by Mary Malloy
They took a break for lunch and went into the dining room where Lizzie had left some food for them. Though she never saw Graziella, the housekeeper took away Lizzie’s dirty dishes and garbage, and restocked the small stockpile of clean plates and cutlery on the table. On an impulse, Lizzie had bought a bouquet at a flower stall a few days earlier, and left a note that said “Grazie Graziella!” The next day a coffee maker joined the serving pieces.
“I’m rather surprised that you don’t want to more aggressively pursue the option of having the mummy,” Carmine said as they ate. “It seems right up your alley.”
“Ordinarily it would be, but I think it would take attention away from other things. The sarcophagus appears in the old drawing, but the mummy itself isn’t visible, and in truth, I have already written a description of the medicinal uses of mummy for the catalog and now I’m having to rethink it.” She had been composing a message to John Haworth in her brain ever since they opened the coffin.
“So it isn’t the display of human remains that bothers you?”
“In fact, though I admit to a macabre streak, I do have some hesitation about it. I have always been disconcerted by the display of Egyptian mummies. It seems that people who devoted so much attention to insuring that they would face eternity in a certain way ending up in an exhibit case in London or Boston…” She searched for words. “It’s not religious,” she concluded. “It simply seems disrespectful somehow. And I’m just as uncomfortable with the flayed corpses in the recent ‘Body World’ exhibits, plasticated and posed for millions of gawkers.”
“It’s natural though, to be interested in what happens to our bodies after death.”
“Here I think we have very different cultural backgrounds,” she responded. “Italians seem to celebrate the public display of their corpses. The bones organized into decorative patterns in churches, the piles of skulls, the mummified remains pulled out of graves and stood up on exhibit…” She stopped suddenly, afraid that Carmine might think she was criticizing Italians, but he laughed.
“We are morbid!” he said. “I think your macabre streak cannot match ours. But we use the excuse that we are preserving the relics of saints.”
“Not entirely. When I Googled ‘Italian’ plus ‘mummies’ I came upon an article about a church in Venzone where corpses put into the limestone vault beneath a church were naturally mummified because of the dehydrating properties of the place. And when they discovered it, the locals pulled the corpses up from the crypt and stood them around the church with their names attached.”
“I’ve been to that church,” Carmine said.
“Well then you know that these aren’t pretty mummies like the one we have in the ballroom, nicely wrapped with no visible features or body parts. These guys are all contorted into writhing postures and ghastly expressions. Can you imagine if they brought grandpa up like that and exhibited him with his name on a sign around his neck?”
“That is what happens to corpses. Is it better not to know?”
“It might be better not to know them personally. I think I would be curious to see John Doe’s grandfather, but not my own.”
This conversation reminded Lizzie that she had never shown Carmine the chapel or spoken to him about the reliquaries. “This will now sound very contrary, but I would actually like to include three reliquaries in the exhibit.”
“With or without body parts?”
“With, of course, a reliquary is no good without the relic in it.”
“And the display of these doesn’t bother you?”
“No, and I guess I am being rather inconsistent. I don’t know what the original intention of the supposed saint was when his or her bones were placed in a reliquary, but certainly as works of art these pieces were made for display.”
“And veneration.”
“Would it bother you if I took them and exhibited them? Because I did ask Father O’Toole, the president of my college, if he thought it would be sacrilegious to put them in a secular exhibit, and he basically approved it because the museum is on the campus of a Catholic college.”
“I certainly don’t object,” Carmine said. “I see so many of these things that I am fairly neutral about them. Mostly they come into my workshop as artifacts needing conservation and they sometimes pose special problems because of the mix of organic and inorganic materials.”
He asked if the relics would require the same special import license as the mummy and she explained that Father O’Toole had told her that he and his friend the cardinal would take care of it.
“Come see the collection in the chapel,” she said. “And you can tell me instantly if any of them need to be rejected for conservation reasons.”
He went back to the ballroom to get some gloves and his magnifying lens as Lizzie repackaged the food and made as neat a pile as she could of the used dishes.
She had gone into the chapel several times since Patrizio left the house and looked more closely around the room, so she was able to point out the main features to Carmine. The corpse under the altar was, at this point, mostly just a skeleton lying in armor and he gave it only the most cursory look before turning his attention to the wall of relics.
“You have a fine assortment to choose from here,” he said. “What are your criteria for selection?”
“Either they are visually compelling because of their beauty or their strangeness,” Lizzie said, “or they have an interesting story.”
“What do you mean by ‘strangeness?’”
“I’m going by an American definition here. Most of the visitors to my exhibit will never have seen anything like this, so this one, for instance,” she said, touching the base of an arm reliquary with the long bone of an arm readily visible, “will seem quite strange.”
“And you find strangeness to be desirable in something on exhibit?”
“Anything that draws someone across a room to look more closely is desirable, and I believe this would.”
He handed her a pair of gloves. “Don’t touch the metal with your hands, please,” he said with mock sternness.
“Don’t you find that arm bone, encased in silver and studded with jewels, strange?” she said hesitantly.
“Of course. Just because I am more accustomed to seeing these things than you doesn’t mean that I don’t recognize the strangeness of the practice.” He reached up and carefully removed the arm reliquary from the shelf and placed it on the altar.
There was no denying that the thing was beautifully crafted. It was an arm, upraised with an open palm, all made of silver. Folds and creases of fabric had been molded into the metal of the sleeve. Around the base of the arm, where it stood on the altar, and at the cuff of the sleeve, were gold bands, inset with semi-precious stones in squares, circles and ovals; a similar bracelet was around the slender forearm. In the palm of the hand was a gold-set pale-blue jewel. The long silver fingers stretched heavenward.
Had that been the extent of the piece there would have been no element of the strangeness that so intrigued and confounded Lizzie. But it was not simply a lovely sculpture of an arm. The thing was hollow, and strikingly visible through an open panel was an old bone—and it wasn’t even a clean white bone. It looked as though it still had the dirt of a grave clinging to it. The contrast between the earthiness of the bone and sumptuousness of the silver and jewels was what gave it its strangeness.
Lizzie held her tongue.
“Don’t worry about offending me,” Carmine said, giving her a slight bump with his elbow. “I told you I am inured to these things after years of working with them, and I acknowledge that most of the relics are fakes.”
Lizzie gave him a smile of relief. She put on the gloves and slowly turned the silver arm around. “They may be fakes as relics of saints, but it is still the arm bone of an actual person. Is there any identification of whose arm this is?”
“When there is a crystal
covering the relic, then a paper or fabric slip is usually put inside to identify the saint, but in this case the silversmith has actually given us the name on one of the bands that holds the bone in place: St. Cecilia, it says.”
“The patron saint of music,” Lizzie said.
“So this is the arm with which she played the harp,” Carmine joked.
“Let’s put this on the list,” she said. “I haven’t seen it yet, but I understand the Gonzaga chapel at St. Paolo Maggiore has a fresco of musicians, and I can make a nice connection in the catalog.”
They turned back to the display. “What else?” Carmine asked.
“A tooth would be nice.” There were three large reliquaries that each held a tooth on a silver pick in the center of a carved piece of crystal.
Carmine asked her if she had a favorite and pulled the nearest one off its shelf and put it on the altar. Each of the three examples was about two feet high, gold, and made in three parts: a base that looked much like the base of a chalice, the central cage which held the crystal, and a finial of some kind. On the simplest of these, the finial was a gold cross sitting on a gilded church tower; the most complex had an enameled crucifixion scene on a gold disk with a dark blue background, surmounted by a cross.
“Once again I have to ask who the donors were before I can make a decision.”
Carmine needed his magnifying lens to decipher the tiny writing embedded inside the crystal. “This one is John the Baptist,” he said of the first. He retrieved the other two and put them on the altar for examination. “This one is Mary Magdalene, and the other is St. Bartholomew.”
“That’s interesting,” Lizzie said. “The Metropolitan Museum in New York has a tooth of Mary Magdalene, and the Chicago Art Institute has one of John the Baptist. I don’t remember the details well enough to know if the artists were the same, but I do remember that there are several heads of John the Baptist in collections all over Europe.”
“The steeple effect here is very nicely done,” Carmine said of the first one they had looked at. “I would choose it over the others, and it is St. Bartholomew, who isn’t already represented in a museum in the U.S.”
“Done!” Lizzie said.
“I think that I will choose this as my third reliquary,” she added, pointing to a column of crystal capped on either end with a gold crown. It was difficult to see what was inside the crystal, but Lizzie had seen a similar piece years before in Bruges and believed she knew what it was.
“The Holy Blood, I think,” she said.
Carmine took it off the shelf and placed it carefully on the altar. The central column of rock crystal was about six inches long and two inches in diameter. It had been drilled through to allow for the placement of a tiny scrap of fabric, really just a few threads. These were said to have been part of the cloth used by Joseph of Arimathea to wash the body of Christ before he was laid in the tomb, and to have captured some of his blood.
“The one in Bruges was given to the Count of Flanders in Jerusalem during the Crusades and has a really terrific provenance for the last thousand years,” she said, and then added that she was more suspicious of where it had been for the thousand years between the death of Christ and its acquisition by Count Baldwin.
“I don’t suppose you have found a list of the relics here?” Carmine asked.
“Not in the ledger, or in any of the related lists, but there are other manuscripts in that part of the library that I haven’t yet surveyed.”
“I’d suggest you look for a bible, if there is an old one associated with this chapel.” They both looked at the bible lying nearby on the altar, but it was clearly new.
“I’ll put it on my list of things to do this evening,” she said. “There is a sketch of this chapel made by the same artist who drew the cabinet, which I will show you when we go back downstairs. The Guido Reni painting of the Madonna and Child used to be here, and the dell’Arca angel that is also in our campus chapel.”
“I’m very interested in the drawing,” Carmine said, and when they returned to the library Lizzie opened her computer and showed him the image that Cosimo had sent her several weeks earlier. She pointed out the two angels.
“One of them is the dell’Arca that you have in Boston?” Carmine asked.
Lizzie nodded, then said hesitantly, “Maggie Gonzaga described a Michelangelo angel from the chapel that she moved to her bedroom during the war. Could that have been it?”
Carmine looked closely at the picture again. “It’s impossible to tell from this sketch,” he said. “But I can show you a Michelangelo angel holding a candlestick at the church of St. Dominic.”
“Is it possible that it is the one from this house?”
Carmine shook his head. “No. The one at the church has been there for centuries and is well documented.”
“I wonder where it is?” Lizzie said. She remembered that Father O’Toole had mentioned that the Gonzagas might have lost valuable works of art to Nazi looting during the war, but she hadn’t been able to verify it. “Is it possible that such a thing could have been looted during the war?” she asked.
“One hears talk,” her companion said. “But no details that I know of. If the Gonzagas had artworks looted by the Nazis they never made a claim to find them or have them repatriated.”
“Too bad. A sculpture by Michelangelo would be the crown jewel in my exhibit!”
Chapter 22
Late in the night, Lizzie found the ancient bible on the same locked shelf where Patrizio kept the ledger. It was gigantic and heavy, with a gold-embossed leather cover and a big clasp to hold it closed.
With some difficulty, she wrestled it off the shelf and onto the table. Turning over the cover, she saw a genealogy of the Gonzaga family, with entries for births, marriages and deaths for more than three hundred years. She closed the book and opened it again from the back. In a tiny script covering two pages was a list of the relics, many of which had been gifts to their relations from the cardinals and bishops in the family. Even though the list was in Latin, Lizzie recognized the names of Maria Maddalena, Giovanni il Battista, and “Santo Sangue,” the Holy Blood. She would need Carmine to translate the details for her, but they seemed to have been acquired from Jerusalem, Constantinople and Rome.
With that, Lizzie felt her final choices for what would be in the exhibit were complete; now she could turn her attention to writing the catalogue. Martin would arrive in two days and she was ahead enough of the planned schedule to be able to spend a few days walking around the town with him, a prospect to which she looked forward with delight. She would also take some time away from the house tomorrow to visit Patrizio again. Though she had found almost everything that would be included in the exhibit in one or another of the documents available to her, she hoped that there might be family lore associated with some of them and that the old man might, if feeling talkative, be prompted to share those anecdotes.
She did not want to be caught unaware in any interview with him by information that she might be able to get by reading about him in his mother’s letters, and she was anxious to get back to the story of Gianna and Archie anyway, so she once again took the letters to bed and read Maggie’s account of the war.
August 10, 1943
Dear Tommy,
I have found someone who is going to England and I write this in haste in the hope of putting it into her hands tomorrow. We follow the news on the BBC radio, turned down very low and all of us sitting in the basement of the house. Bologna has become a very dangerous place. Strikes by workers in March protesting their living conditions and criticizing the Fascist government brought unwelcome attention our way and there are large numbers of German forces entrenched in the area. As I’m sure you must know we were heavily bombed in mid-July, by English planes at night and by American planes during the day. The bombs on July 16 and 24 damaged or destroyed many buildings in the center of
the city as well as the railroad station. There were many people killed and some great historic works of architecture and the artworks in them are gone forever. I’m sorry to say that it did not make any of us feel better to hear Churchill and Roosevelt urging us on the radio to overthrow the Fascists and take our place among the righteous nations.
It was strange that on the same day that we were bombed, the king finally did something good and threw Mussolini out of power. Marshall Pietro Badoglio is now nominally in control of the government, but the Germans don’t answer to him and so it doesn’t have much effect on us here. Adino has gone to Rome to follow the king and good luck to him, but you know too much of my feelings on this matter for me to say them all again. Cosimo has left Bologna and I wouldn’t be surprised if he showed up on your doorstep, or sets himself up in New York for the rest of the war.
My dear trio of partisans simultaneously terrify me with the danger of their actions and make me enormously proud. I try to aid the cause in small ways with food and supplies, but we have little to spare and there are now more than one hundred people living in my house and I am careful not to bring the Nazis storming in on all of them. I cannot, with a house still standing, turn away people whose houses are gone.
Eleonora and Margherita have property outside the city and are growing food to try to keep us supplied, but their farms are often raided by German troops, or by poor hungry people moving through the area. We have each been given a ration card with stickers to get access to staples like flour and rice, but there is less and less available.
I can read your mind right now, my dear brother, and know that you would wish me in Boston, but as long as Gianna, Pat and Archie are here I cannot go. And I think their work is crucial to securing us a future when the war is over.
October 8, 1943
Dear Tommy,
I cannot tell you how frustrating it is that I must wait until I know there will be a secure way to send you a letter before I even begin to write. As of September ninth we have been officially occupied by the German Army. Roads into the city are closed and there are great fears of arrests and the executions of partisans. There have been several raids in the city to flush them out and I am fearful of being caught with any information that identifies the dangerous activities of those I love. And yet, I want you to know how much the partisans are now doing in this region. What began as a resistance to Fascism has now become a resistance against the Nazi occupation. The people involved are an interesting mix, including large numbers of escaped Allied prisoners, who live in the hills around the city and are aided by local people.
