Free The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr

brief article, and no one had found the painting yet. It was possible, thought Francesca, that Longhi had been wrong, that Hamilton Nisbet had bought some other painting, not the one by Caravaggio. But Longhi clearly hadn’t thought so. And, of course, he’d found fault with Panofsky-Soergel for not having made the same deduction.
    I N R OME THE NEXT MORNING, L AURA CALLED C ORREALE AND TOLD him they’d had some success in Recanati.
    “Lauretta cara!” he exclaimed over the telephone. “Tell me all about it.”
    Laura gave him a report of the payments to Caravaggio. Correale wanted to arrange a meeting at his apartment that evening so they could inform Rosalia Varoli-Piazza, the art historian working on the project, of their findings.
    At home, Francesca prepared herself to call Professor Calvesi at his office at the University of Rome. She felt shy about calling him. He was a renowned and widely published scholar, regarded in his world with respect and, as with all people who wield influence and power, with fear. Among students, he comported himself with an icy detachment that warned against intrusion. He was Francesca’s thesis adviser—in name, at least. She’d met him face-to-face only a few times, always briefly, and always in the company of others. On one of those occasions she’d had to seek his approval for the subject of her undergraduate thesis. A younger professor had escorted her into Calvesi’s office, where Francesca had stammered out a few words, heart beating in her throat. Calvesi had approved her project with a perfunctory nod. Later, when they passed each other in the hall and she smiled at him, his look told her that he could not quite place her.
    Francesca rehearsed a brief account of the Recanati payments, took a few deep breaths, and dialed the number. The telephone rang in his office for two minutes, but no one responded. She looked up his home number, dialed again, and this time got an answering machine. But as she began to leave a message, a series of beeps cut her off. Either the machine was full or it was broken. That afternoon, she tried again, with the same result.
    Later that day she met Laura at the library in the Piazza Venezia. Laura suggested they check on the prices Caravaggio had been paid for other paintings, to see how they corresponded to Ciriaco’s payments. They looked up a contract Caravaggio had signed on September 24, 1600—a contract found by Denis Mahon in the Archivio di Stato—in which Caravaggio agreed to paint two pictures for a wealthy Vatican official in a chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo. The patron, one Tiberio Cerasi, had stipulated a painting depicting the martyrdom of St. Peter and another of the conversion of Paul. The contract called for Caravaggio to deliver the paintings within eight months for a payment of four hundred scudi for both pictures. Each measured about ten palmi by six, or seven feet by five and a half.
    This seemed to accord with the one hundred twenty-five scudi that Ciriaco had paid for
The Taking of Christ,
and the one hundred fifty scudi for
The Supper at Emmaus.
The price of a painting was often based on its size, and both Mattei paintings, measuring around eight palmi by six, were smaller than the ones in Santa Maria del Popolo.
    The
St. John
owned by Ciriaco was the smallest of the three, and it depicted just a single figure. To Francesca and Laura, it seemed reasonable to infer that Ciriaco’s payment of sixty scudi for an unspecified work might have been for the
St. John.
Perhaps even the second payment of twenty-five scudi was also for that painting.
    10
    C ORREALE GREETED F RANCESCA AND L AURA AT THE DOOR OF HIS apartment on Via Fracassini with open arms and a big smile.
    “My dear girls!” he exclaimed. “You’ve found something important for me! I want to hear all about it.”
    The living room of Correale’s apartment had now become a library dedicated to Caravaggio. Books and articles on the painter