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
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.