‘That’s it?’ Fratelli asked, going closer to the fresco than the rest. ‘That’s your protection?’
‘What else are we supposed to do?’ Mariani asked. ‘The work belongs at the head of the stairs. It’s the introduction to the dormitories. Would you rather it were lost in the Uffizi?’
‘Not at all,’ Julia said. ‘It’s perfect here.’
‘Of course,’ the director agreed. ‘This is its home and always has been.’ He glanced at the ceiling. ‘We’ll have some video cameras up there. In all the entrances. Anywhere someone might get in. There’ll be more attendants, sitting around doing nothing all day. The cost of all this’ — he shrugged — ‘will come from the drones who troop through the door, naturally. But if you ask me… can we stop the madmen?’
Mariani’s eyes fell on the perfect, calm face of Angelico’s Mary.
‘No. What if someone were to smuggle a hammer beneath their jacket and attack the glass? Should we search everyone? Art’s like life. The safer we make it, the more remote and meaningless it becomes.’
They walked along the corridor. In each of the modest cells was another painting from the life and passion of Christ. Jesus risen from the tomb, telling a prostrate Mary Magdalene, ‘Noli Me Tangere’ — do not touch me. Deposed from the cross. As an innocent, naked infant at the Nativity. Then, in a strange, almost surrealistic image, blindfolded and holding a cane and globe, the symbols given him by his tormentors, slapped by unearthly hands, spat at by a disembodied head.
Ropes cordoned off each cell. Anyone might step over them in an instant.
‘We’ll let people know where they can and cannot go and keep them out as much as we can,’ Mariani said. ‘They may wander into a few cells that contain lesser works. But…’ He sighed. ‘This is the extent of our precautions. If you have any other suggestions, do please tell us. Paintings are like children. One must love them, protect them, guard them against evil as much as possible. But they live in the real world, our world. One can no more protect them against everything than one can keep the grimmer side of life secret from a son or a daughter. Angelico was a practical man. He would never have expected his work to continue to amaze people here five centuries after his death. There’s the miracle. That we have it at all. Besides…’
A wry look of amusement broke his scowling features for a moment. ‘We fool ourselves if we think a few psychopaths are our greatest enemy. Time, neglect and forces we cannot control wreak more havoc on this city than its inhabitants. Decay, so-called restoration…’
He led them to a small annexe at the end of the corridor.
‘These were his quarters. A small oratory, a study, a bedroom.’
Mariani guided them to a panoramic painting on the wall. It depicted, he said, Florence at the end of the fifteenth century, not so much changed in the centre from today. The Palazzo Vecchio looked a little more grey and severe, Brunelleschi’s dome on the Duomo rather more pristine. The hillside church of San Miniato al Monte was visible to the right behind San Niccolò, unchanged. Through the canvas, the Arno wound beyond city walls, now but remnants, out into verdant countryside and on to the distant peaks of the Tuscan Apennines.
Townsmen and — women wandered around the Piazza della Signoria in the foreground, chattering, bargaining, meandering on horseback. Children played tag. Soldiers flourished their weapons. Only a few — among them two men carrying bundles of faggots on their backs — seemed to notice the commotion at the centre: a bonfire joined to the Palazzo Vecchio by a wooden walkway, a tree trunk rising in its midst, planks to make a scaffold, a ladder attached to its summit.
Painters of this period often played with the notion of time, she remembered. This represented not a single event but a succession of them, all leading to the same moment. On the steps of the Palazzo Vecchio, three men in white knelt before a makeshift court (the tribunal of judgement, Mariani said), watched by a handful of bystanders from the bare steps of a loggia free of sculpture. At the same time, these three condemned men appeared on the pathway to the fiery stake, held between the arms of burly minders in black, faces hidden beneath sinister, pointed hoods.
Then, finally, in death. Three ragged figures, suspended by nooses, consumed by flames.
‘There,’ Mariani declared, ‘Savonarola built the bonfire of the vanities in which Botticelli and even Michelangelo destroyed their work. If you believe the tourist books, anyway. And died on the same spot himself a few years later. They seized him…’
He pointed back towards the way they’d come.
‘Right there. By the library. I can show you the very spot. There’s a plaque on the wall.’
History.
It was beginning to swirl around her again, making the room swim, filling her head with strange thoughts.
‘He can’t have hated art that much,’ Mariani’s brittle, unemotional voice continued. ‘He never saw fit to demand the destruction of the frescoes that graced his own home. Nor bar his adoring followers from recording his own image. A hypocrite. Come…’
They turned a corner into the tiny room that was, the sign said, Savonarola’s private oratory. Mariani pointed out a small portrait on the wall. A tonsured man in a monk’s habit, smiling though his head was split open by a vicious, blood-drenched sword.
‘Fra Bartolomeo,’ the director continued, ‘came after Angelico. A more sophisticated man in some ways. A friend and associate of Raphael. But a Savonarola lover… have no doubt. This he painted as a memorial to the friar after his death. The city dignitaries might have had his head if they’d known, naturally. So the portrait pretends to be of Peter, not our awkward, fundamentalist monk. It’s him though. Without doubt. Follow, please…’
They walked on into the next room, Savonarola’s own cell.
A new portrait now, close up, frank. From life, it could only be.
Julia Wellbeloved looked at it and found herself unable to move, to think clearly, to speak for a moment.
It was the man from the canvas in the other room, but seen in an entirely different light. Wrapped in a black cloak that might have been a shroud, his face was pale and hairless, his nose and eyes prominent and marked with both pain and some solitary determination.
‘It would seem Bartolomeo dashed this off in the brief time after Savonarola was seized and before his execution. Perhaps from memory of a meeting in the Bargello. There’s an air of foreboding about it…’ Mariani came nearer and gazed at the head close up. ‘Quite remarkable. I intend to move both these works to somewhere more spacious before long. In some quarters Savonarola is regarded as a martyr. There are those who wish him beatified — not that the Vatican will play ball. The Dominicans, or some at least, wish it. Others regard him as a heretic and a criminal. He died excommunicated and remains so. I’m too timid and too wise to step into a fight between priests. Bartolomeo’s portrait was held in private hands for centuries. We only acquired it a few years ago. If it’s true to life — and there’s no reason to think it’s not — I’m glad I never got to meet our severe and judgemental friar. He hated what Florence was in his own time. I doubt he would have approved of what we’ve become since. Though perhaps we should follow his example, and those of his executioners, and burn our pesky vandals instead…’
She couldn’t take her eyes off the figure on the wall. The prominent nose, the burning eyes. The sense of an iron will staring death in the face.
Another image rose in her imagination. A dark shape emerging from the shadows of the Loggia dei Lanzi, bag in hand. Moving towards Cellini’s Perseus…
The room dimmed, her legs folded beneath her. Before she knew it, Julia Wellbeloved was on the floor.