Under the Egg by Laura Marx Fitzgerald Read Free Book Online Page A

say? Doesn’t the name Raphael ring a bell?” She laughed at my blank stare. “Raphael the painter? One of the giants of the Italian Renaissance—of painting, full stop?”
    Click.

Chapter Five
    R aphael. Of course.
    In my defense, I’d like to point out that I spent most of that summer in a heat-addled stupor. Also, I suspect that a beet-heavy diet may have deprived my brain of the nutrients needed to recall major artists.
    Or maybe I’d been so close to the answer I couldn’t see it, the way your name looks like a random jumble of letters if you stare at it too long. Jack loved Raphael and had dragged me to see his work whenever he could: at the Met, of course; on tour at the Frick; even the collection at the National Gallery in D.C., which we’d visited in one day via a round-trip Chinatown bus.
    Now a missing part of that collection might be tucked into in my Samsonite, and as Bodhi and I exited through the church’s leafy garden courtyard, my brain rapidly sorted through the Raphaels I’d seen, holding them up for comparison.
    Bodhi, meanwhile, was halfway down the Information Highway.
    â€œDo you know how much the last Raphael painting went for at auction?” Bodhi practically shouted, staring into her phone.
    â€œShhhhhh!” I hissed, switching the suitcase from one sweaty hand to the other.
    â€œThirty-seven million dollars!”
    I tripped, almost sending thirty-seven million dollars into a flower bed.
    â€œHey!” Bodhi dove for the suitcase and caught it just in time. “Careful. You don’t want to break your . . . wait . . . got it,” Bodhi jabbed and swiped furiously at her phone. “Raphael. Born Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, actually. Along with Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, one of the Big Three of the Italian Renaissance.”
    â€œThe three of them pretty much were the Renaissance,” I launched in. Bodhi might have known movies, music, and hippopotamuses. But I knew art. “Raphael in particular was revered by every future generation of painters, even modernists like Jack.”
    Bodhi was too focused on her Wikipedia page to hear me. “Born in 1483, father was court painter to a very powerful duke. He grew up among the elite, and this gave him access to wealthy and powerful patrons when he came of age. Orphaned at eleven and apprenticed out early to famous painters like Perugino.” Now she looked up at me. “Know him?”
    â€œPerugino? Sure, the Met has a few of his paintings. Lovely modeling, a real sense of—”
    â€œRaphael moved on to Florence, then on to Rome, where he became the favorite painter of two popes and the Italian aristocracy. Mostly famous for his monumental works across an entire room at the Vatican called the Raphael Rooms, including a painting called—
    â€œ School of Athens ,” I cut in. “His masterpiece, the high point of Humanism, bringing the giants of Classical Greece and Rome into the heart of the Catholic Church.”
    â€œHey, let me get there.” Bodhi jumped ahead a few screens. “But Raphael was perhaps best known for—”
    My stomach gave a flip. “—his Madonna and Child paintings.”
    Bodhi glared at me.
    â€œSorry.”
    If there was one thing Raphael was famous for, it was his cuddly Jesuses and adoring Madonnas: seated, standing, alone, with other characters from the Bible. But always lovely and lovable.
    Kind of like the one in the very suitcase, now giving me a shoulder cramp.
    Kind of. But not exactly.
    â€œOh, I know these guys.” Bodhi was holding up her phone to show me two mischievous angels gazing upward. You’d know them if you saw them, too, a detail from a larger work that has been isolated and reproduced on calendars and greeting cards and chocolate boxes around the world. “So I guess this painting is a big deal, right?”
    I took a deep breath. “Listen, we