The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr Read Free Book Online Page B

find the account books.
    The Marchesa donned a long white cotton shift that buttoned up the middle, the sort of coat a doctor might wear, and a pair of cotton gloves. “To protect myself from the dust,” she explained. Indeed, the room was dusty. In the weak shafts of sunlight from the small windows, Francesca could see motes of dust, and the table was covered with a fine grit blown in from the street.
    Francesca’s eyes went to the leather-bound volumes on the steel shelves. Most were identified with labels on their spines, the legacy of an archival organization created in the early nineteenth century, when the documents were still housed in the family palazzo in Rome. But that organization had been turned topsy-turvy with the transport of everything to Recanati. Francesca ran her hand along the books. She felt as if she were touching history.
    The Marchesa directed them to a collection of inventories from the early 1600s. Most of these were contained in bound volumes, but a few were simply loose, in boxes that opened much like books. The first inventory, from 1603, concerned the possessions of Girolamo, the second of the three Mattei brothers. He had been a cardinal, an able administrator who had directed the city’s Department of Streets and then the Department of Prisons. Some scholars believed that he had been Caravaggio’s patron, and not Ciriaco. But his inventory recorded only eighteen paintings at the time of his death at age fifty-six, and these were devotional images of little consequence. It was clear to Francesca and Laura that Cardinal Girolamo Mattei had little interest in art.
    The second and third inventories, dated 1604 and 1613, belonged to Asdrubale, Ciriaco’s younger brother. Both had been compiled during his lifetime, at Asdrubale’s request, by his maggiordomo, who oversaw the operations of the palazzo. They were bound in leather and much lengthier than Girolamo’s. Asdrubale had built his own palazzo, a grand and imposing edifice, next to that of his two brothers, and had spent a fortune furnishing and decorating it. The German scholar had already examined Asdrubale’s inventories at great length. Francesca and Laura leafed through them quickly and put them aside.
    It was the inventory of the oldest brother, Ciriaco, that they most wanted to see. He had died in 1614, at the age of seventy-two, an advanced age in that day. He had left his entire estate to his son, Giovanni Battista. But it wasn’t until two years later, on December 4, 1616, that the son ordered an inventory of his own possessions and those he’d inherited from his father. The volume that contained this inventory was also bound; it ran some one hundred and fifty pages, on heavy paper. It had the name “Giovan Battista Mattei” on the cover, but it had somehow escaped the old filing system by which the archive had been organized. Francesca and Laura realized that they were the first to lay hands on it in decades.
    They sat at the table, shoulder to shoulder under the solitary lightbulb, and opened the book. It was organized by category—furniture, statuary, books, jewelry, rugs and tapestries, silverware, carriages and horses, property of every conceivable sort. The list of paintings began on page twenty-one. The handwriting, by a notary named Ludovico Carletti, was bold and clear, the ink as fresh-looking as if it had been applied a week ago. Laura moved her finger down the list of paintings, reading each aloud in a soft voice. The Marchesa sat at the far end of the long wooden table, smoking a cigarette and casting an inquisitive eye at the two young women.
    At the bottom of the page, Laura’s finger stopped. They read the line together: “A painting of San Gio. Battista with his lamb by the hand of Caravaggio, with a frame decorated in gold.”
    Francesca let out a small cry of delight. They had found it, the earliest mention of the painting to come to light.
    They began whispering excitedly together. At the end of the