"Maniac," Lorenzo muttered happily. Then he sat quietly for a few moments while the fur on the back of his hands faded away and his fanglike canines receded.
The only way into the building was this old carriage entrance, an arched passage fifteen feet high and ten wide, firmly blocked by great wooden double doors-the original ones, I thought, studded with iron, and with two great, rusty door-knockers at head height, shaped like lions with wreaths in their mouths. As eye-catching as all this may sound, it wasn't. The neighboring old buildings had similar entrances, and all of them were dusty and black with age, like the buildings themselves. The impression the street gave was of a back alley running between the rear entrances of two rows of dilapidated warehouses; not the kind of places anyone would want to live in.
On the left door of this one, just below the knocker, was a plaque that read DIVIETO DI SOSTA-No parking-and on the door opposite was the sign beloved by privacy-seeking Italians since Pompeii: a picture of a snarling dog above the words ATTENTI AL CANE. (CAVE CANEM, it would have said in Pompeii, but the sentiment was the same.)
Lorenzo reached a gangly arm out of the car window and pressed a button on a brass plate attached to the wall of the passageway. There were five other buttons on it, each with an engraved name next to it, as if each of the three stories of the palazzo had two tenants. That I doubted, although there was certainly more than room enough. The buzzer he had pressed was labeled Uffici Tacca: Studio di Architettura e Grafica; not the sort of sign likely to bring drop-in visitors. In addition, the square ceramic address-tile above the plate was artfully broken so that nothing but a fragment of the last number-a 3-was visible. Or was it a 5? Whatever else they might be, the Bolzanos were masters at not calling attention to themselves.
The heavy doors swung inward, scraping along deep curving ruts in the cobblestones, and we drove into the vestibule, stopping before another tall gate, this one of steel. At our left was the old gatekeeper's lodge, its window cut like a ticket-taker's box into the wall. In it was a man in a dark blue uniform sitting before a rack of four television monitors.
He nodded at Lorenzo and inserted a key into a slot beside him. The wooden door behind us creaked closed, the inner gate swung smoothly open, and the Fiat chugged slowly out of the vestibule, away from the grungy Via Talenti, and into the golden world of the Florentine Cinquecento.
Chapter 10
Not every sixteenth-century Florentine's world, of course, but the world as it might have looked to you if you'd been a Medici or a Pazzi.
To start with, everything was clean. The flooring of the courtyard was made of square pink paving stones, the walls of rough-textured almond-colored blocks. Around the four sides, stuccoed, intricately figured columns supported the vaulted roof of a hollow-square loggia, the sides of which were decorated with enormous frescoes of sixteenth-century Austria and Hungary.
In the center was an atrium, open to the sky, with a mellow, musical old fountain topped by spouting bronze dolphins of the sixteenth-century variety. Marble and bronze statues stood on pedestals, and urns were everywhere- Roman, Etruscan, Greek, Minoan-all of them overflowing with out-of-season flowers.
All at the same time I admired it, I envied it, and I thought it a ridiculous, affected, and offensively ostentatious way to live in the 1980s. No, not ostentatious; I don't imagine many people got a chance to see it.
"This is beautiful," I said to Lorenzo as we walked through the incredible loggia to a discreetly disguised elevator.
"Mm?" he said. "Oh, yes."
I motioned at the battle scences. "Vasari?"
"Mostly. That one over the door is a Signorelli," he pointed out with little interest. "Shall we go up now?"
We rode to the second floor in silence, and then went through a set of double doors into the reception room, a klittle salon with sixteenth-century Spanish leather wall paneling, seventeenth-century Florentine tapestries, and a colossal French Renaissance marble fireplace hacked from some French chateau, bearded, grim caryatids and all. Lorenzo glanced at his watch.
"My father's getting his afternoon shave now. We can wait here if you like, or there's time to see the collection. I meant the collection per se, not these." He waved carelessly at the Tuscan and Venetian mannerist paintings on the leather walls.
The Bolzano art collection "per se" took up the entire floor above, which we reached by walking up an oppressively grand staircase under a domed ceiling covered with an exuberant allegorical fresco- Courage, Prudence, and Destiny Carrying the Globe of the Florentine Republic Into Immortality; something like that. It seemed impossible that the grubby Via Talenti ran by below, but there it was, darkly visible through the grimy (only on the outside) hallway windows.
Knowing my tastes, Lorenzo took me directly to the Dutch Baroque wing. Not surprisingly, he wanted to talk about the conflict between symbolistic and phenomenological world views in Flemish genre painting, but when he saw that I just wanted to look, and appreciate, and say nothing, he showed mercy and walked silently along beside me.
We moved past rollicking low-life scenes by Jan Steen, a glowering landscape of van Ruisdael's, an antiseptic church interior by Saenredam-
I stopped suddenly. "Wait!" I was staring at a painting on the wall at the far end of the room: a Vermeer-a girl, cool and reflective, standing at a clavichord…
Lorenzo looked inquiringly at me.
"That painting-" I said confusedly. "It's the one from the cache. I was just looking at it in Berlin. How…" My mind raced while I nattered on. Could I have been wrong? Was the Vermeer I'd examined so closely in Berlin a copy after all? If this one was the original-
Lorenzo tittered. "It's a copy, Christopher."
"A copy?"
"Didn't you know? My father had copies made of most of the pieces stolen by the Nazis."
Yes, of course I knew that; I nearly got killed by one. "But this one-that is, the original of it-it's been recovered now. Why-"
"Ah, recovered, but not yet returned to its home. While it's in your exhibition, we keep the copy in its place. Why not?"
When we got nearer, I saw that it was extraordinarily well done, but definitely not the real thing. And yes, I would have known it even if no one had told me.
"Quite a piece of work," I said.
"Ah-ha-ha. What do I detect in your tone, Christopher? You don't approve? You think it declasse to hang copies alongside authentic masterpieces?"
"No, not declasse, but puzzling. If you're going to have genuine art-"
"'Genuine'? 'Art'?" He crowed with pleasure at having snared me. "Define your terms! What do you mean by 'art'?"
Oh boy, I thought, here we go again. He gestured at the Vermeer copy. "Will you admit this is an object of beauty?"
"Yes, it's beautiful-"
"But not art?"
"No, not in the sense I mean; not with a capital A. It's an imitation. The person who did it was trying to reproduce something already done, not to make something new. It was a mechanical operation, not a creative one; craft, not art."
I was speaking quickly, hoping to head him off, but a startling new idea had burst in on me, one that I should have thought of a long time ago.
"Not art?" Lorenzo repeated archly. "Not art? Do you so completely accept the contextualist position, then, that-"
But I had other fish to fry. "Lorenzo," I interrupted, "tell me something. A copy like this-or the copies in the show-they're extremely fine, good enough to fool almost anyone. Isn't there a danger of their accidentally getting out into the market sometime as originals?"
Or into The Plundered Past itself as originals, accidentally or otherwise. With dozens of fine Bolzano copies around, a little mix-up-a small confusion of false with real-was far from impossible.