The Chapel (30 page)

“About ten years later, he used variations on these very figures for an even bigger commission—the Palace of Reason. He made a vast fresco on the ceiling and walls, an astonishingly accurate astronomical map of the heavens decorated with figures of astrological significance, inspired by the ancients and contemporary science. I really think it was his secular response to all of this Christian folderol Scrovegni had paid for.”

It had never occurred to me that the chapel might not reflect Giotto's beliefs and convictions, that he had applied his genius to please his patron, not for the glory of God. I said, “Isn't the Palace of Reason right here in Padua?”

“Yes, but the original burned to the ground in 1440-something,” he said, saving me the bother of venturing beyond the tiny sector of town that was all I knew of Padua or Padova, or Italy for that matter. “So much of what Giotto painted has been lost or destroyed. Even in here. For centuries, moisture in the air drew salts in the plaster to the surface and popped paint off the walls.” He reflexively touched his bald spot, as if he was hoping to find a few bristles of new growth. “And about fifty years ago, all of the frescoes were restored and covered with a resin, which kept the salts in place but so effectively sealed the surface that the entire painted surface started to dry up and peel away, like dead skin.”

I said, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” The horrors of hell were looming above us in Giotto's superb rendering of the Last Judgment, but he didn't crack a smile.

“We'll never know even the half of who Giotto was,” he said. “The paintings we do have—the ones that weren't lost or destroyed—acquire a disproportionate significance. It's like discovering one stupid thing someone did one night and judging him on that mistake, imagining he spent all of his free nights like that.”

I think we both realized he had shifted the topic from painters to partners. Nonetheless, he had a point. I couldn't tell if he'd been the cheater or the cheated, but I had devoted a disproportionate amount of my Mitchell scholarship to exegesis of his brief affair with Rosalie.

“I love these panels,” he said. “For all of the Virtues and Vices, to set them apart from the living characters, Giotto used this bravura technique—as if to announce he was moving on to something new—this almost monochromatic approach to painting that puts more emphasis on the precision of line and shape than the bright colors and depth of field that had made him famous.” He looked at his shoes. “I'm lecturing you.”

“Don't stop now,” I said. “I've got a $10,000 credit to spend down.”

He may have smiled, or maybe he winced. He seemed determined not to express any more emotions, as if he were practicing to become a statue of himself. “Look at Charity. It's as if you are reading an etching, but the drawing is done here with a paintbrush in fresco—an almost impossible show of mastery. It's called grisaille. It turns up later, notably in work by van Eyck and Brueghel and the other true master drawers among the Dutch, and, of course, in the Sistine Chapel. But Giotto invented the technique. Or so say those who actually know about these things. I'm just paraphrasing a couple of journal articles I read last week by way of preparation.”

I said, “I think you know more than you let on.”

He said, “I know I was lying when I said I've been telling strangers about my partner leaving me. You're the first. Even my colleagues on the panel don't know yet.”

I tucked away that confession. If you have a tomb you're not using anymore, you can always find someplace to stick another secret or sadness. “Is that a crack in the plaster I'm seeing or something Giotto painted?” I was staring at a white line that bisected Charity. It looked like a fissure in the wall that extended from beneath the bottom of the painted frame, through an incomprehensible Latin inscription, and right up between her legs into her high-waisted gown, across her profile, and on up into the wall above her.

“It's a crack. That brick alcove outside was originally a public entrance to the chapel.”

I said, “An exit.”

“Yes,” he said, “a door.”

“But you can't get out,” I said. “You can't get out unless you can slip through that crack. It's like the eye of the needle.”

“Easier for a rich man to pass through the eye of the needle than to enter the gates of heaven?” He sounded genuinely interested and genuinely confused. “You mean Scrovegni? I don't get it.”

I was thinking of those moneybags at Charity's feet, the money Mitchell had left for me to distribute to Sam and Rachel, which I was still withholding. I said, “There used to be an exit behind her?”

“Yes, there was a door,” he said. “Probably it was Giotto who demanded it be sealed up and plastered over to preserve the geometry and symmetry of this grisaille border of opposing Virtues and Vices. Over time, the building settled and the open space that was originally a portal caused the stress fracture. It does indicate Giotto had some sway over the final design of the building.” He tilted his head toward the altar. “She's right about that much, though it's hardly her idea. We all read the same journal articles. Am I being petty?”

I said, “Not a model of charity.”

“I should go up there and call that contest a draw,” he said, staring at the crowded altar. “It's almost time for lunch.” He didn't move.

“I had a huge breakfast,” I said.

He said, “I have to meet with the volunteers during lunch.”

We shared a talent for fending off invitations that hadn't been issued. We let a couple of silent seconds pass before we went our separate ways. I think we both registered the awkward intimacy of that long last moment.

B
Y THE TIME
I
FOUND THE DESIGNATED LUNCHROOM, THE
unappetizing spread of tiny pressed sandwiches, cookies, and a tub of ice with a few little splits of wine and sparkling fruit drinks was littered with rejected scraps and empties. I assembled two towers of panini, or panino, or
tramezzi
-somethings on a plastic plate and stuck a yellow can of fizzy lemonade in the pocket of my dress. Most of the empty chairs I spotted were hung with blazers or purses, or else they were located at tables where the conversation was too convivial for my taste.

I headed for the exit, and just before I got away, a woman said, “This food you are eating is not able to leave the room.” It was Sara, who had apparently been demoted from translator to hall monitor. She was seated next to another woman, and their respective lunch plates were balanced on a chair between them, one untouched sandwich and one cookie on each plate. Sara was wearing an unusually demure navy blue turtleneck dress.

“You can join us, if you like.” The other woman turned my way and flounced her blonde hair, as if I might want to photograph her.

“I think you are Cheryl,” I said.

“Now, how did you know that?” She turned to me briefly and then turned away and checked to be sure her purse was still below her chair.

“I know your husband,” I said.

“You do not!” She looked at Sara and shrugged.

“And I saw you yesterday at the Arena Hotel with your daughter,” I said. It was her daughter who thought my wrinkly dress was a nightgown.

Sara stood up for no apparent reason, though she did stifle all conversation at nearby tables. Her dress fit her like a tattoo.

Cheryl also stood, and she stared at me intently. “No, I would remember if we met,” she said.

I said, “It doesn't matter.”

Cheryl said, “I never forget a face,” as if I didn't have one. “It's one of the things about me, I'd say. Anyway, take our chairs. Don't tell my husband, but Sara and I are going to skip out this afternoon for a little shopping.”

Very loudly, and very slowly, Sara said, “Shoe shopping—shopping for shoes,” as if I didn't speak English.

Cheryl said, “Did you just say you know the captain? No way!”

I said, “I must have been mistaken.”

Cheryl said, “Well, maybe so, but thanks for stopping by anyway,” as if we were standing in the foyer of her home and I was a confused delivery person.

I did take their chairs, and I was pleasantly surprised by my selection of little sandwiches, especially the melon and prosciutto, and a combo of an unfamiliar soft white cheese and thin slices of fennel. The lemonade tasted tinny. Evidently, you didn't get a glass or a little cup for your beverages unless you pledged $25,000.

I joined the first wave out of the lunchroom. My next lecture started in the dehumidifying chamber, and I wanted a good seat. The topic was moneybags. I split off from the crowd and ended up alone on a bench, forced to wait for the rest of my cohort before the guard would open the airtight chamber. The delay was just long enough for
the heat of the day to bring my back to a boil again, and my scratching effectively spread the problem from my shoulders right down my spine. Eventually, I was admitted to the cool dehumidifier, along with three elderly priests.

Two short young women, both wearing dark pantsuits, their wavy hair parted in the middle, were standing beside the video monitor at the front of the room. They looked like flight attendants for a bargain airline. One of them had tied on a white neckerchief, which didn't really jazz up her outfit but did make it possible to tell them apart. The priests stood in the aisle until I chose a seat in the middle of the many empty rows and then parked themselves directly behind me.

One of them said, “We ought to spread out and make them feel better.”

“My name is Lisa Sorretino-Balfour, assistant professor of rhetoric, composition, and modern communications at the College of St. Benedict, where I also serve as codirector of the Art History Is Our History program for returning scholars with my copresenter today, Margaret LaChappelle, associate professor of world religions and spiritual traditions and codirector of the Art History Is Our History program for returning scholars, as well as acting chairperson of the Humanities Department at St. Benedict.” Lisa was reading all of this from a thick packet of typed notes. She turned the page. “Today's lecture is entitled
Moneybags
—” Here, she paused and looked up, as if she'd anticipated a roar of approving laughter from a big crowd when she'd prepared her talk. She glanced at Margaret, who was running a finger around the inside of her neckerchief. Lisa ducked back toward her notes. “The full title is actually a little longer. Here it is. I'll just start that sentence again. Okay. Today's lecture is entitled
Moneybags: Symbols of Ill-Gotten Gain in Giotto's Arena Chapel Fresco Cycle.
”

Lisa read for fifteen minutes. Except when she was interrupted
by a wisecrack from one of the priests, which she never failed to mistake for a question from an interested audience member—pausing each time to look up hopefully, and then okay-okay-okaying until she had relocated herself in her text and resumed reading—she delivered a fairly steady stream of facts that occasionally threatened to cohere into an idea, if you had Sara's map in your lap. Judas figured prominently in the early pages of her notes, as he figured prominently on three of the four chapel walls, most peculiarly on the front wall above the altar, where Giotto painted him receiving the silver coins for his promise to betray Jesus (Number 27). Judas also turned up in the famous scene in which he embraced Jesus and identified him for the waiting soldiers with a kiss (Number 30), and in the Last Judgment (Number 39), after he'd hanged himself, “his guts pouring forth from his abdomen, like a broken purse,” Lisa said, raising some groans from the clerical chorus. Judas, she said, was notably absent from the fourth wall.

One of the priests held up a book of photographic reproductions of the frescoes. “Envy,” he said, his finger under Giotto's gray portrait of a man in flames, a snake emerging from his mouth to eat his face. “Isn't that a fat moneybag in his left hand? Or did he pack a bag lunch for his trip to hell?”

Envy was Number 41f, facing Charity, Number 40f, on the opposite wall, and I mentioned the moneybags at Charity's feet, hoping to bolster Lisa's argument that the moneybags weren't strictly associated with Judas.

Lisa ignored my contribution. “Envy does broadly represent Judas's sin of Avarice,” Lisa said, “but it's not a portrait of a single man.”

The priest said, “It is a picture of just one man.”

Lisa said, “These are very good questions we can all discuss later.”

Margaret spoke for the first time. “The moneybag is not singularly associated with Judas. It is also a symbol of fertility. You know,
both a virtue and a vice.” She nodded my way. “Avarice holds on to the money. Charity is prepared to give it away.”

I nodded enthusiastically.

“At the front of the chapel, paired with Judas and his silver coins, is the Visitation,” Margaret said, “when the pregnant Elizabeth visits the pregnant Virgin. You see, vice and virtue.”

The priest lowered his book. “Judas and the Virgin Mary are two sides of the same coin?”

Margaret said, “It's not quite that literal.”

The priest said, “What does money have to do with the Visitation? Was Mary charging her cousin admission to see her belly?”