The Mirror Thief(74)
The senator’s private apartments are on a mezzanine below the piano nobile, on the side of the house that looks out on the Grand Canal. Waiting in the anteroom while Marco consults with his father, flipping through an octavo edition of Cardano’s De Varietate Rerum that he finds open on a table, Crivano is aware of the insistent clap of waves against the palace walls, the faint song of a boatman rowing by. A song he knows, or once knew in his youth.
Then a bolt clicks, the heavy inner door swings open, and it’s Verzelin, stumbling forward on dead legs, his sackcloth shroud overgrown by eelgrass, his eyesockets picked clean by crabs. His accusing mouth spills a torrent of black mud down his chest, the mud alive with ghost-white wriggling things.
Crivano recoils—his scapulae gouge the wall, the octavo slides to the floor—but it’s not Verzelin, of course it’s not, only young Marco, emerging from his father’s library. By the blessed virgin, dottore, he says. What on earth is the matter?
Nothing! Crivano sputters. Not a thing. The lingering effect of a minor sickness, that is all. I ate a poisonous fragment of quail at my locanda last night, and it has been slow to vacate. My apologies. There is no cause for concern.
That’s unfortunate, dottore. You have my sympathy. You’re at the White Eagle, aren’t you? They’re quite reputable, but no inn is altogether safe, particularly during the Sensa. You should reconsider my father’s offer to stay here with us.
You’re very kind, Crivano says, bending to fetch the dropped book. But the White Eagle is ideal for my purposes, and I wouldn’t think of imposing on your busy household. After all, bad quail can turn up any locanda.
Marco narrows his eyes, cocks his head. I hope, he says, that my foolish cousin said nothing to upset or offend you.
A host of twitches convenes beneath Crivano’s skin. Who? he says.
My cousin. Perina. The girl with whom—
Oh yes, of course! But no, not at all! She’s a delight. Very poised. Clever.
Indeed, Marco says. Well, then. My father has asked me to apologize for the delay. He’ll receive you shortly, if you have no objections to awaiting him here.
Crivano has no objections. Marco departs, and after a moment spent refocusing his faculties, Crivano continues his exploration of the room. In scholarly circles these chambers are among the most renowned in Christendom, whispered of in covetous tones from Warsaw to Lisbon. Many men would hazard propriety or commit grave offense for a passing glimpse of what he now dawdles among. Even the richness of the room’s furnishings—the fireplace of serpentine and marble, the gilt frieze of allegories rendered in oils—pales beside what litters the tabletops and hangs from the walls. Glazed shards of Greek vases. Fragments of Roman sculpture. Wooden cases filled with rare minerals, curious crystals, hides of strange beasts. A bewildering array of mechanisms for measurement and calculation. Scale models of siege engines and galleasses. Painted panels and canvases of great virtuosity and inventiveness.
Hesitant to touch anything, Crivano gravitates toward the last of these. A portrait of a bearded patrician, shunted into a dim corner by its larger neighbors, is the first to catch his eye. Cracked with age, its surface bears an image so precise in its detail as to be mistakable for a window, or a mirror. Impressive though it is, a chill lifelessness inheres in it—the antiseptic vacuity of a specimen—which might account for the prominence it cedes to other works.
The prime spot on the longest wall is occupied by something quite different, a jewel-toned scene from Ovid: bare-bosomed blond Europa, reclining on her garlanded white bull. More bovines appear in nearby frames, and one of these in particular captures Crivano’s attention: a bucolic tableau of the autumn harvest. When Crivano weighs the busy composition against his own memories of a year on an Anatolian farm—his fourteenth year, the year after Lepanto, the year before the janissaries claimed him—it seems absurd, sketched after the fancy of a painter lacking aptitude for or interest in any accurate depiction of the practicalities of agriculture. The undifferentiated farmers, their wobbly stack of crated apples, the array of irrelevant tools: despite their silliness, they transfix him. Every detail seems designed to repudiate his own experience, to displace his faded memories with an abstract truth to which the painter alone controls access. The craftsman’s bold hand has even hung a centaur in the distant clouds—clouds of tenebrous green that can’t help but echo the spectral landscape conjured by della Porta’s device.
The senator’s gentle basso reaches him from across the room, like a hand laid upon his shoulder. Whatever its faults, he says, that canvas is my favorite. It pains me to no end, what has become of that man.
Crivano turns with a measured bow. The painter? he says. I don’t know of him.
Senator Contarini has changed from his velvet robe into a black tunic of fine damask; he crosses the room to Crivano’s side and leans against the edge of a table. The painter, he says, comes from Bassano del Grappa. He rose to prominence in the studio of his father Jacopo, who made great success with rustic scenes such as this. Many of our most ancient families delight in evocations of their distant holdings on the mainland, the source of so much of their wealth. If you have visited a noble house in this city, then I’ll wager you have seen old Jacopo’s work.
The senator reaches into a muddle of instruments and withdraws a magnifying lens, which he lifts to the painting’s surface to examine the cloud-borne centaur. After the great fire in the doge’s palace, he continues, Francesco—for Francesco is the given name of the one who painted this—moved his household to our city, in order to open a workshop of his own. The Great Council had entrusted to me the restoration of the palace, and I awarded Francesco a number of commissions. I believed that I saw in his work the promise of greatness. Greatness of a sort not witnessed in this city since the plague took Titian from us. That potential no longer has any hope of being realized. But who can say with certainty that I was wrong? Or am I no more than a mooncalf for concerning myself with idle matters such as these, instead of with galleys, armaments, fortifications, the various blunt cudgels of republic?