The Raphael Affair

As Beckett explained in a letter a few weeks later, it wasn’t really his fault, and he sent his original article to prove it. He had written the story as promised: revelation about a possible new Raphael, attributed to ‘museum sources’; a quotation of cautious optimism from Byrnes, a few comments from a couple of art historians, then some quite well-researched background about other remarkable discoveries in the past few years. From there on, Beckett had written about Argyll and had clearly and concisely got the message across. Young graduate student cheated by machinations of sly dealer. It didn’t actually say that, of course, but the general implication was crystal clear. It was a good article.

Unfortunately, it was a bit too good. He had sent it off to the editor of his paper in New York and this man had been excited by it. So it had gone on the front page, left side, single column, instead of in the arts section as Beckett had expected. But it was a busy time of year. A summit meeting was in the offing, another bribery and corruption scandal had broken out among local politicians, the administration was indulging in another spate of Libya-bashing. The editor hadn’t wanted to run the story over on to an inside page. So he made it fit by cutting it down a bit, and had sliced off the bottom seven paragraphs. With these went all mention of Argyll.

In every other respect, the article worked wonders, and stimulated enormous public interest. Over the next few months, all of Argyll’s predictions to Flavia about the Raphael came true. The story of the eighteenth-century fraud and its discovery captured the imagination. The New York Times colour supplement, and the arts supplement of the London Observer, duly carried lengthy accounts of the art-historical detective work which had led to the pot of gold. They, also, neglected to mention Argyll, but were otherwise solidly written. Byrnes’s sales campaign was well under way.

Argyll indulged his sense of mild masochism by collecting the articles. All sorts of critics and historians invaded what he had previously considered to be his turf. The diligent research of others produced dozens of little fragments to complete his partial picture and show the results of his haste. One article reproduced letters from the Earl’s brother-in-law indicating he had died of a heart attack from shock at the fraud, and that the family had covered up their loss for fear of embarrassment: ‘Rest assured, dear sister, no fault attaches to you for the attack. Such an event was entirely due to his own injudicious choice and hasty character. But these matters will remain between us alone; the disgrace to our family, and the scorn of certain of our friends could not be tolerated…’ That particularly outraged him. He had seen the same letter, but had decided it was inconclusive. Now everything else was clear, so was the letter.

What was worse was that all these little articles meant that even the modest piece he had planned for the Burlington Magazine was not possible; everything had already been published at least once. He avoided his friends and found a peculiar form of solace in going back to the Life and Times of Carlo Mantini, 1675-1729. At least he could finish that. It wouldn’t be so good now that one of his central chapters had become about as original as the plot of Romeo and Juliet, but it would do.

He was also correct in assuming that Byrnes, one of nature’s salesmen despite his mild manner, would turn the whole process of cleaning and restoration into a media event. The best restorers from the museums were called in to scrape away the paintwork of Mantini and remove the layer of protective varnish over the precious object underneath. Almost every week, bulletins on television would show the team of white-coated professionals – half scientific, half artistic – applying a variety of exotic solvents that could be relied upon to do their appointed task and no more. Then yet more programmes and articles in magazines monitored the second cleaning process, which would restore the painting to its original perfection.

Almost everybody knew by now that underneath the painting by Mantini there lay a portrait of Elisabetta di Laguna, the mistress of an earlier Marchese di Parma and, by repute, the most beautiful woman of her age. What someone like Raphael, who had made much less attractive women look like veritable Venuses, would have produced with such a sitter was anybody’s guess. Critics from the London Standard to the Baltimore Sun speculated freely. Some even ventured to suggest that Leonardo’s Mona Lisa would be knocked off its perch as the world’s favourite painting.

While the picture was under wraps, the jockeying for position got under way amongst the likely buyers. The Louvre indicated its interest, if it could afford the price. Two large New York banks and three pension funds in Tokyo also let it be known they might attend the auction. In an attempt to frighten off the opposition, the Getty Museum in Malibu Beach hinted that it might unleash all its vast buying-power to take possession. And all over the world, lesser millionaires and billionaires assessed their position, counted their money and attempted to work out whether they could, in a few years, sell it for a profit. Many decided they could.

When the picture was finally revealed to the public, the event was stage-managed in exquisite detail. The unveiling took place in a large meeting-room at the Savoy Hotel in the Strand, and hundreds of people were invited. The picture stood on a raised platform, covered with a large white sheet. Before the great moment, a presentation was made to the assembled press, television cameras, dignitaries from the worlds of museum and art-history faculties. The senior curator of the Louvre sat alongside the local staffer from Associated Press and the great Japanese collector Yagamoto; while the keeper of western art from the Dresdener Staatsgalerie was sandwiched between his great rival from one of the richest museums in the American Midwest and a sweaty individual from one of the London tabloids.

All of them had been served with champagne, courtesy of Byrnes Galleries, and all listened with appropriate attention as Byrnes himself ran through the now well-known story of how the painting was discovered; long forgotten in the little church in central Rome, and covered by another painting as a result of one of the greatest artistic fraud attempts of all time. Byrnes did a competent job of it, but was far from coming across as the archetype of the smooth art dealer. A small, timid-looking man with horn-rimmed spectacles and a bald head which ducked and bobbed nervously as he spoke, he was not at all like most people’s image of an international aesthete.

Nor, to Flavia in the fifteenth row on the right, did he look like the Machiavellian beast of Jonathan Argyll’s evidently fevered imagination. She was there largely out of curiosity; the presentation having come during one of her visits to London for informal discussions with the London art squad.

Flavia had gently asked her opposite number in London to organise an invitation. The squad was out in force to guard the picture, and Byrnes could hardly refuse them. So she sat and listened to him making his concluding remarks. Then he introduced Professor Julian Henderson, doyen of Renaissance studies, who gave a brief lecture. The picture, he told them, in an eminently polished delivery, was, without doubt, Raphael’s masterpiece; the apogee of the Humanist ideal of feminine beauty.

The lecture hall was not one that the journalists in the audience were used to, but they listened politely, and the photographers got on with their business. Henderson concluded by comparing the picture to other portraits by Raphael, and suggesting that the evidence now indicated that Elisabetta had been the model for the portrait of Sappho in the mural of Parnassus in the Vatican. The new work that the discovery would engender was enough to keep historians of the Italian High Renaissance in business for years.

Amid minor laughter and light applause he sat down and Byrnes moved towards the picture.

Flavia was beginning to find the showbiz style of the meeting a little wearisome, and was glad that Byrnes avoided any excessive display in the final stages. Not that it was needed; the audience’s sense of anticipation needed no further stimulation. With only a minor flourish, the cover was gently removed, and there was a quiet gasp as the onlookers, and the cameras, focused on what had become one of the most famous paintings in the world.

Because of the incessant coverage it had received in the last few months, almost everyone had some idea what the portrait looked like. Seeing it in the flesh was nonetheless exhilarating. It was a beautiful painting of a very beautiful woman. From her position, Flavia could not see very well, but it seemed to be a bust length with the head turned slightly to the right. Fair hair was gathered loosely at the back of the head so that the left ear was partly covered. The left hand reached up to touch a necklace, and the subject was dressed in a close-fitting dress of a gorgeously rich red. The background was conventional, but excellently produced. The sitter – lean and with none of the fleshy appearance that made many of Raphael’s Madonnas look just a little overweight – was in a room. In the left background was a window giving out to a wooded hill, on the right, wall hangings, a table and some ornaments. The organisation of the figure itself radiated an air of remarkable tranquillity, with just a hint of the sensuality that the painter so often brought out.

But she was most struck by the reaction from the audience. They were not admiring the delicacy of the brush strokes, the masterly application of shading or the subtleties of the composition, that was certain. They were ogling. Not a usual reaction for connoisseurs. She herself was caught up in the enthusiasm. The picture, both in its history and subject, was extraordinarily romantic. This most beautiful woman, nearly half a millennium old, had been lost for nearly three hundred years. It could hardly fail to capture the imagination. She even felt herself forgiving Byrnes.

∗ ∗ ∗

The enthusiasm that greeted Elisabetta’s entry onto the world scene after her long absence carried the painting right through to the auction, held in the main sale room of Christie’s about a month later. That affair also lived up to expectations.

The auctioneers knew how to put on a show. Expensively printed catalogues with full-colour photographs, a satellite link to sale rooms in Switzerland, New York and Tokyo, live television coverage in eight countries; these were the most obvious signs that an event of great importance was taking place. The atmosphere in the room, casually lined with other works of lesser significance, was electrifying. Like all good salesmen, the auctioneers had style. The sale was officially dubbed only ‘sixteenth- and seventeenth-century old master oils and drawings’, and Elisabetta was humbly placed as number twenty-eight on the list. The only difference was that, unlike many of the other lots, the Raphael had not been given an estimated sale price.

The audience had risen to the occasion also. London auctions range widely in style, background and purpose. At one end, there are the routine sales held in the shabby auction rooms in insalubrious neighbourhoods like Marylebone where the main clientele are unshaven dealers who congregate to chat, eat sandwiches, and pick up paintings for a couple of hundred pounds.

At the very top of the pile are the great houses in St James, where uniformed doormen open the broad brass doors, the employees speak with the accents of the privileged, and the clientele look as if they could buy a few hundred thousand pounds-worth of oil painting and not even notice. Even here, however, dealers tend to predominate, but these are the princes of their trade, with galleries in Bond Street or Fifth Avenue or the Rue de Rivoli. They are the sort of people who have enough to live on for a year if they sell one painting every three months, who own firms – not companies and never shops – that were often founded a century or more before. Not that this made them any more honest and less likely to break the law if necessary, but they generally did so more cautiously, more intelligently, and with greater decorum.

Like their clients, they knew how to behave appropriately. In the audience of maybe three hundred people, all but a dozen of the men wore their dinner jackets. The women, outnumbered around four to one, were dressed to match, with most in long ball gowns or wearing furs – until the heat of the camera lights made them intolerable. The air vibrated with the smell of a hundred mingling perfumes.

The sense of anticipation built up slowly as the lots were brought to the rostrum and the bidding started. A Maratta was sold for three hundred thousand pounds – the price instantly clicked up on the display board in four countries translated into dollars, Swiss francs and yen – and no one paid any attention. An Imperiali fetching a record price excited no interest whatsoever. Lot twenty-seven, a particularly fine old Palma oil-sketch which deserved greater consideration, was knocked down at an absurdly low price and bought in.

Then came Lot twenty-eight. The auctioneer, a man in his sixties who had seen it all before, knew well that the best way to generate excitement and loosen wallets was an utterly deadpan presentation. The slightest sign of enthusiasm or an apparent wish to manipulate the audience with a show of salesmanship would produce entirely the wrong effect. Understatement is always a virtue in such situations. As he spoke, two young men in brown overalls brought the picture and hung it on the easel to the right of the rostrum. It stood there, bathed in light – as one poetic television reporter put it afterwards – as if it were back on an altar as an object of worship itself.

‘Lot twenty-eight. Raphael. A portrait of Elisabetta di Laguna, about 1505. Oil on canvas, sixty-eight centimetres by a hundred and thirty-eight. I’m sure many of you know the background to this work, so we will start the bidding at twenty million pounds. What am I bid?’

To start the bidding at such a high price was audacious, but just the right touch of muted flamboyance needed. Only a few years ago to have ended the session on such a figure would have been a sensation. Only four pictures in the world had ever fetched more. Without any noise, and without any member of the audience appearing to move at all, the bidding flashed past thirty million, then thirty-five, then forty. At forty-two million, some dealers manning a rank of telephones along one side of the room spoke to their clients in dozens of different countries. At fifty-three million, some put down their phones and folded their arms, signifying that their clients had pulled out. At fifty-seven million it was clear that the bidding was down to two people, a burly man in the third row who insiders knew had acted in the past for the Getty Museum, and a small man who made his bids with a nervous gesture with his hand, chopping sideways briefly as though making a point in an animated conversation.

It was this second man who won. After he had offered sixty-three million pounds, the burly man with the purple cravat looked up, hesitated and then shook his head. There was silence for perhaps three seconds.

‘Sold. For sixty-three million pounds. Yours, sir.’

The room exploded in applause, the tension welling up suddenly then bursting into relief and euphoria. It was not only a record, but an enormous record. The only reservation in the minds of the professional part of the audience was who the buyer had been. The art world is a small universe and almost everyone in it knows everyone else and who they work for.

No one had the slightest idea who this man was, and he vanished through a side door before anybody could ask him.

4 (#ulink_f27562a0-e816-501e-b4cc-789237f46bb7)

It took only a few days before the word seeped through the secret passages riddling the world of dealers, connoisseurs and collectors that the small unknown man who had outbid the Getty was a senior civil servant in the Italian treasury, sent to the sale with a blank cheque from the government and instructions to get the work at any cost. The news itself caused another mild stir. Like most other state museums, the Italian system was given an annual budget that was wholly inadequate. Like the curators of every museum in Europe, the director of the Museo Nazionale had had to stand by, consumed by a mixture of rage and envy, as work after precious work reached prices that his entire budget for the next twelve months could not have covered. But he was a man who regarded the saving of works for Italy as a moral duty, and had been lobbying everyone in authority for months to set aside more funds. He had won his point and, when Elisabetta came up for sale, had cajoled and fought for the government to honour its promises.

Clearly, some remarkable manoeuvring had been going on in the labyrinthine and obscure network of intrigue known as the Italian government. In fact, it was another example of politics at work. The interest that the portrait had generated elsewhere in the world was nothing compared to that seen in Italy itself. The way that a cunning English dealer had snatched Elisabetta from the hands of State and Vatican, and had legally evaded all the restrictions designed to stop such an event, made the government appear foolish, the museum curators slow-witted, and the art historians incompetent.

And several members of the government remembered the furore that had preceded the founding of Bottando’s sezione only a few years before. So the authorities gave way to the ferocious and persuasive lobbying, made available the special grant they had promised, and sent off their man. In some ways it was a daring thing to do: the opposition Communist Party instantly did its best to make capital out of the move by pointing to a dozen better ways of spending that sort of money. Others wrote polemical articles in the newspapers on the Italian budget deficit and how the country could not possibly afford such indulgences.

But the government, and particularly the arts minister, had calculated correctly. He posed as a champion of the Italian heritage, willing to defend the patrimony at all costs. If Italy had lost such a valuable painting, then it must have it back. If this cost money, then so be it; that amount would be paid to safeguard the nation’s artistic integrity. It turned out to be a popular move; opinion polls showed that the electorate’s patriotic nerve had been touched. Besides, there is something peculiarly gratifying in owning the most expensive picture in the world, and to have outspent the Americans and Japanese in a fair fight. Outside the country also, the Italian move was applauded. Directors from national museums everywhere cited the purchase as an example for their own governments to follow; some newspapers even began pointing to the minister – a man of little administrative ability and small intelligence – as embodying the sort of dynamism and vision that could make an effective prime minister.

Which didn’t endear him to the current incumbent, but as the government as a whole reaped some of the advantages of being considered effective, swift of foot and cultured – the last quality in some ways more important in Italy than the first two – nothing was said. But it was noted, and the minister was marked down for special attention in case he should show further signs of getting above himself.

The actual return of the painting was conducted like a state visit from a visiting sovereign. A month after the auction, once it had been put through a series of tests and examinations in London by specialists, it arrived in an air-force transport at Fiumicino airport and was carried in a procession – with attendant motorcycle outriders and armoured cars – to the National Museum. The armoured cars seemed a little excessive, but Bottando’s department, in liaison with his comrades in the regular army, was taking no chances. The Brigate Rosse, the urban guerillas of the seventies, had lain dormant for several years, but you never knew.

In the Museo Nazionale itself, Elisabetta was set up like an icon. A room was emptied to take the portrait which would rest, behind the rope barrier keeping viewers ten feet away, in solitary splendour. Again, caution prevailed. Both police and curators remembered the sledgehammer attack on Michelangelo’s Pietà in St Peter’s a few years before; too many pictures in recent years had been slashed with knives or peppered with pellets from shotguns by maniacs who claimed to be the archangel Gabriel, or resented the adulation of some long-dead artist while their own talents went unrecognised. And everyone agreed that the painting’s fame made it a perfect target for some deranged attention-seeker.

Finally, the room was bathed in subdued lighting, with a single spotlight illuminating the work. The museum’s interior designers freely admitted to their friends, if not to anybody else, that this was a bit melodramatic. Drawings, such as Leonardo’s Madonna in the National Gallery in London, actually needed such protection from light to preserve them. Oil paintings were much more resilient and could do perfectly well in natural light. But the effect was splendid, creating an atmosphere of almost religious awe and causing visitors to speak in respectful, hushed tones which added greatly to the work’s impact.

Visitors there were in abundance. In the first few months attendance at the museum doubled. A visit suddenly became almost compulsory not only for tourists – who had often left it out hitherto because of its inconvenient location out of the centre – but even for Romans themselves. Thousands of postcards were sold; Elisabetta di Laguna T-shirts were popular; a multi-national biscuit company paid the museum a fortune for the right to put her face on one of their products. Combined with the hugely increased entry fees, the museum directors calculated the state would have recovered most of the vast cost of the picture within four years if the painting’s popularity continued at this rate.

For Bottando and his assistant, the return of the painting had triggered one of their busiest periods for years. Setting up security, keeping tabs on known national and international thieves, worrying lest anything should go wrong, chained them to their desks.

Bottando, looking at the work through the eyes of an old-time policeman whose budget was already not big enough, spent much of his time in a frenzy of anxiety. He knew perfectly well that, whatever the picture’s artistic merits, it was a painted time-bomb for his department. If anything should happen to it, the blame would move around the government with the speed of a ball in a pinball machine before coming to rest on his desk.

Much of his work, therefore, consisted of preparing his defences. Although not a cynical man, and no politician, he was no fool either. A lifetime’s work under the aegis of the ministry of defence had taught him a great deal about survival techniques in a world that made fighting in the army seem genteel and civilised. So he spent many hours sweating over cautiously worded reports, drafted and redrafted memoranda and wasted a great deal of time taking a few, carefully selected, bureaucrats and politicians to dinner.

The result was not entirely to his liking, but better than nothing. He had lobbied for extra manpower, using Elisabetta as a way of making his case for a larger budget. In fact, the result was that the security staff of the Museo Nazionale was doubled. Although it was never stated directly, the effective conclusion was that his department was relieved of any responsibility for guarding the picture once it was hung.

This provided some protection. But Bottando realised, with a perception honed by years of watching for trouble, that there existed no official document proving his lack of responsibility, and that was worrying. Especially because in Cavaliere Marco Ottavio Mario di Bruno di Tommaso, the sublimely aristocratic director of the National Museum, he was dealing with a man who would have been a natural politician had he not gone into the museum business. A smoother operator, in fact, was not to be found in the Camera dei Deputati. Tommaso had had a painting snatched from under his very nose, had been forced to buy it back at an outrageous price, and had turned it into a triumph. Impressive, without a doubt.

He was reminded of the justice of this opinion as he stood talking to the director at a reception thrown to celebrate the picture’s installation in the museum. A very select junket indeed. A sizeable chunk of the cabinet and their inevitable hangers-on; museum folk, the occasional academic, a few journalists just so the affair would reach the papers. Tommaso was, if anything, Bottando’s superior in making sure glowing reports of his activities frequently adorned the pages of the newspapers.

‘Taking a bit of a risk, aren’t you? I mean, all these dubious types around your prized possession?’ Bottando gestured contemptuously at the justice minister and an army chief peering at the work, cigarettes in hand.

Tommaso moaned softly in agreement. ‘I know. But it’s difficult to ask the prime minister not to smoke. He gets withdrawal symptoms after ten minutes. We had to switch off all the fire alarms to make sure they weren’t all drenched by the sprinklers. Can’t say it makes me all that happy. But, there you are. What can you do? These people will insist on sharing the limelight.’ He shrugged.

The conversation dragged on for a few minutes more, and then Tommaso slid off to talk to others. He was always like that. Everybody got the regulation five minutes of urbane conversation. He was a perfect host; Bottando merely wished that he didn’t make you feel it all the time. He was always pleasant, always remembered everyone’s name, always recalled something about your last conversation with him to make you think he valued your company. Bottando hated him. The more so because he’d just sprung a very nasty surprise.