The Wonder Chamber

by Mary Malloy

  Lizzie finally settled on two students, Jimmy Moe, who was an Italian major and fluent in the language, and Roscoe Wiley, who was a history major and had taken two of her classes. She instantly liked Jimmy, who had an exuberant personality, and she knew that Roscoe was a hard worker.

  It was after four o’clock when Justin arrived and his total disinterest in the project was in sharp contrast to the enthusiasm of the students whom she had sent away disappointed.

  “What can you tell me about the collection?” she started. “I’m really excited to see it.”

  Justin looked at her and shrugged. “I haven’t ever really looked at it,” he said. “I know it’s in my Uncle Patrizio’s house, but I’ve only been there a couple of times.”

  “So you didn’t grow up in that house?”

  Again he shrugged. “No, I grew up outside of Bologna.”

  She asked him to explain how he was related to Maggie Kelliher and Lorenzo Gonzaga, and even that he wasn’t sure of. “I think they were my mom’s grandparents,” he said.

  “Is there some reason why you want to work on this exhibit?”

  “No, not really. My Uncle Cosimo said I should do it because it is about our family.” He kicked one shoe against the other as he spoke and concentrated his gaze there, as if looking at Lizzie would be too much work.

  “What’s your major?” she asked, seeking some way to put him to work that wouldn’t waste her time.

  He scratched the side of his face and looked up at her. “Don’t have one,” he said.

  “Aren’t you a junior?”

  He nodded.

  “Shouldn’t you have declared a major by now?”

  Again came the ubiquitous shrug. “Yeah, I guess it’s sort of Business, but I’ll probably change it.”

  “Well, you speak good English,” she said finally.

  “My dad worked in New York for ten years,” he said, “and we lived on Long Island.”

  That explained his completely colloquial American teenage accent, Lizzie thought. She had made a copy of the list of objects in the collection and handed it to him. “Do you think you could start a translation for me of this list?”

  He looked at it. “So I just write down like ‘alligator’ and ‘mummy’ and stuff?” he asked, looking at the list.

  “If that’s what it says in Italian, then that is what you write in English. If it isn’t clear, look it up or leave it blank.”

  With another shrug he left her office and closed the door behind him.

  “Shit!” she said to herself. It was going to be a lot more difficult to have this kid hanging around than not. If Cosimo Gonzaga hadn’t instructed her to hire him for this project she would be done with him right now.

  She returned to the library and found that Jackie had piled several more things on the two tables on which she was working, including several ancient books. Lizzie sat down and opened the one on the top of the pile. It was Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Museum Metallicum, one of several books by a sixteenth-century professor at the University of Bologna who had made a collection that was thought to be the largest in the world at the time. Aldrovandi was a botanist and physician who sought to collect all of nature in his “cabinet,” where he could then organize and study it. On the title page was an oval portrait of the author held by angels—an indication that he was dead by the time this book was published in 1611. The central panel contained a lengthy title in Latin, behind which was a hilly landscape dotted with vignettes of mining. Openings into the earth, and cross sections of mineshafts populated by tiny workers, were scattered around the page.

  This was only one of the great books by Aldrovandi, who attempted to catalog all things from the mineral, animal and plant worlds. Jackie had put the others on the table as well and Lizzie looked quickly at each, one after the other. These were books she knew well. It was her interest in the history of museums and collecting that had made her the choice to curate the exhibition of the Gonzaga collection. What she had not noticed on any previous reading was the bookplate in each of these copies that indicated it was a gift from Lorenzo and Margaret Gonzaga in honor of Patrick Kelliher.

  “I see you have discovered why I thought you might like to look at those again,” Jackie said, sitting down next to her.

  “Yes, thanks.”

  “And there is so much more, my friend,” Jackie said, obviously excited.

  She put a brown folder on the table. “I decided to look up the accession information that was recorded when those books came in as a gift, which was when Paddy-boy died. Maggie and her husband obviously brought these things with them from Italy to make a memorial gift.” She pulled a piece of paper from the folder. “This is the letter that Maggie wrote to accompany the gift.”

  The letter expressed a daughter’s loss at the death of her father and her desire to do something to mark the profound change it made in her life. “As I am now the resident of a new country,” she wrote, “I want to honor my father’s memory with something Italian.” She explained that her father had been impressed by the Gonzaga collection when he visited Bologna, and had asked to know more about it. In a brief history of the collection, Maggie credited its founding to Adino and Lorenzo Gonzaga, ancestors of her husband. The father, Adino, had been a student of Aldrovandi at the University of Bologna, and his son Lorenzo had been a colleague of the other great Bolognese collector, Ferdinando Cospi, who lived a generation later. “These books document those important collections,” was the last line of the letter.

  “There’s more,” Jackie said as she took the letter from Lizzie. “I can’t believe that this was in the correspondence file and was never accessioned into the collection.” She opened the folder and slid out a piece of ancient paper. “Here is an illustration of the ‘cabinet’ in 1677.”

  Lizzie gasped as she took the piece of paper.

  “Oh my God!” she said. “I don’t believe it! The College has had this all this time?”

  “Since 1959. And I don’t think anyone has looked at it since then.”

  “Oh my God!” Lizzie said again. “It’s fabulous!”

  The picture was drawn in pen on a thick piece of paper. It was just a bit too big to fit comfortably in the letter-size folder in which it had been hidden for the last fifty years and the edges were frayed along the top and the left side. It showed a room filled with cases that stretched from a few feet above the ground to what she guessed was ten feet or so. There was room both underneath and above the cases for additional display and every square foot of wall space had something stuck to it.

  The cases each had five shelves, crammed with birds and small animals, seashells, pieces of coral, scientific instruments, vases and other things that might be ancient pottery, as well as trays of coins or medals. On the wall above the case were marble busts, fantastic arrangements of weapons, and larger animals, including an alligator. Below were elaborate constructions of seashells and coral. Amphora leaned against the wall and other vases with flat bottoms stood in the corners. There was a gigantic foot, apparently from an ancient statue, that stood solidly in the center of the floor. In front of the case was an elegantly dressed man with a pointer, apparently prepared to share information about the collection with visitors. Beside him, at the edge of the case, stood an Egyptian sarcophagus.

  “It’s wonderful,” Lizzie said. “Just wonderful.”

  “Is it unique, do you think?”

  Lizzie shook her head. “No, there are several other illustrations like this.” She pulled a book out of the pile in front of her, Museo Cospiano. “This was another guy in Bologna who had a collection, and the frontispiece is similar to this image. Maggie mentions him in her letter—Ferdinando Cospi.”

  She opened the book to the frontispiece and Jackie said, “It’s the same picture.”

  “Not quite,” Lizzie said, “though they are clearly by the same artist, and the G
onzagas were probably copying Cospi’s collection, or both were copying Aldrovandi’s. Both pictures were made in 1677, so the artist might just have transferred some things from one image to the other.” She added that she had never seen the Gonzaga image published in any book.

  “How are they different?” Jackie asked.

  Lizzie looked back and forth between the two pictures. “The most obvious thing is the mummy case. Neither Cospi nor Aldrovandi had one of those that I know of.”

  “And Cospi doesn’t have an alligator,” Jackie added, pointing to the one hanging from the ceiling of the Gonzaga collection.

  “Which is actually kind of unusual,” Lizzie commented. “I’ve looked at a lot of these kinds of pictures and alligators are strangely common. The collections in Northern Europe usually have a kayak hanging from the ceiling; the ones from Southern Europe have an alligator.”

  “Where are there alligators?”

  “I don’t think there are any in Europe,” Lizzie said with a laugh, “but by the time these collections were being made lots of stuff was coming from Africa, Asia and the New World. That was part of the reason for making the collections—to put new knowledge into a framework that could be understood.”

  Lizzie asked if she could commandeer the two tables she was working at, in addition to her study carrel, for the duration of the project. Jackie agreed. “Who knew there was so much stuff here at St. Pat’s?” Lizzie said. “I had no idea I would be able to get so much done before leaving for Bologna. Certainly we will want this image in the exhibition; maybe we’ll make a photo mural of it and mount some of the surviving objects on it.”

  “Have you lined up your student assistants?”

  “Yes. Two of them are going to be great, but Justin Carrera is a problem. I get the strong feeling he is only doing this because he has been told to do it by his uncle and has no interest whatsoever in the project, even though it is about his own family. I’d jettison him if I could,” she said with a sigh of frustration. “Anyway, I’ll get them in here next and we’ll start parceling out the organizational work.”

  “I’m glad to see you working on a project that doesn’t seem to have any life-threatening aspect to it,” Jackie said as they parted company for the day.

  “That is a rather new experience for me,” Lizzie responded. “But what danger can there be in an old collection?”

  Chapter 5

  The College was more forthcoming with funds for the exhibit project than was customary in Lizzie’s experience. Most of the costs were being underwritten by the heirs of Paddy Kelliher on both sides of the Atlantic. The Boston Kellihers were paying for an exhibit design firm and for a small staff to work with Lizzie, including her two student assistants. The Italian part of the family, the Gonzagas, were not only providing the loan of the collection, but paying all the costs associated with packing and shipping it in both directions. In addition, Cosimo Gonzaga was paying the salary for his nephew to be on the project staff.

  Justin Carrera very quickly proved to be the disaster Lizzie anticipated. He didn’t show up for the first meeting scheduled to talk about the project and divide up the work with Jimmy Moe and Roscoe Wiley. As she had no confidence that Justin would provide a good translation of the list, she gave a copy of it to Jimmy as well. He had gotten an excellent reference from his Italian instructor and Lizzie asked him where he had learned to speak it so well.

  “My family speaks it at home,” he said, “and I have been reading the literature since I was a kid.”

  “I take it that ‘Moe’ was shortened from something else in the immigration experience of your family?”

  Jimmy had very black hair that came to a decided widow’s peak, and though it was cut in a way to diminish its prominence, he had a tendency to push his hair straight back when he wasn’t thinking. His skin was pale and he had green eyes, so his Italian heritage wasn’t obvious.

  “Morandzolini,” he said with a grin. “My father thought Moe was more American.”

  Lizzie showed Jimmy and Roscoe the image of the Gonzaga collection from 1677 and made them each a copy to use as a reference. “This will be our inspiration,” she said. “The common term in the seventeenth century for a room like this, set up to display a collection, was a ‘cabinet,’ and I’d like to recreate it as much as we can in our exhibit.”

  She opened the folder that had photographs of the collection. “These show the collection as it looked more than fifty years ago. They will all need to be scanned and cataloged, and eventually we will want to see what we can identify that is both on the list and in one of the pictures. There are also pictures of the family,” she continued, opening that folder as well. “And some of them were taken in rooms in the Gonzaga house in Bologna and have collections in the background.” She turned to Roscoe. “I’d like you to start by cataloging the photographs. Scan each of them and note the names on the back. I trust your eye, so give me a brief description of anything interesting in them that has to do with collections.”

  Roscoe picked up one of the pictures. “So here I would say that the room has four large and eight small paintings and some porcelain vases?”

  Lizzie nodded. “Perfect. More detail than that we don’t need at this point.”

  “It’s really terrific architectural detail in these rooms,” he said, handing the picture to Jimmy. “There are angels in the corners holding up the plaster bits.”

  One of the angels had his backside to the room, with his legs spread wide and his testicles visible. The boys looked at each other.

  “Get used to it, lads,” Lizzie said, “there are lots of butts and breasts and other bits plastered around the house.”

  She put her hand on the box of letters from Maggie Gonzaga to her family back home. “Would one of you mind scanning these for me?” she said. She wanted to have a file that she could peruse at home.

  Roscoe agreed, saying it would be no problem to process them while he was working on the photographs.

  With pieces of the exhibition beginning to fall into place, Lizzie made a preliminary list of things to be included, so that she could speak to the designer about them. She would have Jimmy and Roscoe full time in January, and part time after the spring term started. She would go to Bologna for three weeks in February, and was glad that she would be able to get such a good handle on the collection in advance of going there. Certainly there would be lots of surprises that weren’t included on the list or captured in any of the pictures, but the wonderful image of the cabinet in 1677 was such a strong starting place that she felt confident making a preliminary list that included five things: the Guido Reni Madonna and the Niccolo dell’Arca angel sculpture, which showed the fine arts aspects of the collection; the image of the cabinet, which demonstrated the scientific principles of natural history organization; and the alligator and sarcophagus, which were so prominently illustrated and which were big and had great visual impact.

  Smaller things like ancient pottery, sea shells, coral, and animal or fish mounts could be sketched in by deciding how many of each type should be included and then choosing the specific examples when she got to Bologna. The big questions were things like statuary and other works of art. They were all around the house, as a quick glance at the pictures had shown, and Cosimo had said that anything in the house was available for the exhibit.

  Lizzie looked again at the 1677 image. There were busts arranged around the top of the cabinet and she thought she would see if those actual pieces could be identified. It occurred to her that since the College had the original image of the cabinet, Cosimo Gonzaga might never have seen it, and she wrote him a short note, telling him how exciting it was to be working on the project and attaching a scanned image of the picture. “It is probably too much to hope that this arrangement is still standing in your house,” she wrote, “but I would like to identify as many things as I can that survive from this period.”

&nb
sp; It was six hours later in Bologna, and she didn’t expect any answer this evening, but her thoughts were beginning to turn to her trip and to being in the Gonzaga palazzo on the Piazza Galvani. Even the address had a romantic sound.

  Lizzie quickly typed up a similar note for the exhibit designer, and sent him the image as well. “Here is a terrific starting place,” she wrote. “Do you think we can enlarge it into a wall-sized mural?”

  Her last note of the day was to Justin Carrera. “You missed our meeting today,” she wrote bluntly. “Please let me know your schedule and how you are doing on translating the list. Can you stop by my office tomorrow?”

  Since Jackie had been finding so many unexpected treasures in the archives, Lizzie decided to stop by the library again before she went home. Roscoe was at the scanner, methodically putting Maggie’s letters on the glass plate one at a time, and told her that he would be able to send her a file that evening.

  Jackie waved to her from her desk and removed a pile of books from her spare chair so that Lizzie could sit in it.

  “Have you found any more unexpected delights for me?” Lizzie asked.

  “Haven’t I found enough already? I see you have your minions starting to process them.”

  “I think they’ll do a good job,” Lizzie responded. “And I’m getting quite excited about it all; it’s terrific material to work with.”

  “How is the background research going?”

  “The biggest dilemma before you found that great image of the cabinet, was in distinguishing between two different Gonzaga collections, both famous in their own times, but completely separate. In addition to the ‘cabinet of curiosities’ that I’m working with, there was a famous collection of fine art made by another branch of the family.”