Free The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr Page B

their appointment with Calvesi. He lived nearby, on the Via dei Pettinari, an ancient narrow street that dated back to the days of the Roman empire. They both felt nervous about seeing the professor. They calmed themselves by eating gelato and rehearsing their presentation.
    At the door, Calvesi greeted them with a brief smile and remembered both of their names. He was in his early sixties, white hair neatly trimmed, dressed in a cardigan and corduroy pants. At the university he always wore professorial tweeds and carried himself with an air of stern preoccupation. But now, at the door to his house, he seemed to Francesca much less forbidding, perhaps even a little self-conscious.
    He led them into his apartment. They would talk in his library, he told them. They followed him through a series of rooms, spacious and well-appointed, with subdued lighting, Oriental rugs, and an abundance of art, almost all of it contemporary paintings and sculptures. He and his wife had lived in this apartment for more than thirty years, he told them. The library was large, two stories in height, with a modern wooden staircase that went up to a mezzanine. The shelves extended from floor to ceiling, all neatly ordered, a collection of tens of thousands of books and journals that the professor had amassed in his long career as an art historian.
    Calvesi was not given to small talk, and this made him seem aloof. In her anxiety, Francesca tended to talk, making comments about his collection of art, about the library—stupidly, she thought later, as if she were chattering at a cocktail party, as if she were playing the role, as a boyfriend had once accused her, of the dumb blonde, although she was neither blond nor dumb. For her part, Laura adopted a strategy of respectful silence.
    In the library, Calvesi sat in a large leather chair and directed the two young women to the couch. He crossed his arms and cleared his throat. At that moment, Francesca realized—she couldn’t say exactly what it was that brought her to this realization—that Calvesi was not deliberately aloof, but rather shy. Perhaps it was the way he’d cleared his throat, or the movement of his eyes, which never quite met hers. It shocked her momentarily to think that a man of his stature, of his achievements, could actually be shy.
    They told him briefly about Correale’s
St. John
project and how that had led them to the Recanati archive. Calvesi listened attentively, nodding now and then, and when they described the account books of Ciriaco, Francesca could see his interest sharpen. He made no interruption, but leaned forward in his chair. They brought out their notes to show him the entries they had copied, and he took them in hand and studied them carefully.
    “This,” he said slowly, “is a very important discovery. It puts everything about these years of Caravaggio into focus. Now we have a chronology that is indisputable.”
    As he talked about the significance of the entries and the dates, he stood and began pacing, growing flushed and more excited than Francesca had ever seen him. He was in the grip, thought Francesca, of the Caravaggio disease. She and Laura were smiling broadly, happy that they had made their professor so happy.
    Calvesi told them he was in the final stages of correcting the page proofs of his book about Caravaggio, called
Le realtà del Caravaggio.
It was too late, he said, to insert this information in the body of the text, but he wanted to mention it in the introduction. Of course, he would give them full credit for the discovery.
    And then he said they must publish these findings, the payments and the dates, in a responsible journal such as
Storia
dell’Arte
as soon as possible.
    Laura said, “Well, Correale has asked us to keep it secret until the
St. John
exhibition.”
    Calvesi shook his head. “If other people know about this, there will be talk, rumors. It’s inevitable. Once you find something like this, it is impossible to keep quiet.