NO WORK OF ART, particularly those afforded the designation of “masterpiece” can be said to belong to any individual. Museum, gallery, corporation, or like institutions that happen to collect and exhibit works of that stature serve only a temporary custodial function in their care. Such masterworks belong rightly to posterity and to those who inhabit that time. The destruction, therefore, or disfiguration of any work of art is a crime against mankind …
Manship looked up from his typewriter. It was nearly 4:00 P.M. and still there’d been no word from Ettore Foa, the Italian deputy ambassador. In fact, with the opening of the Botticelli exhibition scarcely forty-eight hours away, Manship’s phone was conspicuously silent. That in itself was ominous.
He’d been working all day on his essay on theft and vandalism of art. When completed, it would be enlarged, reproduced on long mats, framed in plain aluminum strips, then hung alongside the painting of the St. Stephen’s Centurion with its irreparable gashes and horrific excised eyes. Distasteful as it was, he had to agree with Van Nuys and Rene Klass that the mutilated masterpiece would introduce a jarring note into an otherwise-celebratory event. But, hopefully, he told himself, the sight of this glorious painting reduced to shreds might just possibly serve as a sobering tonic to a complacent public that had come to take its great art for granted.
All the while he wrote, he kept glancing at the phone, willing it to ring—a silent plea to Foa to put him out of his misery of waiting.
Foa was not in Washington earlier that afternoon when Manship called. When he asked where the deputy ambassador was, he was brusquely informed that Signor Foa was out of town. Whomever it was he spoke to was not authorized to say where he was, or when he was expected back.
So the writing of the essay that he’d postponed far too long became therapeutic. It took his mind off of troubling events. Yet all the while he wrote about the missing eyes in the Botticelli Centurion, it occurred to him that what he saw instead were the almond-shaped sea blue eyes of Isobel Cattaneo, their rueful, piercing gaze coming to rest upon him. They bore precisely the same expression they had that night when she sat across from him at the tiny enoteca in Florence. He had a distinct, almost preternatural sense of her presence nearby, as though she were looking over his shoulder. At first merely transitory, the sensation persisted and grew more intense.
Anyone who politicizes a work of art to further his own political agenda …
His fingers stumbled over the keys of the ancient Royal as he attempted to recapture the thread of his thought.
… has probably subverted the intent of the artist. Once a painting is judged by posterity to be a masterpiece, it ceases to have any national identity, any territorial boundaries. Its subject matter has achieved universality and can no longer be said to belong to any specific time or be appropriated on behalf of any cause in which people may hope to enlist it. It may then be said to have entered into the history of civilization, thus becoming untouchable.
“Isobel,” he heard himself murmur, then was startled to realize he’d never addressed her by her Christian name before. The name sounded strange on his lips.
Sometime later, finishing his essay, he yanked the paper from the roller and plunged headlong for the door. Flinging it open, the first thing he saw was Taverner’s startled face.
Manship flew past her, barely pausing to drop the copy of his essay down on her desk. “That has to be at the printer’s by six tonight. If anyone wants me, I can be reached at home.”
He watched her eyes flare. “But, Mark …” That’s all she managed to get out. In the next moment, he was gone.