Stone Virgin (23 page)

Remembering Vittorini’s advice, Raikes got to his feet slowly and carefully.

He had allowed himself an hour to wash, change, have some dinner. But when he returned to his apartment the reply from Cambridge was waiting there and he could not resist taking the time to read it. His friend had been busy on his behalf. He had drawn a blank at the Fitzwilliam Library, and at first at the University Library too – mainly through the difficulty of categorizing the material. But then he had consulted an acquaintance at Pembroke, who taught Italian history.

‘You are lucky, really,’ he wrote. ‘Because the Supplicanti were only in Venice for something like seventy years, the episode has been a sort of focus of research – it’s not often, apparently, that you get such a tidy period, cut off at both ends. It was a chance for some academic sleuthing. Not much seems to have come of it. All the extant records of their dealings in Venice have been collated several times, most recently in 1949, by a man called Masters. It’s a perfectly ordinary record of day-to-day transactions such as were going on in religious foundations all over Italy at the time. There is nothing in them to show what went wrong. No one has ever been able to discover why the Supplicanti came to grief in Venice. The documents have never been traced and are now presumed lost. However, one thing I think will interest you. There is a record of the commissioning of a Madonna in 1432 – which lies in the period you asked about. I am enclosing a photostat copy of the English translation.’

The rest of the letter, the friendly sentiments, the professions of readiness to be of further help, Raikes barely glanced at. He immediately began reading the document that had accompanied it, a single sheet, cast in the conventional form of a contract:

In the name of God, 16 March, 1432

Be it known to all who shall examine the present official instruments that the Prior and friars of the church and foundation of the Supplicanti in Venice were called together and assembled in chapter in the sacristy by order of the Prior and at the sound of the bell struck three times according to custom. There were present the pious friar Francesco di Niccolò of Rimini (Prior), friar Giuliano of Foligno (reader and preacher), friar Pietro Giovanni, and friar Giovanni di Alemania, constituting the chapter. Also present were the worthy Nunno Cischi and Ser Uguccio Toschi,
operarii
of the church. These on their own behalf and on behalf of their successors in the said church give to the stone-cutter known as Girolamo Piemontese, stipulating and receiving on his own behalf, and of his heirs etc., the making of an image of the Holy Virgin Annunciata in white stone of Istria, to be done by his own hand and no one else. He is held to the same and to work at and perfect the image with his own hands and with the utmost diligence, vigilance and perfection. And this is to be for the price of 60 gold ducats, in part payment of which the said master Girolamo, stone-cutter, acknowledges receipt of the said witnesses, and me, the below-named notary. And he promises to do the work and finish it within the next six months beginning today. And the said chapter promise to give the said master Girolamo bread, wine, oil and wood for his maintenance and he on the one hand and they on the other promise to observe all these conditions.

The meeting had already started when he entered. It was being held in a building near the Accademia Bridge, not far from the offices of the Ministeria delle Acque, an ancient place, once the guildhall of the Venetian mask-makers.

He was surprised, on entering, to find a diminutive Japanese occupying the platform, speaking fairly fluent but oddly accented English. ‘Due to humidity, hah, yes,’ Raikes heard him say. He saw Steadman sitting near the back and made his way towards him. Steadman looked up as he approached and grimaced in friendly fashion.

‘Hah, yes,’ the Japanese said. He had paused on Raikes’s entrance. In the curiously opaque light of this cavernous room he appeared due to humidity himself, with his gleaming spectacles, the unnatural shine of his pale, lightweight suit. The lamps were high up on the ceiling, milky globes whose light seemed to lose all force in the spaces of air below; and Raikes had the impression that there was a further attenuation of this already exhausted light by some mist or vapour in the room, some impalpable thickening of the atmosphere, as if the whole place, though warm enough, was not properly sealed off from the moist breath of the night outside.

The eye-cases of the Japanese shone steadily through this and the high-pitched, crowing vowel-sounds continued. He was reading from a script but interjecting his own remarks from time to time. He must have been asked to speak as a sort of courtesy, Raikes thought – the Japanese were not engaged in any collective effort of restoration in Venice as far as he knew. Of course, Sir Hugo was a great believer in internationalism. There he was now, high-domed, nonchalant in black corduroy, seated to the right of the speaker. Perhaps he had simply lassoed the Japanese from a doorway? But no, listening further Raikes understood that the man was an official of the Tokyo Museum of Fine Arts, where they had recently been dismayed by the deterioration of certain medieval saddle cloths in transit between Tokyo and Los Angeles. Discoloration had occurred round some of the stitch holes, and a loosening of the weave itself, especially at the edges. A serious matter.

‘All you know the effect of humidity,’ the Japanese said, looking up briefly from his notes and making a small bow in deference to this knowledge on the part of his audience. ‘To stabilize atmosphere conditions in the galleries and museums, that is standard practice. But in world of today we must also consider art object in transit. There are two expression for humidity, there is absolute humidity expressed by water vapour contained in given quantity of air and relative humidity expressed as percentage rates of weight of water vapour in air to weight in same volume saturated air at same temperature. The effect of humidity on art object is related to relative humidity …’

Raikes sat back in his chair. This was really rather boring stuff and barely intelligible in any case, though he could appreciate the displeasure of the museum. A fourteenth-century decorated saddle cloth was in a sense more valuable than something like a Tintoretto painting, as there might not be more than two or three in existence whereas there was no shortage of Tintorettos … That was heresy, of course. All the same he thought with gratitude of his stone lady, delicate, hieratic, Gothic mysticism still implicit in her lines, drama in the contrapposto but no vulgar posturing, no sprawl, no baroque ‘dynamism’, thank God.
Girolamo Piemontese, stone-cutter
. That stillness, not inertia, the stillness of arrested motion, unmistakably the achievement of art. One saw the same quality in the work of other sculptors then or a little later, people like Donatello, Nanni di Bartolo, della Robbia, however different they were in other ways. A mistake of course to read meanings into the work of artists so remote but difficult not to see in that emblematic stillness some sort of metamorphosis from the breathing woman to the immobility of God’s lodging. Perhaps that was why stone seemed so much the medium for Madonnas. In effect the Annunciation took Mary’s humanity away as we would look at it now. Here was a young Hebrew woman, working class, probably illiterate, told abruptly that she was henceforth mere sanctified womb, that her body, her whole being, was no more than a nutrient chamber. Enough to cause that terrible stillness …

He glanced round. Miss Greenaway was in front of him, with Owen beside her. He made out the unmistakable back of Wiseman’s head up near the front. At the end of the same row he caught sight of Lattimer’s fine-drawn, regular profile, felt some surprise at this, then remembered Wiseman telling him that Lattimer had been a substantial benefactor to Rescue Venice. An appropriate way for him to spend his money. What had he said?
It is objects we really care about
. And his own pleasure, at Lattimer’s praise for his work. Proof of original sin. He thought again, with a sort of wondering excitement, of the document, the contract, back in his apartment …
to be done by his own hand and no one else
.

There were something like a hundred people present and Raikes wondered vaguely who they could all be. Some of the number was made up of representatives of other restoration enterprises in the city. He saw faces he knew from Venezia Nostra and the Comité Français. There were some people from the new German project at the church of the Gesuati – they had begun restoring the frescos there. He recognized the huge, bald, sad-looking Slingsby, from the American Committee to Rescue Italian Art. All coerced or cajoled here by Sir Hugo. He wondered what sort of messages they were getting through their earphones – the Japanese must be presenting some problems to the interpreters.

‘It is the air,’ the Japanese said, suddenly and it seemed disconnectedly. He had departed from his script again. He paused and uttered that curious crowing monosyllable in the back of his throat:
Hah
. ‘Even in box,’ he said, ‘air attacks art object.’ He made the shape of a box with his hands, then gave it a rapid and extremely professional-looking karate chop.

‘Air demolish art object,’ he said, suddenly smiling. ‘Even when in box.’

He paused for some moments to allow the drama of this to make its impact. Then he went on with his reading: ‘From this it can clearly be understood that air of certain absolute humidity enclosed in closed vessel varies relative humidity when vessel made to travel through regions of varying temperatures …’

Again Raikes’s attention wandered. He felt slightly nervous at the prospect of having to speak later on; but at the same time he was rather sleepy and there was a heaviness in his limbs, not unpleasant. It was a state he had become familiar with during the past week or two after working on the Madonna, not like the weariness he had felt at first, but with something almost voluptuous in it. Perhaps because of this, perhaps because of the vaporous atmosphere, he found it difficult to keep the two figures on the platform in distinct focus, and he began to have a curious sense of synchronization between the Japanese and Sir Hugo as if he were watching a ventriloquist’s act or some ingenious piece of puppetry.

This illusion was broken by scattered clapping. The Japanese was bowing, shuffling papers, descending. Sir Hugo rose, advanced smiling to the microphone, one hand in the side pocket of his jacket, the other elegantly raised. This was his public-address posture, as hieratic in its way as that of the Madonna. Sir Hugo thanked the Japanese for his contribution and said that he personally found it deeply moving to see how truly international the efforts to save Venice had become. Venice belonged to the world. He enlarged on this, appearing to forget that the Japanese had not actually referred to Venice at all, but had spoken exclusively of Japanese saddle cloths. Two men with cameras made their way up the side of the room with that half crouching gait of photographers. From below the platform Sir Hugo was briefly peppered with flashes. Of course, Raikes thought, he would not have omitted to invite the press. The presence of these cameras immediately began to change his ideas about the kind of talk he was going to give.

‘We are grateful,’ Sir Hugo said, with his well-bred modulations, ‘that he should have come along and added his expertise to our think tank.’

‘Good God!’ Steadman muttered uncontrollably. His legs, in their grey flannels, writhed. ‘Have you ever heard such crap?’ he whispered in Raikes’s ear.

Raikes wrinkled his nose in sympathetic distaste. Still, he thought, it was people like Sir Hugo who got things moving. Below the modish phrases and the nonchalance lay a formidable tenacity of purpose and a very definite idealism. His sense of occasion was unerring; it would not be ill-lit halls and irrelevant saddle cloths that featured in the reports going back home, but international co-operation, progress, a case for more funds. All the same,
think tank
…

‘And now,’ Sir Hugo said, ‘without more ado, I am handing over the stage to the distinguished team from Birmingham who are making what promises to be an important break-through on the –’

It was Raikes’s impression that the Tintoretto people – or one half of the squad at least, Owen and Miss Greenaway – were in motion before Sir Hugo had actually finished, that the platform was cleared and these two in position at the light switches while the ghastly close of that sentence – it could only be ‘Tintoretto front’ – still hung unuttered in the air.

There was a slight pause. Then Raikes heard curious shuffling sounds behind him. In common with other members of the audience he turned his head to look. It was Barfield, coming up the centre aisle towards the stage. His right leg was encased in plaster and he was leaning heavily on a stick. In spite of this he was making fairly brisk progress, perhaps anxious not to lose the momentum set up by his assistants. He was carrying a rolled-up screen under his arm. He had trouble getting up on to the platform and attaching the screen to the wall, but this merely added to the impressiveness of that gallantly limping approach. Leaning on his stick he began speaking at once, in his flat, didactic tones. He had no notes.

‘The main problem in these early stages,’ he said, ‘apart from the enormous size of the paintings, which has made handling them very difficult, is the fact that Tintoretto, to get the dimensions he wanted, used a large number of canvases stitched together. We have found it a very tricky operation to remove this stitching. Very tricky indeed.’

Perhaps forgetting his disability for the moment Barfield took a step and stumbled a little. ‘It requires a light touch,’ he said, recovering. ‘It isn’t only the stitching, of course. The old lining and the layers of decomposed glue have to be removed before we can reline the paintings. I can now report that this has been successfully accomplished with the first of the paintings,
The Woman Taken in Adultery
, by first applying a fine gauze along the seams as a reinforcement. Once we can consolidate the surface with a new lining the actual cleaning process can get under way. This promises to be a very tricky operation. Very tricky indeed. To give you an idea of the complexities involved I’d like to show you the photomicrograph of a cross-section through the paint surface of the woman’s dress.’