But where, Powerscourt said to himself, were the Caravaggios? They certainly weren’t on the walls. This earlier Candlesby had collected the paintings all over Italy and brought them back to his old house and stored them up here on the top floor. The people who lived here now were so frightened of the paintings or what had been done with the paintings that they were too scared to come in. He looked at the cupboards suspiciously. When he opened one of them he found on the top shelf a strange collection of clothes, what looked like a loincloth, a dark cloak, a sort of chemise with no collar that could have been worn by male or female, a strange circular headdress, various lengths and dimensions of scarlet and blue cloth that could have been used for anything. On the second shelf he found a skull, the vast open jawbone still yawning horribly at those who came to see it, a selection of twigs, a limp bamboo cane with split ends and a couple of berets, one in dark blue and one in pale green. There was a filthy candlestick and a mirror that had seen better days. Quite what these objects were doing there, Powerscourt had, for the moment, no idea.
He tried to remember the little he knew about Caravaggio. Born in the north of Italy and brought up in Milan. Moved south to Rome where he was employed by a courtier at the Vatican, then to Naples and various other cities round the Mediterranean. There had, Powerscourt’s contact at the National Gallery once told him on the telephone, been rumours of fighting and drunkenness. He was believed to have fled Rome after killing a man. He had died young after a turbulent life. The National Gallery, Powerscourt’s man told him, had three or four of his paintings stored in the basement, that final resting place for unfashionable artists. He had fallen from popularity, Caravaggio, very soon after he died. Few galleries, if any, had his paintings on display, except for a rather obscure one in Naples. Maybe the artistic world was anxious to forget such a controversial figure. One day, Powerscourt’s curator contact had prophesied, Caravaggio would return to fame and glory once again. It happened all the time, he said. Just as some obscure share or bond which seems to do nothing for decades will suddenly spring into life when fresh seams of gold or silver are discovered, his works would come back into fashion. The swagger and the display and the mastery of light and drama that had entranced his contemporaries in his lifetime would be on display again in the great galleries of Europe. How odd, Powerscourt thought, if the fortunes of the Candlesbys and their estates could be restored by the paintings that had been left to rot up here since the time of the loss of the American colonies.
He had a violent coughing fit. The dust seemed to be making its way down to his lungs. He tiptoed over to the alcove with the curtain. Very gently he pulled it to one side. On the right-hand side was a great pile of paintings, about a dozen, he thought, maybe more. Another heap was against the opposite wall. The dust was lying in layers on the frames. Spiders had created gossamer Old Master drawings against the back wall. Powerscourt picked the right-hand paintings up one by one and carried them back to the bed. He leant them against the sides with a few on top of the covers. The dust twirled and swirled and whirled around his face until he had to go and put his head out of the window. He wondered suddenly if the Edward Candlesby who had purchased these pictures had leant out of this window and stared at his English estates stretching out to the lake and beyond into the Lincolnshire countryside, remembering the days he bought his Caravaggios amid the heat and the different dust of Naples and Rome. He wondered about the purchases on the Grand Tour. Had Candlesby fallen victim to the usual honey trap? You went to an art dealer, usually in Rome, some of whom sold only to British visitors. The dealer would inquire politely in reasonable English which of the Old Masters appealed to you the most. Raphael, you might hazard, or Titian perhaps. What a pity you have come today, the dealer would say. I have some very fine Raphaels and some wonderful Titians, but they are at my house in the country. I like them so much, signor, that I keep them at home for my own enjoyment. But for you, I will bring them back here to the Via Veneto. If you come back in three days’ time, they will be here, waiting for you. What could be better! Maybe the dealer already has some fake Titians and Raphaels in store somewhere. If not, his forger goes to work and the fakes are ready for inspection on the third day. Some excuse about the need for final glazing would be made to give the works time to dry out properly. Perhaps milord would care to look at some other paintings in the meantime? Powerscourt suspected that Caravaggio might not fit into that particular mould. He was relatively unknown. High-class forgers might not take the time and trouble to learn how to reproduce him. The dealer might not keep any in stock in case he could never shift them. Maybe these were originals after all.
Two things struck Powerscourt as he looked through the paintings. The first was the artist’s total mastery of light, spectacular even after a century and a half of dust and damp. It was as if he had a whole battery of searchlights of different power. Some of the faces and some of the bodies would have the most powerful light shone on them. The skin would gleam and glisten as if the subject were sweating slightly. Other, less important, characters received much less power. The contrast between the brilliance of the light shining on the body of St Jerome, for example, and the skull, half in shadow on his work table, gave the picture a power and intensity that held the viewer in its spell. Mastery of light heightened the drama. Even through the dust and the grime the light shone through. The other thing to strike Powerscourt was the faces. These were not the faces of aristocrats or warriors or great kings or ancient philosophers from the distant past. They were not the idealized beauties that graced the canvases of Botticelli or Bellini. Caravaggio was an unlikely foot soldier in the Counter Reformation launched at the Council of Trent towards the end of the sixteenth century, the Catholic Church’s fight back against the Protestants. The heretics of Geneva or Wittenberg might ban paintings from the walls of their churches. The true believers in the Pope and the Mass were given large paintings on the walls and in the little chapels of the churches of Rome that were morality stories, but morality stories of a power and force that could not but impress. The faces in Caravaggio’s pictures were taken from the streets, lifted from tavern or alleyway or choir to grace an artist’s vision. This, Powerscourt remembered his man at the National Gallery telling him, was what gave them their contemporary feel. This was what enabled the poor and the destitute to identify with Caravaggio’s characters. Titian’s kings and doges inhabited a world far from the ordinary citizens. Caravaggio’s people were real boys and real men and women, spotted by the painter perhaps and paid a pittance to pose for his brushes.
There were one or two charming paintings, probably executed for some prince of the Church, of Bacchus with leaves in his hair, of cardsharps plying their trade, a boy with a basket of fruit. Caravaggio was drawn to drama as the dust was drawn to this high room that served as a sepulchre for his art. Here was the calling of St Matthew, here was the raising of Lazarus, the death of the Virgin. A number of the works, Powerscourt thought, verged on the sado-masochistic, or seemed to come from the pornography of religious violence. Death, blood and beheading were commonplace, painted with appalling realism. Judith with the head of Holofernes, for example, showed the progress of the knife against the warrior’s throat. The beheading of John the Baptist showed the saint lying on the floor with the executioner poised above him in a well of light, knife at the ready. Christ was tied to a tree, flayed, scourged, and had the crown of thorns put on his head. Saints were crucified upside down or right way up, their agony and their faith earning a place in heaven.