The Lost Painting (11 page)

He asked what she was studying.

Art history, she replied, at the Warburg Institute.

His eyes lit up. He had just taken an art history course at Christie’s, the auction house. He’d wanted to study art, but his family thought he should get a background in finance. Most of his friends worked in investment banks or were studying to become lawyers.

Francesca went out to dinner that night with Roberto and another resident of the house, a young man from Naples. Roberto explained that he was on a campaign to curb the chaos in the house. The Portuguese maid had given him a lecture. But he told Francesca she could stay until she found another place. They talked about art and the Warburg Institute and nightlife in London, a subject the man from Naples seemed to know a lot about. Roberto spoke English with near fluency and could mimic the refined diction of the upper class. He told Francesca that he’d known immediately she was from Rome because of her strong accent. She frowned, a little offended. Most Italians considered Roman accents coarse and uncultured, the equivalent of a Cockney accent in Britain. The man from Naples said, with genuine surprise in his voice, “Oh, really? I thought she was from Tuscany.” Tuscan accents are viewed as elegant, the purest form of Italian. Francesca clapped her hands with delight and laughed at Roberto, who laughed along with her. She realized he had been teasing her.

O
N WEEKENDS
L
UCIANO TOOK THE TRAIN IN FROM
O
XFORD TO
see Francesca. During the week, they talked often on the telephone, long conversations about life, art, and philosophy. She found it easy to talk with him, “about anything and everything,” she once said. When he came to London, they went out to dinners, to movies, to parties, often in the company of other Italians and foreigners.

Luciano had once told Francesca that he’d fallen in love with her when they were in high school, the moment he’d laid eyes on her, on their first day at the Liceo Lucrezio Caro. She’d dismissed that with a roll of her eyes as romantic exaggeration, but he insisted that it was true. He had been too shy ever to ask her out, too shy that first year to say anything to her. He came from a rural district north of Rome where his father had a medical practice, an area of agricultural fields alternating with large, bleak concrete apartment blocks known as dormitorios. As a teenager, he’d been tall and skinny, with elbows and knees that sometimes felt as if they didn’t belong to his body. He wore glasses and he dressed differently from his classmates, in clothes that looked, Francesca would later say, as if they had been bought by his mother.

Francesca had been the best student at the liceo, winning one academic prize after another. She had been invited to compete for a position in the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, the most prestigious university in Italy. But her scholastic achievements embarrassed her and she did her best to conceal them. Her boyfriend back then rode a motorcycle, wore the right clothes, was handsome, outgoing, athletic, and in constant danger of failing at school. Luciano said that Francesca was the smartest person he’d ever met, but his classmates had widely regarded him as the school genius for the way he challenged the received wisdom of their textbooks and their professors.

They’d gone their separate ways at the University of Rome. They found their own paths through the chaos of the university, through the milling crowds of students and the interminable lines, the lecture halls and libraries so packed that every chair, windowsill, and bit of floor space was occupied by a warm body. The university, the second largest in the world after Cairo’s, offered no orientation, no advisers, counselors, or tutors to guide students. It was, Luciano once remarked, “a true Darwinian context—only the fittest survive.”

And then one day, after three years, Luciano called Francesca. Would she mind giving his younger brother some advice on courses and professors? At the end of the conversation, they agreed to meet for dinner with some of their old acquaintances.

They began seeing each other more often, always in the company of other friends. Their relationship was chaste, involving nothing more than the customary kiss on the cheek in greeting. They were friends, not lovers.

That changed during Francesca’s first stay in London. One night, she and Luciano went to a dinner party at the apartment of another Italian studying in England. They both knew everyone there. It was a night like any other. Luciano tended to be quiet at such gatherings, Francesca talkative. Luciano, by his own admission, had little talent for the idle, good-humored chatter of dinner parties. Francesca, on the other hand, moved with ease from one person to another, full of gaiety and laughter, able to make each conversation seem personal. At the end of the evening, they walked out together. On the street, they fell into a deep discussion and walked for several blocks. Finally they arrived at the house on Sloane Square. Francesca paused and turned to face Luciano. It was late, and the street was silent and dark. She looked intently at him, eyes serious, as he talked. He noticed a change in her demeanor and saw that her gaze had grown soft and expectant. He looked down at his shoes, and mumbled that it was late, he should be on his way. She blinked and looked at him quizzically. “Yes, of course. I’ll see you soon,” she said, and turned to go up the steps.

Luciano told himself that he was a fool. She had expected him to kiss her. Or at least, he thought that was what she expected. He had wanted to kiss her; he should have kissed her. But what if he’d read the situation wrong? If he had kissed her and she had not expected it, it might ruin a friendship.

The following night they again met with a group of friends. After dinner at a restaurant, they again walked together to the house on Sloane Square. They did not get far before Francesca stopped abruptly and turned to Luciano. She leaned forward and kissed him full on the mouth. She pulled back and smiled at him. “I had to kiss you,” she said with a laugh, “because last night you should have kissed me.”

“Yes,” he said, “but it seems that I never do the obvious thing.”

They spent that night together. To Francesca it was not an event of great consequence. She still considered Luciano her friend, not her lover. “I’ve just never thought of him in that way, as a possible boyfriend,” she’d said to Laura and others.

For Luciano, it was different. Not long after, he told Francesca that he had been in love with her since high school. Francesca claimed she didn’t really believe him, even when she heard him say this to others. She made light of it. “You only think you love me,” she told him. “You just don’t want to take the time away from your books to find anyone else.”

But in time she came to understand that he was serious. “I was not being honest with him,” she said later. “I knew that for him it was different. But I pretended that I didn’t know. I pretended that it was just friendship when I knew that it was something more for him.”

He’d say to her, “Okay, you’re not in love with me now, but you will be. I’m persistent.”

F
OR HER SECOND TRIP TO
L
ONDON,
F
RANCESCA FOUND A BASE
ment apartment near King’s and Fulham roads. The Sloane Square house had been too distracting for serious study. And this time Francesca was coming with a Roman friend, Caterina, who also had a research grant in London. They had known each other since their first years as undergraduates at La Sapienza, the University of Rome. Apart from an interest in art history, they shared the same sense of humor and, being roughly the same size, they also shared their clothes. Neither had a propensity for neatness. They were, in short, ideal roommates.

The apartment was small and dark, but efficiently organized, far enough from the noise and tumult of central London and yet convenient to the Warburg. It was, Francesca told Luciano, ideal for her purposes.

She made a second home of the Warburg’s vast library. She usually arrived late morning—she was a late riser, eyes soft and occluded with sleep and dreams until almost noon—and stayed among the books at her favorite table until long after nightfall. She was working on several projects at once, fulfilling her obligations for the Warburg grant, still writing the unfinished essay for Correale, and pursuing the fate of the Mattei paintings.

Between projects, she looked for information on William Hamilton Nisbet and his art collection. Her first efforts, searching under the family name, yielded no interesting results. She changed tactics and began searching for catalogues of Scottish exhibitions in which Hamilton Nisbet’s collection might have appeared. The earliest listing was for a catalogue entitled
Old Masters and Scottish National Portraits,
published in 1884 in Edinburgh. She went into the stacks to retrieve the catalogue. Standing there, book in hand, she flipped through the pages. It contained an introductory essay about the exhibition and lists of paintings and their attributions, but no reproductions. She scanned the long list of paintings and her eye lit on the name Honthorst. The painting, now called
The Betrayal of Christ,
had been lent to the exhibition by one Miss Constance Nisbet Hamilton. Curious, she thought, that the name had been inverted, but it could only be the same painting that William Hamilton Nisbet—Constance’s great-grandfather—had bought in Rome from the Mattei family.

Francesca went back to the library index and made a list of other catalogues. She collected the books from the stacks and brought them back to her reading table. One was called
Pictures for Scotland: The National Gallery of Scotland and Its Collection.
This was not an exhibition catalogue, but rather a history of the National Gallery of Scotland’s collection. She turned to the index and looked under Honthorst. Nothing. Nor anything by Caravaggio. Then the name Serodine caught her attention, the painting called
Tribute Money.
Hamilton Nisbet had bought just such a painting from the Matteis, although, like the one by Caravaggio, it had also been misattributed, in this case to Rubens. Francesca flipped to the indicated page and saw the Serodine painting reproduced, the size of a postcard, in black and white. The legend above it read: “Bought as by Rubens from the Palazzo Mattei by William Hamilton Nisbet in 1802.”

In the accompanying text, Francesca read that the painting had come to the National Gallery of Scotland in 1921 as part of a bequest of twenty-eight paintings from Mary Georgina Constance Nisbet Hamilton Ogilvy, the last of William Hamilton Nisbet’s direct heirs. The gallery also had another picture from the Mattei family, a small painting from Francesco Bassano’s studio called
The Adoration of the Shepherds.
But the National Gallery had rejected, for whatever reason, the other three Mattei paintings—including
The Taking of Christ
—that Hamilton Nisbet had bought in Rome. They had gone up for auction at a place called Dowell’s, in Edinburgh, in 1921. One of them,
Christ Disputing with the Doctors,
by Antiveduto Grammatica, had been found in 1956, hanging in a Scottish presbytery in Cowdenheath.

The only Mattei painting still unaccounted for was
The Taking of Christ.
The National Gallery had let what would become the single most valuable painting of the group slip through its hands. Francesca thought that the writer of the essay—his name was Hugh Brigstocke, and he was the assistant keeper of the gallery—had done his homework well. He had read Longhi’s 1969 article in
Paragone
and he knew that the
Taking,
sold as a Honthorst, was most likely the missing Caravaggio. In footnotes, Brigstocke had listed his sources and included the portfolio numbers of the Hamilton Nisbet papers in the Scottish Record Office.

So what had happened at the auction at Dowell’s on April 16, 1921? Surely an auction house kept records of its sales, thought Francesca. Who had bought
The Taking of Christ
?

Francesca presumed that Brigstocke had checked the records at the auction house, although he made no mention of them. Most likely he’d arrived at a dead end. She looked up the publication date of the book—1972, eighteen years earlier. She wondered whether Brigstocke still worked at the National Gallery of Scotland. Was he even alive? She wanted to speak to him. She also wanted to go to Edinburgh, to Dowell’s auction house, and follow the document trail herself. Perhaps, she thought, she could entice Luciano into coming with her.

L
UCIANO SHOWED
F
RANCESCA AROUND
O
XFORD AND TRIED TO
convince her that she should move to England. The Italian educational system, he told her, was a type of Mafia, a national scandal. He knew at first hand. He had applied to doctoral programs in philosophy in Rome, Florence, Bologna, Venice, Milan, and Turin. Each admitted only three students a year. He’d taken the oral and written exams, traveling by train and staying in cheap hotel rooms with other applicants, people in their thirties and forties who had applied time and again and never gotten a place. Admission depended on knowing someone, on having a rich father who could pull strings, or on being the protégé—or the sycophant—of an important professor. Luciano had no connections. Time and again he’d been rejected.

It was a different story in England, where he applied to Oxford, Cambridge, St. Andrews, and the University of Warwick. All accepted him. “You shouldn’t be wasting your time in Italy,” he told Francesca. “You should come to England.”

She knew he was right about Italy. But she had a talent for making connections. She actually liked going to the openings of new exhibits and academic conferences, where she was learning to make her presence gently known, to use charm and flattery on important art historians and powerful professors, nodding seriously at their observations and laughing at their witticisms, often putting a hand softly on their arms. Luciano called it “fare marchette”—using feminine wiles instead of her native intelligence to get ahead.

He devoted himself to her while she was in London, always ready to help, always caring and attentive. There were moments when she thought that maybe this was love after all, even if she didn’t feel the sort of passion she’d experienced in other romances. It is a rare thing, she thought, to have a friendship like this, so maybe it is love. And then she’d catch herself and think, No, I think it’s a mistake. It’s because I am in London, far from my family and other friends. It’s like being in vitro.