It was, in other words, a lot like Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, and by the time I stepped onto the Pinacoteca's portico, I was feeling right at home, even a little nostalgic for my graduate years at Cal.
Inside, it was sharply different; no noise, no garbage, no picturesque seediness. All very serene and modem. The cellblock interior of the old convent had been gutted and replaced by spacious, off-white rooms in which the art treasures were expertly shown off against uncluttered settings. I was fifteen minutes early for my meeting with Di Vecchio, so of course I took the time to wander through. I'd been there before, but never with the theft on my mind, and this time I found myself heading for the two rooms from which the paintings had been stolen.
As Di Vecchio had said, there was no "junk" in the 6,000- piece collection, but most of what the museum did have was work by regional artists who, however good, had never achieved worldwide recognition. These the thieves had left alone; understandably, in my opinion. Would you risk pursuit and prison to steal a Bugardini, a Garofalo ("the Raphael of Ferrara"), a Marco Zoppo?
This is not to say that the Pinacoteca was a second-rate museum. Most of the world's great art museums are equally provinciaclass="underline" the Uffizi, the Prado, the Rijksmuseum—all are primarily showcases for their native sons. It takes a museum without much of a cultural pedigree of its own (the Metropolitan in New York), or with a long history of big spending (London's National Gallery), or with one of the world's preeminent looters in its past (the Louvre), to be truly eclectic. And even the Louvre is a little overrepresented in its Rigauds and Prud'hons, if you ask me.
The thieves had also bypassed the famous paintings in the gallery given to the work of Guido Reni, Bologna's foremost artist. All of these had been created to hang in churches and be seen from a distance, so they were huge, averaging twelve feet by twenty-five. Even when cut from their frames and rolled up, they lacked portability—imagine hurriedly stuffing one in the trunk of a car. The same for a large Raphael in another room.
What had they taken, then? Those paintings small enough to tuck under an arm when cut free and rolled up, that were by artists famous enough to bring real money in Riyadh or Tokyo or Cleveland. The Pinacoteca had lost works by Corregio, Tintoretto, Botticelli, Giorgione, Titian, the Carracci, Veronese—eighteen great masterpieces in all.
Well, seventeen. The Botticelli, a Pietà, had been painted in the clumsy, semi-hysterical style of his sadly degraded sixties, thirty years after the glorious days of the Primavera. Definitely Mickey Mouse stuff, to use the appropriate art- historical terminology. Not that I'd tell that to Di Vecchio, of course. Anyway, a Botticelli was a Botticelli. One didn't take its theft lightly.
Most of the pictures had been taken from the second-floor room in which I was now standing, and the one next to it. These rooms were different from most of the others in that they had no windows, only skylights. Assuming the thieves had used a rope ladder, the skylights would have made it easy to enter and leave the gallery without being observed, and the absence of windows would have given them privacy while they worked. The question was, how had they gotten in, and gotten the pictures off the walls, without tripping the alarms? Surely their security system hadn't just happened to be off, like Clara's. And where had the night guards been? It was something I'd never asked Di Vecchio about before; but then I'd never been put into the hospital in connection with it, either.
From the corner of my eye I saw a guard watching me steadily. I thought it best to stop studying the skylight and instead focused on the wall in front of me, on which hung a large wooden altarpiece, a Christ Enthroned by the thirteenth‑century Florentine master Cimabue. Cimabue is one of those artists I know I should like, I really should. Very important historically. A splendid craftsman, the teacher of Giotto (maybe), the man who bridged the gap between the art of antiquity and the new humanistic world view, etc., etc. But I just don't like him; he gives me the creeps.
Tony Whitehead has pointed out that this is hardly an apt sentiment from a curator of a major art museum, and that the least I could do would be to come up with a more felicitous way to put it. So I suppose I ought to rattle on about the frozen Byzantine angularity of Cimabue, or the grim, Gothic starkness. But the long and short of it is that Cimabue gives me the creeps. Sue me.
Not that I didn't stay there studying the altarpiece under the eye of the guard. I seem to spend a lot of time studying paintings I don't like under the eyes of museum guards. The problem is, I always feel rotten just striding through a gallery, however wretched, in which some poor guard spends most of his working life. As a result, I usually feel compelled to demonstrate some appreciation, even if it's pretense. Just one more sign of insecurity resulting from my infantile anaclitic redefinition of love objects, I suppose.
When I'd stood there long enough to make him feel better (all right, Louis, to make me feel better), I walked back to the elevator landing and went through the frosted-glass double doors that led to the administrative wing. Di Vecchio was in his office, severe and upright behind his steel desk in the armless, no-nonsense secretary's chair he favored. He glanced up from a letter he was reading and waved me into a rigid, molded-plastic chair, also armless. Three years ago, when the amiable, elderly Dr. Sorge Begontina had still been director, this office had been a homely, clubby place reeking of cigar smoke and stocked with ratty, comfortable furniture: a battered wooden desk with a row of cubbyholes at the back, threadbare Persian carpet, even a couple of sagging, horsehair-stuffed armchairs that were probably older than Begontina.
But with the coming of Amedeo Di Vecchio, the horsehair had gone, as had the cigar smoke and the friendly clutter of Etruscan pottery shards and odd bits of Roman sculpture— a marble forefinger, half a sandaled foot, a fold of toga—that had weighted down open books or piles of paper, or simply sat there. Now the lines were clean and the furniture steel and plastic in simple primary colors. No more arms on the chairs. The only art on the walls was a set of engravings of the Greek ruins at Paestum. Beyond those frosted glass doors Di Vecchio might live in a Renaissance world of vibrant, subtle colors and bursting forms, but when it came to decorating his personal workspace, his own austere socialist's taste came to the fore.
I settled myself into the hard chair as comfortably as I could while he signed the letter and placed it on a tray. He adjusted his gold-rimmed glasses on the bump at the top of his nose and sat more erectly in his own comfortless chair. With his fringe of a beard, his gaunt limbs, and his glittery eyes he looked like something from a Byzantine mosaic himself.
"Good afternoon, Christopher."
"Amedeo, do you happen to like Cimabue?"
He blinked. "Of course. I find him deeply moving. Cimabue is superb, without peer; the greatest of all the Duecento masters. Why do you smile?"
"Was I smiling?"
"You are smiling." But he didn't pursue it. Di Vecchio, I knew, considered me insufficiently serious-minded; not as bad as Max, but not adequately professional, either. He raised a finger to touch his cheek in the same spot where my most visible bruise was. "You're all right now?"