Read Online The Girl With the Botticelli Eyes by Herbert Lieberman - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Herbert Lieberman
Tags: Suspense
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off with a lurch.
They drove north from the city over a landscape of green terraced hills dotted with the umber-colored silhouettes of ancient family palazzos. Patches of vineyards and groves of olive trees scattered bright splashes of green over the brown undulant humps. They wound through tiny villages, with empty streets and squares, where all the shop windows were shuttered against the blinding noonday heat and the ubiquitous clock towers, like the hands of sundials, cast their long needle shadows across the vacant, broiling piazzas. Out once more on the narrow lanes of countryside, the only hints of habitation were the occasional drowsing goats tethered beneath trees, or the eerie tinkle of cowbells clanking through the scorched afternoon. In less than a half hour they reached the restorers. Accompanied by the chief conservator, a Ligurian by the name of Panuzzi, they toured the shop, a series of large interconnected work spaces where various craftsmen chiseled at statuary and daubed and matched paint onto fraying canvases. A workforce of nearly a dozen young men attired in plaster-dusted jeans and denim aprons shouted back and forth, chain-smoked, drank endless paper cupfuls of coffee and Pelligrino water, laughed raucously above the chink of hammers and chisels, and hurled good-natured insults at one another as they labored over their appointed tasks. To Manship, they seemed boyish and inexperienced, inattentive to the rigors of their highly demanding work. But after even the briefest inspection of the final product, he had to admit they were masters.
Seeing the paintings had a tonic effect on Manship. For the first time in several days, his spirits lifted. The work already done was more than anyone could have reasonably hoped for. They’d moved quickly, particularly with those things most damaged. Moreover, the restoration was first-rate, flawless, without looking unnaturally new.
As his eye wandered over one of several versions of the Madonna, Manship waved a hand lightly through the air above it, as if to whisk away some barely perceptible mote of dust. For a moment, he permitted his finger to linger with a slight tremor over the surface of the canvas. Withdrawing a jeweler’s loop from his pocket, he carefully inserted it into the socket of his eye.
Torelli and Panuzzi hovered breathlessly behind him. “Note the line running along her throat, Signor Manship,” the chief conservator remarked. “And the shading defining it. Exquisite, no?”
Manship had just been studying that same area. He wondered how long it had taken Botticelli to render just the right balance of line to shading. Did it require hours and hours of exasperating trial and error, or had the old master dashed it off with an effortless twist of the wrist? Manship tended toward the latter opinion. His loop ranged up and down the canvas, then swung horizontally left and right. “The reds down in the lower right …”
“Yes, yes, I know.” Signor Panuzzi was crestfallen. “They appear pallid now. That’s because of the age and condition of the material beneath. Botticelli’s reds by no means. But when I finish with them, Mr. Manship, I swear to you by the ghost of my dear departed mother, Botticelli himself could not tell the difference between Panuzzi’s red and his own.”
Torelli laughed nervously and dabbed his immense handkerchief at the back of his neck.
When they came to the Pallavicini painting, it was a different matter entirely. Far more grave, but Manship was pleased with the work that had been done so far.
“Not bad, ay, Signor Manship?” Torelli asked hopefully.
“I think it will be fine,” Manship said after a moment, spirits rising.
But later, standing before the Centurion, he was bereft, like someone who’d come to a morgue to identify the body of a loved one brutally violated. No one spoke for some time, awestruck by the degree of rage inflicted on the work. And yet, beneath the long, jagged gashes, within the
They drove north from the city over a landscape of green terraced hills dotted with the umber-colored silhouettes of ancient family palazzos. Patches of vineyards and groves of olive trees scattered bright splashes of green over the brown undulant humps. They wound through tiny villages, with empty streets and squares, where all the shop windows were shuttered against the blinding noonday heat and the ubiquitous clock towers, like the hands of sundials, cast their long needle shadows across the vacant, broiling piazzas. Out once more on the narrow lanes of countryside, the only hints of habitation were the occasional drowsing goats tethered beneath trees, or the eerie tinkle of cowbells clanking through the scorched afternoon. In less than a half hour they reached the restorers. Accompanied by the chief conservator, a Ligurian by the name of Panuzzi, they toured the shop, a series of large interconnected work spaces where various craftsmen chiseled at statuary and daubed and matched paint onto fraying canvases. A workforce of nearly a dozen young men attired in plaster-dusted jeans and denim aprons shouted back and forth, chain-smoked, drank endless paper cupfuls of coffee and Pelligrino water, laughed raucously above the chink of hammers and chisels, and hurled good-natured insults at one another as they labored over their appointed tasks. To Manship, they seemed boyish and inexperienced, inattentive to the rigors of their highly demanding work. But after even the briefest inspection of the final product, he had to admit they were masters.
Seeing the paintings had a tonic effect on Manship. For the first time in several days, his spirits lifted. The work already done was more than anyone could have reasonably hoped for. They’d moved quickly, particularly with those things most damaged. Moreover, the restoration was first-rate, flawless, without looking unnaturally new.
As his eye wandered over one of several versions of the Madonna, Manship waved a hand lightly through the air above it, as if to whisk away some barely perceptible mote of dust. For a moment, he permitted his finger to linger with a slight tremor over the surface of the canvas. Withdrawing a jeweler’s loop from his pocket, he carefully inserted it into the socket of his eye.
Torelli and Panuzzi hovered breathlessly behind him. “Note the line running along her throat, Signor Manship,” the chief conservator remarked. “And the shading defining it. Exquisite, no?”
Manship had just been studying that same area. He wondered how long it had taken Botticelli to render just the right balance of line to shading. Did it require hours and hours of exasperating trial and error, or had the old master dashed it off with an effortless twist of the wrist? Manship tended toward the latter opinion. His loop ranged up and down the canvas, then swung horizontally left and right. “The reds down in the lower right …”
“Yes, yes, I know.” Signor Panuzzi was crestfallen. “They appear pallid now. That’s because of the age and condition of the material beneath. Botticelli’s reds by no means. But when I finish with them, Mr. Manship, I swear to you by the ghost of my dear departed mother, Botticelli himself could not tell the difference between Panuzzi’s red and his own.”
Torelli laughed nervously and dabbed his immense handkerchief at the back of his neck.
When they came to the Pallavicini painting, it was a different matter entirely. Far more grave, but Manship was pleased with the work that had been done so far.
“Not bad, ay, Signor Manship?” Torelli asked hopefully.
“I think it will be fine,” Manship said after a moment, spirits rising.
But later, standing before the Centurion, he was bereft, like someone who’d come to a morgue to identify the body of a loved one brutally violated. No one spoke for some time, awestruck by the degree of rage inflicted on the work. And yet, beneath the long, jagged gashes, within the
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