3

HE WORKED AT the statue in the failing light, straining to make sure that no square millimetre of her person was missed. He was kneeling before her on his little mat, involved in the intricate folds of her robe, as these clung to or fell away from her thighs. In fact he was working between her thighs now, in the region of mythic speculation. Here at this point, beneath the draperies, lay the gateway to the miraculous. The Logos entered here, he thought, wielding the quartz-cutter with unremitting care and skill. As the brilliance of the sun fills and penetrates a glass window, in St Bernard’s simile. No damage to the membrane either on entrance or exit. It was a good image, apt both for conception and birth. Deriving of course from the beauty of medieval stained glass windows. Thus art replaces nature, he thought: the earlier symbols had been of rain or dew, penetrating and vivifying the earth. Before leaving England he had read everything he could find about the Annunciation.

He knelt back, switching off the instrument and removing his mask. The light was not good enough now. For reasons he could not fathom his request for an electric cable to be laid up here had not so far been attended to. Biagi had been politely vague on the matter. The architect in charge of work on the church floor said he thought it was a matter for the Soprintendenza ai Monumenti. They had referred him to the Soprintendenza alle Gallerie, who said they would put the matter in hand. So far, however, nothing had happened. It seemed a simple enough thing, a good light to work by.

This particular evening it didn’t matter; he would have had to stop soon in any case; it was the evening of the conference, when they were all due to congregate and report on progress under the auspices of Sir Hugo Templar. He would have to get back, change, collect his notes – he had agreed to say something about his work on the Madonna.

He knelt there for a while longer, looking at her. All was pure and splendid now from mid-thigh downwards, her restored parts beginning to take on a faint, glimmering incandescence in this failing light. Above this was the coarse mottling of her corrosion, the blackened concave parts merging already with the slowly darkening air. He glanced up at the averted face, the badger stripe of bleach that ran from forehead to chin. He had a sense, not for the first time, that she was about to break into some movement or gesture. This hour of the changing light was the time the angel came to her, or so it was generally believed – no doubt why the church had enjoined the faithful to say an Ave Maria at the time of the eventide Angelus bells. By a coincidence in itself miraculous she had been reading Isaiah chapter seven, verse fourteen at the time: Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son …

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.’

Barfield looked sharply to his left then to his right. At once nearly all the lights in the room went out, the whirring of a projector made itself heard. ‘When you’re ready, Muriel,’ came Barfield’s voice in the dimness.

But the beam of light, when it came, did not hit the screen. It fell above and to the right, lighting up a square of blank wall. Edged purplish by this light, still leaning on his stick, Barfield gave directions. As if in an uneasy dream Raikes listened to this slightly peevish, reasonable voice.

‘You need to change the angle, Muriel,’ Barfield said. ‘Up a bit and about three inches over to the left, no, your left, Muriel … That’s better.’

An abstract image of extraordinary beauty now appeared on the screen, bands of dilated blue and glowing orange, this burning off at the edges to diffusions of crimson and ochre, with complex and exquisite interactions between the spreading colour and the containing bands.

‘There are seven layers of paint through this surface,’ Barfield said. ‘We are looking at them horizontally, highly magnified, of course – the actual paint thickness is 0.24 millimetres in this section. No, wait a minute, I tell a lie, there are eight layers if you count the nineteenth-century repainting here.’ The walking stick entered the zone of light, pointed briefly at dark lilac mist along the edge of the uppermost band.

Of course, Raikes thought, he might have received his injury by some other means, crushed under the weight of a Tintoretto for example. That would have been in keeping with the hectic and heroic note he had sounded – in fact all the Tintoretto people had sounded it – in the café that morning, when Miss Greenaway had slipped memorably out of her boilersuit top, and revealed, along with the beauty of her breasts, the existence of documents in the sacristy. Or he might simply have fallen downstairs …

‘We can’t decide whether to clean off this repainted area,’ Barfield said, ‘until we are sure about the nature and quality of the original. This is a tricky business. Tintoretto used an extraordinarily wide range of pigment. Microscopical and chemical analysis of paint samples from this one painting have revealed just about all the pigments available at the time. In addition to lead white, carbon blacks, red, yellow and brown ochres, we have identified natural ultramarine or lapis lazuli, azurite, smalt, indigo, malachite, verdigris, copper resinate glazes, orpiment, realgar …’

The hypnotic effect of this litany of colours, delivered in Barfield’s flat voice, combined with the glowing composition on the screen, lulled Raikes into a state of slightly somnolent reverie. He felt immune for the moment: while voice and picture continued no calls could be made on him. He found himself wondering again why Lattimer should have chosen to show up here. So that his presence should be noted? So that Rescue Venice should be reminded of his previous generosity? He did nothing without a purpose, as Wiseman had implied, and as Raikes had discovered for himself; but the urges of the man’s egotism seemed at least as strong as conscious purpose; it was impossible for example to know whether Lattimer had wanted mainly to offer him dubious employment, that evening of his visit, or to be admired and envied in the midst of his possessions, the souvenirs of war and business, the grisly trophies of his sexual exploits.

This brought him, by a process he did not pause to examine, to thoughts of Chiara Litsov, a resurgence of that slightly painful sense of her existence that had occupied some part of his mind ever since meeting her, a feeling half curious, half sorrowful. He was not conscious of any desire in this. In fact the heat that had plagued him earlier in his stay, when Venice had tormented him with its endless suggestions of sexual possibility, when he had gone around in a more or less permanent state of tumescence, all that had ended now – since meeting Mrs Litsov, he suddenly realized – stilled as effectively as a blow might still restless limbs, to be replaced by this painful mental scrutiny, this strange speculation which had no goal of discovery because no knowledge to proceed on, but fed on itself and was its own justification. She and the Madonna had been the twin bearings of his thoughts …

The glowing spectrum on the screen was extinguished. The lights went on. Barfield, clearly finished, limped to the wall and took the screen down, to the accompaniment of applause. Sir Hugo was on his feet again. Raikes waited until his name was uttered then made his way up to the platform.

He had come armed with several photographs, blown up to poster size, together with weights to make them hang properly and a suction-plug device for attaching them to the wall. The first one he showed was of the Madonna as she had been when he arrived, exhibiting her travestied form and face, the encrusted sores of her disease. This public display of her, combining with his feelings of nervousness, affected his emotions. It was only with reluctance that he had agreed to speak; basically he thought of the whole affair as a stunt of Sir Hugo’s and had a certain distaste for it, while conceding it was probably necessary; but the presence of the newspaper people and the number of what seemed ordinary members of the public had made him see that this might be something of an opportunity. When he turned from the photograph to face his audience, holding his single page of notes, he felt suddenly like the Madonna’s champion, speaking out on her behalf, belied and travestied as she was. This gave from the start an accent of feeling to his voice.

‘This is the lady as I first saw her,’ he said. ‘No one seeing this, I imagine, would claim that weathering improves the look of stone sculpture. She is made of Istrian stone, which is a dense limestone of very common use in Venice. She is therefore an example of what is happening to the external stonework of this beautiful city.

‘Weathering of course is a very long and gradual process. It may be broadly defined as the process of adjustment of minerals and rocks from the original place of formation to their present environment on the earth’s surface. The same thing applies to human beings. Adjustment to life outside the womb involves a shock to the system.’

This was a prepared joke and there was some laughter at it, or rather the collective murmur that denotes audience awareness of humorous intention. Raikes paused, noticing faces he knew here and there. A camera flashed, recording this moment of pause.

‘So,’ he said, ‘there was damage done to the Madonna even before she was made. There was the shock of the quarrying. The deterioration really begins there. Afterwards, over the centuries, there was a long process of recrystallization, impaired density, increased solution rate. Helped of course by the carbon dioxide always present in the atmosphere. But it wasn’t this that caused the appalling disfigurements you see in the photograph. She is suffering from a specifically twentieth-century disease.

‘Many of you will be familiar with the process. Sulphur dioxide is given off when fossil fuels are burned. The chimneys of Mestre and Maraghera have been pumping SO₂ into the atmosphere for a long time now. And Venice is a humid place, notoriously so. In winter cold and humid, in summer hot and humid. So we have a perfect formula for disaster. The SO₂ combines with the moisture always present in the atmosphere to produce sulphuric acid. This acts on all exposed stone surfaces to form calcium sulphate, which spreads over the stone like a tumour, rotting it to gypsum. Those are the encrustations you can see. Underneath them of course the decay is still going on.’

Raikes replaced the photograph with one of a highly magnified stone sample and explained the process of electron-microscopic examination done by sectioning. He pointed out the symptoms of soluble salts accumulated on the stone in the presence of water, the powdery deposits, humid stains, loss of cohesion; the deadly ‘efflorescence’ – white needle-like crystals caused by dissolved salts sweated from the pores and crusting on the surface. Then he showed a picture of the Madonna as she was now, cleaned almost to the waist. He spoke about the progress of his work, the excellent results obtained with the air-abrasion instrument, his hopes for a complete restoration. At this point he paused. He had gained confidence in speaking but now some of his tension returned. He was about to say something he knew not to be politic.

‘This is just one statue,’ he said. ‘Venice is full of rotting statues. The Madonna shown here is about five and a half centuries old. If the rate of decay could be shown on a graph, there would be a very slightly rising line for the first five hundred years and an almost vertical one for the last fifty. The problem is one of time and human resources. It has taken one man rather more than one month to clean rather less than one half of one Madonna. To put the matter bluntly, Venice cannot go on relying to the extent she does at present on foreign enterprises. Unless more active steps are taken on the part of the authorities to recruit and train restorers at sufficiently attractive rates of pay, and to shoulder the financial burden of large-scale restoration projects, it will be too late. Quite soon it will be too late. This lady behind me was caught just in time. A few more years and she would have had no fingers and no nose. A few more after that and she would just have been a piece of limestone.’

He was conscious of clapping as he took down the photograph and left the platform. As he walked back to his place he saw Muriel standing near the film projector. She had her left arm in a sling.