SIMONE MARTINI. THE NAME WAS LIKE A FLY AGAINST the windowpane of my mind, buzzing incessantly—and with more insistence than Stefan’s name buzzed—as I hurried to meet Miranda at the Avignon library again. Could Martini be the creator of the Shroud of Turin? If so, when, and why? Had he done what Emily Craig postulated had been done—copied a crumbling first-century original? Or had Miranda nailed it when she called the Shroud “the world’s first snuff film,” created by the murder of its main character?
My sense of having split-personality disorder—or, rather, split-century disorder, of being torn between the fourteenth and twenty-first centuries—hadn’t gone away. If anything, it had intensified as I waited for Stefan’s three “fishes” to nibble at the bait Descartes and I had dangled. If not for the mystery of the bones themselves, I’d have gone off the deep end during the wait.
Elisabeth had shown me a book on Italian artists of the early Renaissance, but Martini merited only a few pages in it. So Miranda and I were returning to the library once more.
In the M section of art books, we found a slim volume devoted to Martini. Scurrying upstairs to the mezzanine—which we had to ourselves today—we huddled over the plates of Martini’s paintings.
One of his earliest works enchanted me. The image—a fresco in a chapel in Assisi, Italy—depicted Saint Martin being knighted by the Roman emperor. With a golden disk behind his head and his hands folded in prayer, Martin looked every bit the pious saint. But other figures in the scene looked like entertainers at a medieval party. Three singers had been captured in midnote, open mouthed, forever singing in close harmony. Beside them, a dark-haired man in a colorful, bejeweled robe strummed a stringed instrument—a mandolin? a lute? Accompanying the strummer was a flute player, smiling slyly, and for good reason. I pointed him out to Miranda. “Look,” I said, “he’s playing two flutes at once.”
“Cool,” she marveled. Then—a slight variation on her favorite utterance—“How does he do that?”
One of Martini’s final works—The Holy Family—was striking in its treatment of Mary, Joseph, and a youthful Jesus, age ten or twelve. “Wow, a family quarrel,” I told Miranda. “Mary and Joseph are scolding Jesus—you don’t see many pictures of that, huh?”
“And get a load of that pout Jesus is giving them,” she said. “What a brat!”
But it was Martini’s Avignon portrait The Blessing Christ—the red-ochre sinopia drawing I’d seen in the palace—that I kept flipping back to stare at again and again. The drawing had been made as a study for a fresco at the cathedral, one of four scenes tucked beneath the small roof of the front porch. The paintings themselves were gone, but the underlying sinopia of Jesus had been found and moved to the palace to preserve it, along with a companion drawing of Mary. The eyes of Jesus seemed to be looking right at me, as if to say, “You’re right—the Shroud, the bones, and I: Martini’s Holy Trinity.”
Miranda translated the artist’s biography for me; it didn’t take long, since details of his life were sketchy. “His first known work was in Siena, Italy, in 1315,” she said. “He worked in Siena, Padua, Naples, and Florence for twenty years. He moved to Avignon in 1335 or ’36 to paint at the papal court. He died here in 1344.”
“At the papal court? So he might have had a connection to the bones,” I noted. “Might have had access.”
“That’s a mighty big might,” she said. “Hey, this is interesting. He was friends with Petrarch, the sonnet-spinning chaplain who loved to hate the papacy. Martini painted a frontispiece for Petrarch’s copy of the writings of Virgil. Oh, cool—he also painted a portrait of Laura, Petrarch’s not-quite girlfriend.”
“Let’s see it,” I said. “What page is that on?”
“None, alas—it’s long lost. But we know it existed because Petrarch wrote two poems praising the picture, and praising Simone’s artistic genius.”
But was it possible that Martini had a dark side? Was it possible that he’d created a “snuff shroud,” as Miranda had speculated in Turin—a work made expressly to document the murder of the man it depicted? The idea was horrifying but undeniably fascinating. Wouldn’t it be ironic if the relic revered by millions was actually a piece of forensic evidence—the world’s most sensational and incriminating piece of forensic evidence, one whose meaning had been misunderstood for centuries?
But was Martini capable of committing a cold-blooded murder for the sake of…what? Did he have both motive and opportunity, as my detective friends had taught me to wonder? What might drive a talented and prominent artist to commit and document such a crime, and then commit the sacrilege of passing off the evidence as a holy relic?
I took out a pocket-sized notebook and flattened it open. At the top of a left-hand page, I wrote “Motive?” and—on the facing page—“Opportunity?” I stared at the neatly lined pages awhile, feeling foolish and bereft of ideas. Finally, shaking my head in frustration, I forced myself to put pen to paper. Under “Motive?” I wrote “artistic rivalry?” Did Martini have a competitor in Avignon he felt jealous of, threatened by? I nudged Miranda. “Know of any artists who’ve killed other artists?”