The Lost Painting (16 page)

He did not recognize the painting as a composition by Caravaggio, but he did think, as he later put it, that it was “a remarkably fine work.” He looked forward to watching the colors and shapes come back to life as Benedetti cleaned it.

I
N THE RESTORATION STUDIO,
B
ENEDETTI EXAMINED THE FRAME.
It appeared to be late eighteenth century or early nineteenth century, gilded and well made. Along the sight edges, that part of the frame closest to the picture, ran a finely carved beading, like a string of pearls, although several of them had broken off. The frame, Benedetti thought, could prove valuable in tracing the provenance of the painting.

But it was the attribution to Honthorst that interested Benedetti most. He had read long ago, in his student days, Bellori’s account of Caravaggio’s life, and he’d recognized this painting the moment he saw it as the one described by Bellori. He’d also read Longhi’s essay about
The Taking of Christ
and its many copies, although the details were not fresh in his mind. But the name Honthorst—he could not quite put his finger on it, it lurked just outside his memory, yet he knew he had once come across something concerning the Dutch artist and Caravaggio.

The thought no sooner occurred to him than he remembered the context. A short article by Longhi, just a note really, buried inside an issue of
Paragone,
and one paragraph in that note in which Longhi had surmised that a painting attributed to Honthorst was in reality by Caravaggio.

At home, Benedetti had a large collection of books and art journals, including a complete set of
Paragone
issues dating back to his student days. His memory told him that the painting Longhi had written about was
The Taking of Christ,
and that it had been sold to an Englishman as a painting by Honthorst. If that was true, if his memory had not betrayed him, then Benedetti knew he had his first real lead in tracing the painting’s provenance.

It took him only a few minutes that evening to find the correct issue of
Paragone,
with Longhi’s acerbic three-page note about the German scholar Gerda Panofsky-Soergel and her research in the Mattei archive. The reference to
The Taking of Christ
was brief—a single long sentence on the third page, a mere digression. But Benedetti saw that he had remembered correctly. All of a sudden, it did not seem so preposterous that this particular painting should end up in Dublin, just a short journey across the Irish Sea from Scotland. Benedetti resolved to make that journey himself as soon as possible, his first stop in piecing together the painting’s history.

A
T THE GALLERY THE NEXT MORNING,
B
ENEDETTI SHOWED
R
AY
mond Keaveney and Brian Kennedy the article by Longhi. He could see in the director’s eyes the skepticism of yesterday begin to waver.

The obvious step was for Kennedy to ask the Jesuits how they had gotten the painting. But the mere act of posing such a question might raise in Father Barber’s mind questions of his own. Keaveney didn’t want Kennedy to be in the position of having to answer those questions yet. It was too early, he argued.

Benedetti would proceed with restoring the painting and, at the same time, conduct an investigation into its provenance. Father Barber didn’t expect to have it back for at least six months, and they could probably delay even longer, if necessary. Until they had proof—documentation of the painting’s voyage through time—they would continue to keep the matter a secret even from other gallery employees.

5

A
NDREW
O
’
C
ONNOR WAS THE GALLERY’S SENIOR RESTORER AND,
in name at least, Benedetti’s boss, although in practice he had always treated Benedetti as his equal. They shared the penthouse studio, often working side by side on different paintings, and occasionally even on the same painting. O’Connor was one of the few gallery employees who knew from the beginning that Benedetti suspected this
Taking of Christ
might be the lost original by Caravaggio.

O’Connor and Benedetti had first met more than twenty years ago at Mario’s trattoria in Rome, when O’Connor was studying at the Istituto Centrale per il Restauro. Benedetti had by then graduated and gone into business for himself, and from time to time he’d hired O’Connor to help him out. Back then, O’Connor was poor, barely able to make ends meet. Benedetti had always paid him generously, often more than the sum they had agreed upon. When O’Connor took sick and lay abed in his attic room for a week, unable to negotiate the five flights of stairs, Benedetti took care of him, bringing him soup and medicine, mopping his feverish brow, and arranging for a doctor to come and see him. At a St. Patrick’s Day party at the Irish embassy in Rome, O’Connor introduced Benedetti to the woman who would become his wife, and then he served as Benedetti’s best man.

They had stayed in touch after O’Connor left Rome and returned to Ireland. One day, years later, O’Connor received a letter from Benedetti saying that he’d reached the end of his string, he couldn’t tolerate the bureaucracy in Italy, and he didn’t know where to turn. O’Connor told him to come to Ireland. As it happened, the other restorer at the gallery had just quit and gone off to Australia. The job didn’t pay much, but at least it paid steadily, and they could find outside work. “It’s my last chance,” Benedetti wrote back.

O’Connor had arranged an interview for Benedetti with James White, then the director of the gallery. White spoke no Italian, and Benedetti spoke no English. O’Connor offered to sit in on the interview and translate. White replied that O’Connor’s presence would be inappropriate. O’Connor often wondered how Benedetti managed to get through that interview.

Up in the penthouse studio, O’Connor studied
The Taking of Christ.
From what he could see, beneath the dirt and varnish, the quality of this painting appeared quite good. But O’Connor had cleaned hundreds, perhaps thousands of paintings. Every now and then he’d get excited about one of them. He’d see the qualities rather than the faults. And then one day he’d come in and stare at the painting and say to himself, It doesn’t look as good as it did yesterday. What was I thinking, anyhow?

For the time being, O’Connor preferred to remain skeptical. But the painting interested him. He wanted to work on it, to get a feel for the artist.

O’Connor recalls that within a few days of the painting’s arrival, Benedetti began cleaning one or two small areas, only a couple of inches square, on the periphery of the picture. This test cleaning determines which combination of solvents will work best to remove the dirt, grease, and varnish, and how the paint surface will react. In the language of restorers, the process is called “opening a window” on the painting.

Since it was Benedetti’s project, O’Connor felt compelled to ask if he might work on it. Benedetti assented. O’Connor selected a dark area at the bottom, near the robe of Christ. He used cotton swabs and began with distilled water, barely dampening the swab, to remove the superficial dirt. Occasionally he wet a swab in his mouth. Saliva contains enzymes and is often effective at removing dirt and some oils. In Italy he’d seen restorers clean paintings with small pellets of fresh bread. The process of cleaning old paintings has a long history, not all of it illustrious. In previous eras, paintings had been variously scrubbed with soap and water, caustic soda, wood ash, and lye; many had been damaged irreparably. An older restorer once described paintings to O’Connor as breathing, half-organic entities. “It’s a good thing they can’t cry,” this restorer said, “otherwise you would go to museums and have to put your fingers in your ears.”

Looking at the Jesuits’ painting, O’Connor judged that it had survived earlier cleanings rather well. The paint surface was largely intact. O’Connor had seen all types of cracks in the brittle surfaces of paintings—spoke cracks, spiral cracks, garland cracks, flame cracks, net cracks, grid cracks. They were all signs of damage of one sort or another. But this one had only the characteristic and inevitable craquelure of old age, something no restorer could remedy even if he wanted to.

After half a dozen swabs, O’Connor had cleared away the initial layer of dirt. The window, a few inches square, was still just barely opened. He had reached a more resistant layer of microscopic particles bound by oils, grease, perhaps even some tars from tobacco smoke, a common contaminant in privately owned paintings. In the case of this one, which had hung in the Jesuit dining room, coal dust and smoke from the fireplace had probably been bound into the mixture.

From experience, O’Connor knew which solvents worked best at removing this layer. He preferred acetone because it evaporated so quickly that it remained only briefly on the paint surface. He also used white spirits and alcohol. Often he would mix several solvents. At the Istituto Centrale, he had learned a dozen different recipes. One of the most common was called 3A—acetone, alcohol, and acqua (water), in equal parts.

He began with a dilute solution of acetone, increasing the strength as he went on. The film of dirt and oil came away, and then the yellowed varnish. Within the confines of the small window, he began to glimpse the depth and intensity of the colors in the original paint. Under the microscope at low power, he could see the clear contours of the brushstrokes. If this picture was in fact by Caravaggio, O’Connor knew that he had come as close to the hand of the master as anyone could.

D
URING THE NEXT FEW WEEKS,
O
’
C
ONNOR WATCHED AS MORE OF
the painting began to emerge in ever larger windows made by Benedetti. He began to notice that Benedetti was coming in to work at odd hours, times when O’Connor wasn’t around. To O’Connor, it seemed that Benedetti was avoiding him, that he wanted to work alone; he had the distinct sensation that Benedetti had become strangely possessive about the painting. In Benedetti’s absence, it sat on its easel, covered by a green felt cloth.

One day, about three weeks after the painting’s arrival, O’Connor and Benedetti crossed paths in the studio. Benedetti was staring at the painting. He stood with his arms crossed, his eyes narrowed in concentration, his mouth compressed into a frown.

“Look at the arm of Judas,” Benedetti said to O’Connor. “What do you think?”

O’Connor studied the painting. “What are you getting at?” he asked.

“It seems too short, doesn’t it?” said Benedetti.

It did. A subtle error of proportion, not immediately evident in the context of the entire painting.

“It looks like he painted the shoulder and then didn’t have enough room for the arm,” said Benedetti.

O’Connor understood that Benedetti was wrestling with his doubts.

“Well,” said Benedetti finally, “he wasn’t a perfect anatomist. He made other errors like this. In
The Supper at Emmaus,
the apostle’s hand is too large.”

B
ENEDETTI
DID
EXPERIENCE
A
FLEETING
MOMENT
OF
DOUBT
AFTER
he’d had the painting for about a month. Looking back on it, he couldn’t recall with precision why he’d felt that way. It had not been the arm of Judas, or any specific aspect of the painting itself. In fact, just the opposite. If anything, that spasm of doubt had afflicted him because everything seemed to be going too perfectly. He simply couldn’t credit his own good fortune.

As he opened larger windows and stripped away layers of dirt and varnish, he became more and more certain that the painting really could only be by Caravaggio’s hand. Apart from the quality of the brushwork, the speed and assurance with which Caravaggio had painted, Benedetti had come across several telltale pentimenti, errors of the sort that a copyist would not likely make. The most significant, visible to the naked eye, was on the head of Judas. Benedetti had found it only because the painting had been cleaned too harshly in the past. Two centimeters above Judas’ ear, Benedetti saw the ghostly image of another ear. Caravaggio had painted from live models directly onto the canvas, without making preliminary drawings. He’d probably started his compositions with the face, perhaps the ear, of a central figure. This pentimento supported just such a hypothesis. Clearly Caravaggio had second thoughts and painted over the first ear, but an earlier cleaning had abraded that layer of pigment.

Benedetti discovered other small pentimenti, also visible to the naked eye, such as the belt on the soldier at the center of the picture, which Caravaggio had enlarged to fit the brass buckle that he’d already painted. And the restorer had found one of Caravaggio’s characteristic touches, scoring marks that the painter had made with the butt end of his brush in the wet ground to define the lances that the soldiers carried.

6

B
ENEDETTI HAD A SMALL OFFICE, NO BIGGER THAN A CLOSET, ON
the third floor of the gallery. The furniture consisted of a wooden desk that faced a single round window with a view of Merrion Square, a chair, a bookcase, and a four-drawer filing cabinet. He cleared out one of those drawers and began assembling a dossier on
The Taking of Christ
. In one file, he kept detailed notes on the restoration process and his observations on the state of the painting. He also started several other files—on Hamilton Nisbet, on the Mattei family, on Caravaggio. He gathered together all of his books and articles on Caravaggio and arranged them in the bookcase. When he was not working upstairs in the studio, he came to his office and started filling his files with notes.

He knew that Caravaggio had made at least three, and perhaps four, paintings for the Mattei family. One of those, he believed, was upstairs in the restoration studio. The second one,
The Supper at Emmaus,
was at the British National Gallery in London. Benedetti had seen that picture several times, the painting with the apostle’s hand that was too big. On his next trip to London he would study it again, this time with an eye to detecting stylistic and technical similarities between it and
The Taking of
Christ
.