that it even existed. He was one of the chosen.”

All through dinner-a marvelous fish soup, followed by a tagliatelle alle noci, followed by partridge, right into their dolce, a warm zabaglione-they argued. Not in a bellicose way, because the restaurant was too fine and the food too good, not even particularly contentiously or continually. They brought it up, let it lie, brought it up again.

Melrose said, “I simply refuse to go to a ‘One-who-knows.’ ”

“It’s not that far. Lucca’s almost right on the way.”

“ ‘Almost’ is the operative word here. Now listen: we have already spoken to the foremost authority and leading expert. I refuse to drag myself-”

“ ‘Drag’? It’s a Maserati.”

“On these drifting hills nothing is a Maserati. I refuse to go in search of One-who- knows.” Except that Melrose was intrigued by now with this entity he himself had really conjured out of Di Bada’s phrase. He really wanted to see this inquiry through to its godforsaken end. He did not, however, want to agree to this third leg of their journey without a certain amount of resistance. Anyway, it was fun listening to Trueblood whimper and plead. He picked up his glass of Chianti (which was unlike anything you could get in England) and said, “Oh, all right.” He dipped his spoon once again into his Marsala-drowned custard. How could something so simple taste so wonderful?

Trueblood was pleased as punch. Melrose said, “You know, the more we go on with this, the nearer we get to the question, not the answer.”

Trueblood looked a little shell-shocked, his eyes like cartoon eyes, Xs in place of