Bottando paused. Raphael? The man clearly was off his head. He couldn’t remember the church very well but was convinced that he knew the location of every Raphael in the country. If there was one in a tiny little church like Santa Barbara, he would know about it. He walked to the computer and switched on. When the machine had hummed and whirred itself into readiness he went into the database that had been built up giving the locations of likely targets for thieves. He typed ‘Roma’, and, when it asked for more details, specified ‘chiesi’. He then typed in the name of the church. The machine instantly told him that Santa Barbara had only six objects that were potentially stealable. Three were bits of silver, one was a seventeenth-century vulgate Bible with an embossed leather binding, and two were pictures. But neither was a Raphael nor likely to be confused with one. Both, in fact, were very second-rate affairs that no thief worth his salt would waste his time stealing. The market for purloined, nine-foot by six-foot crucifixions by anonymous Roman painters was not exactly buoyant. Nor could he see much demand in the illicit international art trade for the altarpiece — a Landscape with the Repose on the Flight to Egypt by the magnificently mediocre eighteenth-century painter Carlo Mantini.
Going back to his desk, he read on for a few more lines, convinced that by ‘interesting’, Flavia merely meant that her document was yet another demonstration of the foolishness of mankind. She was very strong on this interpretation of human nature, especially as far as art collectors were concerned. Several times the department had abandoned the hunt for a minor work when they discovered that it had been bought — as a Michelangelo, Titian, Caravaggio or whatever — by a wealthy foreign collector with more money than sense. To get their revenge they wrote to the buyer informing him that he had been cheated, and passed on word to the local police. But, on the whole, they considered the humiliation the man would suffer was adequate punishment, and generally the work was too unimportant to go to all the trouble and expense of international arrest warrants and deportation orders.
So perhaps this fifty-page document simply catalogued the delusions of an unbalanced moron who had persuaded himself he could get rich quick? A few more glances rapidly persuaded him there was more to it than that. From being a question-and-answer session, the document settled into a sustained narrative, the result of a lengthy statement. Bottando read on, and became more puzzled:
‘...studying for a degree based on a dissertation about Mantini. During my research, I discovered a series of documents that proved beyond any doubt that Mantini earned money by working for art dealers in Rome in the 1720s and had taken part in a sizeable fraud. You mustn’t think that Italy’s restrictions on exports of works of art are new. Most old states had them even back in the sixteenth century. By the eighteenth century they were becoming onerous. The Papal States in particular were getting poorer, and lots of foreigners were coming here wanting to buy. So, various routes were worked out to bypass the regulations. The most usual was the most obvious: a series of judicious bribes. Pictures were also temporarily reattributed to some obscure painter, until an export licence was given. Occasionally, dealers would go so far as to cut the picture into fragments, ship it to London or Paris, then reassemble and repair it.
‘The more important the painting, the more difficult it was to get it out of the country. I suppose that is also true now. And the most difficult of all were those by — or thought to be by — the great triumvirate of the Renaissance: Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo. Several times dealers or collectors bought works by one of these artists, asked the papacy for permission to export, and were turned down. In many cases the pictures are still here. So, when the di Parma family wanted to sell their most valuable possession, something illicit was clearly needed if they were to collect the money.
‘The di Parmas had been a great family, one of the most powerful in central Italy. Like many others they had fallen on hard times, and when the Earl of Clomorton offered to buy their Raphael for an outrageous sum they agreed. To get it out of the country, they enlisted the aid of an English art dealer called Samuel Paris, and he turned to Mantini for extra assistance.
‘The routine they came up with was beautifully simple. Mantini was to paint over the Raphael and the picture was to leave the country as one of his works. When it got to England the new painting would be cleaned off and the Raphael would take its place in the Earl’s collection. Presumably Mantini used a coat of varnish to protect the painting underneath, and used only paint that could be removed easily.
‘I don’t know any of the details of how it was done technically, but I do know it was done. There is a letter in the Clomorton archives from Paris assuring the Earl that he had watched Mantini apply the paint and seen the Raphael disappear under its disguise. But Clomorton never hung his picture on his wall.
‘At some stage something went wrong, either accidentally or deliberately. The picture must have been switched; the payment for the Raphael was handed over and a different picture was sent to England. Shortly after it arrived, the fraud was evidently discovered and the Earl died. The family doesn’t seem to have mentioned the matter again.
‘The point is, the Raphael was covered by Mantini — this was seen by Paris; it never got to England; and it disappeared from the di Parma collection. On the other hand, the family owned a Mantini in 1728 that they hadn’t had four years earlier.
‘Now, all of this suggests that the Raphael stayed in Rome under cover. If that was the case, I don’t know why they never wiped the disguise off. But they didn’t, the Mantini stayed in the collection and was evidently considered to be of such small importance that in the 1860s they donated it to Santa Barbara as an altarpiece.
‘And there you are. The picture has rested unknown in that church for more than a century. I first saw it a year ago when I was working on my dissertation. Then I decided a Raphael may be underneath, came back to check, and it’s gone. Someone has pinched the damn thing.’
Even when seen through the stilted prose of an official document, the prisoner’s sense of outrage was clear. Not only had he been jilted out of one of the most remarkable art discoveries of the decade, he had got himself arrested as a vagrant to boot. If, indeed, it was a remarkable discovery. Either way, if the painting had vanished, it was something to look into. Seeing an excuse for a stroll, he summoned Flavia, walked down the stairs, and set off for Santa Barbara.
One of the delights of his job, so Bottando thought to himself as they walked, was the chance of living in Rome. Although not born here, he considered himself very much a Roman and had spent most of the past thirty years in the city. Much of his dislike of his previous assignment in Milan had been prompted not by the job, but because he had had to live in a city which he regarded as soulless and drab.
Then came his great opportunity. Bottando was summoned back to Rome to combat the growing number of thefts of works of art throughout Italy. The creation of his department was due to the theft of a dozen famous works from one of the best — and theoretically best guarded-museums in the country. The police, as usual, hadn’t known where to start. They had no contacts in the art world, didn’t know the likely instigators, hadn’t a clue what might have happened to the paintings.
In a country where the love of art is part of national identity, the matter quickly bubbled up into a potential scandal once it had been raised. The smaller political parties in the ruling coalition began making speeches about defending the national heritage from rapacious foreigners as a way of irritating the larger group of Christian Democrats. At one stage, it had even seemed as though the socialists would pull out of the coalition, and that love of art would bring down the government — thus giving the country another unusual political first.