The merging of Bellori’s face with that of the angel is, according to Hampton and White, one of many hints to the reader that the story is stage managed. Their argument is compelling, not least because of the context in which they read the manuscript, namely, the remarkable early seventeenth-century fascination for simulacra and imitations in all conceivable forms and variants. The courts of minor middle European princes were at that time awash with automatons and illusion-creating machinery, everything from mechanical ducks and self-playing organs to models of people that could move their eyes, turn their heads, and strut a few paces across the floor; artists perfected the trompe l’œil technique and painted such realistic skies on church ceilings that birds were said to have flown up into them; dramatists wrote plays within plays and comedies in which identities merged incessantly.
However, in 1962 two discoveries were made that immediately silenced Hampton and White’s speculation that Bellori was a figment, and overnight turned The World That Never Was into what it had claimed Bellori’s manuscript was: a historical curiosity.
It was Guido Bergotti who was able to document the first contemporary reference to Bellori. During his work on the biography, he had come across some letters in the Vatican library dating from the early 1600s, and immediately become interested in them because the sender, a landowner by the name of Donati, lived just outside Ardo. He wrote regularly to his brother in the Vatican, informing him of events large and small at home — the bees that had just swarmed, and that, at the time of writing, had transformed the tree beneath the window where he sat into a black and buzzing ball; the five cows that had been found lifeless beneath a tree after a storm, presumably struck by lightning; the recurring problem of finding enough farmhands at busy times; their mother, so confused they had to lock her up at night to prevent her wandering into the forest, her heartrending cries.
One of these letters described an episode to which no one prior to Bergotti had paid much attention. He, however, sat up as he read it. During the hunting season in the autumn of 1606, an unknown man had been found in the mountains some miles from Ardo with his body torn open and his skull smashed. As no one was missing from the town, it had to be a stranger, most likely a fugitive — why else should he be so high up in the mountains? — who’d unfortunately met a predator and been torn to bits. To judge from the condition of the corpse, it must have happened sometime during the spring, Donati wrote, and began to describe the stag he felled shortly afterward, never to mention the mysterious corpse again.
Even though both the time and place of the incident fit completely with the final passage of Bellori’s manuscript, this is nothing more than a piece of circumstantial evidence, as Bergotti was the first to admit. The letter might be describing Bellori’s corpse, but it might also be the corpse of someone else.
The final proof that the manuscript was genuine came when the Archivio Segreto Vaticano was thrown open to researchers later that year, and it turned out that the Inquisition had begun a preliminary investigation in connection with the publication of On the Nature of Angels. The previously unknown documents consist for the most part of interrogation minutes, in which Antinous Bellori admits that he wrote On the Nature of Angels. In the next breath he distances himself entirely from everything written in it. He was led astray, he was confused, he made it up, he didn’t mean anything by it, he is contrite and begs for forgiveness, again and again. So pathetic and harmless does he seem that the interrogations are terminated, and no case against him is ever brought, and thus he avoids the fate that, fifteen years later, was meted out to Giordano Bruno and Domenico Scandella, two very different men whose paths both crossed Bellori’s before they ended at the stake.
Bergotti’s find provides an explanation for Bellori’s abiding bitterness during the first years after the publication of On the Nature of Angels. After only a few months it had been placed on the Index, the Vatican’s list of forbidden books, and most of the copies had been burned. If his work had merely been ridiculed or suppressed, he could have comforted himself with the thought that time would prove him right. But with the intervention of the Church, he was both laughed at and stripped of any chance of rehabilitation.
Why is there nothing about this in his notes? He who wrote about everything?
During the interrogations with the Inquisition, he had repudiated everything he had believed in and stood for all his adult life. He begged forgiveness for his great theory of the divine. His humiliation must have been too great for him to acknowledge. On the other hand it must have made his choice easier: if he found the angels, the whole long line of defeats would be turned to victory. And perhaps this, too, was part of it: in the angels’ presence, and also in the yearning for their presence, what was false, impure, weak, and cowardly in his nature would cease to exist, or cease to have any meaning: in their sight he was nothing, they everything.
When he drew himself in the mirror that February night in 1606, this was all in the past. He no longer wished for restitution. He no longer cared for pride and fame. Nor did he have any interest in asking questions. Whether about higher things or about the world he lived in. He lived, that was all he needed to know. And he amused himself. At least he did if we are to believe the picture he provides of himself.
Perhaps he suspected that posterity would discover him someday. Perhaps that was why he sketched himself that evening. Perhaps he wanted to send us a greeting. See here, those of you as yet unborn. Here I am, mad Antinous Bellori. Perhaps you think you know who I am? Well, think again!
That same night he had a dream. It was confusing because he never quite knew if he was awake or asleep, the two states intermingled after he heard the cries from outside.
He was lying in bed, it was night, and there was a shout from outside.
At first he lay quite still, thinking that he must have dreamed it. Then the shout came again, now there was no doubt, out in the courtyard voices were calling.
Antinous, they called. Antinous.
He got up and went over to the window, looked down into the courtyard. It was empty. There wasn’t so much as a footprint in the eighteen inches of snow that covered it. He must have dreamed it then, he thought, and was about to return to bed, but changed his mind. Day was breaking outside, he could just see to the wall at the end of the courtyard, and the big tree outside it; its dark, leafless branches shaped themselves into a kind of skeleton ball in the gray dawn. But he couldn’t see it clearly, as it was snowing, heavy and slushy, and the air was damp.
Apart from the wall, which had a subdued, rusty reddish hue, the landscape was quite without color. Everything was somewhere between whitish gray and blackish gray.
Antinous! came the call again.
He started. There was no one out there! So where was the voice coming from? Could there be someone inside?
It didn’t sound like it, but even so he went downstairs to check.
Not a soul.
To make sure, he went into the hallway and opened the courtyard door a crack and stuck his head out.
Over by the wall he saw some shadows moving. Hardly surprising he hadn’t seen them, he thought, and called to them.