6
Dust motes hung in the white shafts of light between the stacks, and Matthew had to work hard not to become hypnotized, not to let his imagination run wild with the strange reports on the pages before him. Down the hall in his office the red message light blinked on his telephone-the idiot lawyer for that potential donor in Chicago, no doubt. Memos from Nevins, the chief curator, from Carol and the planning committee, the director, Legal, all crowded his e-mail inbox, but Matthew was ignoring them. He was holed up instead in the department library, with the old volumes that held the few fragments of available knowledge on the Kessler icon.
An Internet search revealed nothing on so obscure a subject. There was nothing dependable from Byzantine sources, either, no way to trace the icon back to its place and moment of creation. The only clues were to be found in the image itself. The bottom of the work was so damaged that he hadn’t been able to tell for certain whether there might once have been a depiction of the Christ child there, to whom Mary’s badly chipped hands should be directing the viewer. This would place the image squarely in the hodegetria style, “She who shows the way,” one of the most favored and oldest iconic traditions, based on an original painted by Saint Luke himself, according to popular myth. But the placement of the hands and the half turn to the right of the entire figure-more likely to direct the viewer’s attention outside the frame-seemed to place the image more in the hagiasoritissa tradition. This series was associated with the relic of Mary’s hood or sash, brought back from the Holy Land by Saint Helena in the fourth century and placed in a reliquary, above which the prototype of this image would have hung.
There were some arguments against this identification. The Katarini icon looked the viewer dead in the eye, instead of following the hand gestures to the right, where an icon of Jesus would generally accompany it. However, Matthew knew other images in the tradition which also broke that rule. A bigger stumbling block was that the style hadn’t really become popular until the mid-tenth century, and the Katarini icon was certainly older than that, maybe much older. Yet who was to say the style hadn’t existed earlier? Perhaps previous versions had all been destroyed in the iconoclasm of the eighth century. Indeed, Matthew thought, allowing the long-suppressed conjecture which had been building within him all morning to come forward, who was to say this image was not the long-lost prototype itself? The first of its kind, the inspiration for all that followed?
A shiver passed through his arms as the notion seized him. He fought this sudden agitation, assuring himself that the religious significance of such a find meant little to him. It would, though, mean a great deal to others, like the church officials who had contacted Fotis. Even as an art historical identification it would be impressive indeed-career-making, perhaps. Alas, unless further evidence came to light from some hidden source, it would remain forever a theory. Meantime, if he would never know for certain from where the Holy Mother had sprung, or how it made its eventual way to Epiros, at least he could review the traces of evidence regarding its time there.
The catalogs of the great art critics of centuries past had little room for Eastern Orthodox, and when it was included, it was always the same handful of icons: the sixth-century Peter, Mary, and Christ Pantokrator at Saint Catherine’s in Sinai; some later pieces of Theophanes and Rublev in Russia; the Vladimir Virgin; a few others. Considering its placement in the rugged hills of Greece, not to mention the vast number of works in that country claiming special spiritual status, the Katarini Holy Mother’s becoming known at all had to count as nearly miraculous. The first mention Matthew could discover was from the English adventurer Thomas Hall, who traveled all over Greece and Turkey in the 1780s. Hall’s highly fanciful travelogues included, among many unlikely reports, one of the “Holy Mother of Epiros” (as if there were only one Holy Mother icon in the whole region), described as “more scratched wood than paint, except for the very lovely face of the Virgin” and as “curing blindness in true-hearted souls at a touch of its worn wood, but striking blind those of an evil or avaricious nature.” This followed the story of the levitating monks of Meteora and directly preceded that of the miraculous vision of Christ in the peasant wife’s washcloth. Matthew always had a good laugh reading Hall.
Lord Byron, on his first, nonfatal sojourn in Greece in 1809, made mention of a miraculous Holy Mother icon possessed by the Muslim tyrant Ali Pasha, who was already old but vigorous in mind and body, and would remain so until his death at the hands his Turkish overlords in 1822. Again, the description was very close to the Katarini icon, and Byron reported a strange golden aura about the work. Matthew shook his head. If I drank as much as you, Georgie boy, he thought, I’d see auras around paintings too.
The last volume on the table, however, was the one that troubled him most. Johann Mayer-Goff was a traveler of the late nineteenth century and a self-trained specialist on Orthodox art. The German was a sober, stolid, even somewhat boring writer, at least in translation, not given to hyperbole or floating monks. He was the first to name the village of Katarini as the residence of the icon, and he had attended the feast of the Annunciation in that same old church which Fotis’ man burned down sixty years later. The day was rainy, Mayer-Goff wrote, and only candlelight illuminated the dank stone sanctuary:
The icon was brought forth from its place of hiding and positioned near the altar. The peasant women wept in their seats, until they fell into the aisle and approached the Mother of God upon their knees, caressing the wood with their gnarled hands. One among them, who had not walked unaided in many years, stood suddenly upon shaking feet and praised Heaven. At the last, a blind old shepherd with an angry face was led forward by a young man and a girl, who seemed to pull him against his will. When his hand was placed against the forehead of the All-Holy, he cried out once and fixed his eyes upon the nearest candle flame, then upon all of us in the congregation. It was made clear from his movements that he could see us, and with another cry he fell upon the stone floor and wept like child. I saw this with my own eyes.
Matthew began to see dark spots on the page and realized that he had not taken a breath in many moments. Inhaling deeply, he then exhaled an embarrassed laugh. Get a grip on yourself, buddy.
“There you are.”
He looked up to see his older colleague Carol Voss standing before the table, and slapped shut the volume of Mayer-Goff as if he’d been caught by his mother reading Penthouse.
“Here I am, indeed.”
“Not answering your e-mails,” she scolded gently, her green eyes behind large glasses looking him over carefully. Carol was a mentor of sorts, his only close friend at the museum, and there was little he could keep from her.
“It’s not just yours I’m ignoring, if that makes you feel better.”
“This about the Kessler icon?” she waved at the books on the table.
“Yes.”
“Checking provenance?”
“More or less. It’s sketchy.”
“Are we serious about this?” she asked skeptically.
“Are you pretending that I would know that better than you, Ms. Finger-on-the-Director’s-pulse?”
She laughed. “I haven’t a clue. Nevins seems excited.”
“Yeah, but he’s up at the Cloisters every day. I don’t even know if he’s spoken to Fearless Leader.”
“Speak to him yourself.”
“We don’t have that kind of relationship.”
“You seem worried,” she said, out of nowhere. “Are there ownership issues?”
“Maybe,” he conceded, in a barely audible tone.
“Have we filed with the Art Loss Register?”
“Not yet. We need to be a little more certain we want it, right? Besides, if there’s a theft involved, it isn’t going to show up there. It would be older.”
The phrase “wartime loot” hung in the air between them, unspoken.
