'No. Nobody.'
'Well, somebody. What about motive?'
'All I can think of is what Anne Greene suggested to me: Somebody wanted to keep him quiet about the forgery.' I stood up and looked at the sleet thrumming against the black window pane. 'It isn't much, is it?'
'I wouldn't exactly call it a watertight case, no,' he said cheerfully. 'But have a little faith. Hey, what about the forgery, by the way? Any luck yet?'
'No. But I'll find it.'
'Right on. And Chris? You really want to be-'
'I know.' I swallowed the rest of the brandy. 'Careful.'
Chapter 9
I have been to Florence a dozen times, first as an impoverished graduate student grinding out a dissertation, and then as an expenses-paid curator from a rich and acquisitive museum, but I have never stayed anywhere except at the Hotel Augustus. When I was a student, it was a little more than I could realistically afford; now it is a lot less. Whenever I turn in my expense account after a visit, Tony predictably fumes and tells me I ought to put up at the Excelsior ('At least think about appearances, Chris. Jesus Christ, what will the Uffizi people think?')
One reason I stay there is that it's interesting; a sixteenth-century town house that's been altered so many times you can't figure out where the original rooms were. The exterior is nothing to write home about: a plastered facade of mustard yellow-plain, peeling, and ugly-with a few touches of old stonework that are next-to-invisible under all the grime. But inside it's a clean family hotel with Florentine touches that never fail to please me: vaulted ceilings, worn stone, seats tucked in corners, surprising little reading niches, handsome but transparently fake antique furniture old enough to be antique in its own right. There is a tiny bar with a domed ceiling on which is a creditable fake seventeenth-century fresco of birds and foliage.
The other reason I stay at the Augustus is that it's on the Via della Scala, just around the comer from the ancient church of Santa Maria Novella, to which I never fail to make my own personal pilgrimage as soon as I arrive. This time was no exception, even though the taxi let me off at the hotel less than half an hour before Lorenzo Bolzano, Claudio Bolzano's son, was due to pick me up.
Five minutes after I'd checked in and been effused over by the ancient receptionist like the old client I was, I was inside the church, standing before a shadowed fresco in pale browns midway down the left wall of the nave. Inconspicuous, washed-out-looking, pretty much ignored in this city crammed with fabulous art treasures, it is a landmark in the history of art.
There have been a lot of landmark artworks and a lot of landmark artists, but only once has a painter single- handedly launched with a single painting a movement that changed art forever. The painter was Masaccio, the painting was The Holy Trinity, and the movement, if that's a strong enough word, was the Renaissance. In painting, anyway; Donatello and Brunelleschi had already gotten the ball rolling in sculpture and architecture.
The twenty-four-year-old Masaccio's innovations were stunning. He used light as no painter before him had. Even the great Giotto's light had been flat, sourceless, an obvious necessity but no more. Masaccio illuminated with it, hid with it, molded with it. And Masaccio's figures are the first 'clothed nudes'; they look as if they could get out of their robes if they wanted to, and nobody in a painting had ever looked that way before. Even more important, the chapel in The Holy Trinity is the first painted space that is not 'on the wall' but an extension of the space in which the viewer stands. The awestruck Vasari said it was like peering into a cave in the wall. And Masaccio accomplished this not merely with an artist's cunning but with a deft, precise application of Brunelleschi's new insights into the laws of perspective.
The fresco hit Florence like a thunderbolt. Seventy-five years later young artists like Michelangelo were still coming to study it.
And another five hundred years after that, so was I. It is a hell of a feeling for an art historian to stand a few feet from it (no, not to touch it; I have my limits), just where Masaccio himself stood, and Michelangelo and Ghirlandaio and the rest, and to know that it all started right here, right on this wall, right in front of you.
A couple of elderly women, one fat and one thin, but sisters from the look of them, plodded up beside me on tourist-weary feet. They held a shiny green guidebook open between them and looked from the fresco to the book, and then back again.
'It's not much to look at,' the thin one finally said in a Midwestern accent. 'This can't be it.'
'Yes, it is,' the other replied, and read aloud from the book: ' 'On the wall of the third bay in the north aisle, one will find Masaccio's timeless masterpiece, the magnificent and deeply moving Holy Trinity.'' This has to be it.' But she didn't sound too convinced herself.
'Well, I don't think it's so magnificent,' the thin one said, querulous, perhaps, after too many timeless masterpieces. 'Anyway, it looks too new. This must be a copy. I mean, the original must be in a museum.'
I wasn't unsympathetic to her reaction. The innovations that had stood fifteenth-century Florence on its ear were old hat now. To twentieth-century eyes, the Trinity was one more drab religious painting, not notably different from thousands of others. Its importance is historic, not aesthetic, and the average tourist mooning over it (unlike this honest woman) is only mouthing so many vaguely comprehended platitudes.
You know, I think I just achieved a new acme of snobbery: If I like an old painting, it's acute perception; if you do, it's ignorant hypocrisy.
'Per piacere, signore,' the plump one said uncertainly, turning to me and clearing her throat, 'questa pittura… e la Trinita… la Trinita Sacra?'
'Si, signora,' I said.
'La… la originale? De Masaccio?'
'Si, signora. Ha proprio ragione.' She was so timidly pleased with being the linguist of the team that I enjoyed being able to tell her she was right in Italian.
'Grazie tante, signore,' she said.
'Prego, signora.'
'This gentleman says,' she explained to her sister, 'that this is the original.'
'That much I can understand,' said the other ungraciously. 'Anyway, what does he know? I say it's a fake.'
And off they shuffled toward the more popular Ghirlandaio frescoes in the chancel.
'It's a delicate point, don't you think so?' asked a high-pitched, Italian-accented voice behind me. 'The fresco has been rather zealously restored, you must agree.'
The speaker was a tall, hollow-chested man with a bald, domed head, wearing wire-rimmed glasses mounted on a long, pinched nose. He stared amiably at me with the button-eyed gaze of an alert and optimistic dog that has just heard the refrigerator door open.
Lorenzo Bolzano. Although I had never met his father, I knew Lorenzo slightly, having encountered him at art symposia now and then. Lorenzo had a reputation of his own, quite apart from being the son of the eminent collector. He was an art scholar of the more abstruse variety: adjunct professor of the philosophy of art criticism at the University of Rome. He was also European editor of the frighteningly intellectual, usually incomprehensible (to me) Journal of Subjectivistic Art Commentary, to which he sometimes contributed his own incoherent (to anyone) monographs ('Reality as Metaphor'; 'Is Art 'Real'?').
'Hello, Christopher,' he said. 'I was told at your hotel that you would be here.'
'Hi, Lorenzo. I'm glad to see you.'
And I was. His views on art were laughable but harmless, and he himself had an agreeable daffiness that made him fun to talk to if you didn't mind pursuing learned theoretical circumbendibuses that never got you much of anywhere. I was also glad to see him because I hoped he might help when it came time to deal with his father.
That hope was short-lived.
'My father?' he said with an unmistakable stiffening of his small mouth when I asked about Claudio Bolzano's health. 'Much better, thank you.'
'That's good, Lorenzo. And is he really serious about taking the paintings back?'
