Senator Contarini has changed from his velvet robe into a black tunic of fine damask; he crosses the room to Crivano’s side and leans against the edge of a table. The painter, he says, comes from Bassano del Grappa. He rose to prominence in the studio of his father Jacopo, who made great success with rustic scenes such as this. Many of our most ancient families delight in evocations of their distant holdings on the mainland, the source of so much of their wealth. If you have visited a noble house in this city, then I’ll wager you have seen old Jacopo’s work.
The senator reaches into a muddle of instruments and withdraws a magnifying lens, which he lifts to the painting’s surface to examine the cloud-borne centaur. After the great fire in the doge’s palace, he continues, Francesco—for Francesco is the given name of the one who painted this—moved his household to our city, in order to open a workshop of his own. The Great Council had entrusted to me the restoration of the palace, and I awarded Francesco a number of commissions. I believed that I saw in his work the promise of greatness. Greatness of a sort not witnessed in this city since the plague took Titian from us. That potential no longer has any hope of being realized. But who can say with certainty that I was wrong? Or am I no more than a mooncalf for concerning myself with idle matters such as these, instead of with galleys, armaments, fortifications, the various blunt cudgels of republic?
Crivano shifts his weight, watches the crystal lens roam the painted surface. If one is to wield power, he says, then one must control the image of power. Or so a certain clerk of Florence would have us believe.
Contarini chuckles. I tell myself as much, he says. Often I do. Of course, that same clever Florentine also warns us of men who dream about ideal republics that have never existed. These fools—how does he put it?—are so tormented by the notion that how we live is very distant from how we ought to live, that they disregard what is done in favor of what should be done. Thus do they invite ruin upon themselves, their realms, their families. I sometimes suspect that I should count myself among these dreaming fools. But this suspicion always fails to shame me.
The glass glides across the canvas: green clouds, red apples, tranquil brown cows. What became of him? Crivano says.
Of whom?
Of the painter, senator.
Contarini straightens, and his hand falls away, polishing the lens on his sleeve. Against his father’s counsel, he says, Francesco began to associate with a group of learned young nobles. Politically aggressive, impatient with the Pope’s dictates, involved with the search for secret knowledge. These were hardly the same nobles who had made his family wealthy. This conflicted allegiance made Francesco anxious, and his was not a temperament well-suited to anxiety. It seems clear in retrospect that he suffered from a certain infirmity of the mind. According to his poor wife, he became convinced that the sbirri of the Council of Ten were hounding him, and intended to do him harm. He believed that they attacked him with demoniacal magic while he slept, expunging and altering his memories. Or so has his wife testified. To me it seems equally likely that he simply sought release from the world, as some men do, and always have done. In any case, some six months ago he leapt from the highest window of his rented home. The fall did not kill him, but it broke him quite badly, and despite the exertions of our friend Dottore de Nis he remains bedridden today, unable to perform for himself even the most mundane of tasks. In his infinite mercy, God did not permit the natural progression to be upended in this instance: he granted heartbroken old Jacopo eternal rest in February. And any day now, I imagine, Francesco will follow his father to the grave.
Crivano furrows his brow and studies the canvas, as if it might disclose some hint of its maker’s madness, but it remains as it was. I don’t suppose, he says, the painter’s fears could have had any substance?
His fears about the sbirri, you mean? Contarini says with a macabre smile. Or those concerning demonic assaults upon his sleeping mind?
About the sbirri.
The senator arches his eyebrows, shakes his head, looks away. I made inquiries, he says. I suppose as the man’s chief patron I felt responsible to some degree. The wife’s allegations seemed unlikely, but—owing to the peculiar activities of some of Francesco’s young friends—not quite out of the question. The Inquisition claimed to know nothing of him. The Ministry of Night pled ignorance as well.
And what of the Council of Ten?
Contarini claps his hands softly, cupping his palms as if to trap a fly, then flattens them, rubbing them slowly together. From the Ten, he says, I received only the routine obfuscation. They never deny anything, you know. Their potency rests on the common perception that their eyes and ears are everywhere. A denial might suggest that they don’t know what you’re talking about. Thus the truth of the matter must remain sealed in their leonine jaws, just as the secret of Francesco’s spoilt memory can be known only—