The Wonder Chamber

by Mary Malloy

  Lizzie described to Carmine how she and Martin had gone to L.A. and shown up at the school.

  “And I offered to repaint the wall,” Martin continued, “and there was a discussion that went on for days about whether they should continue to work on preserving my original work of art, or let me paint a new mural.”

  “But if I remember the details correctly, you would have destroyed the original in the process,” Carmine said.

  “Most of it, anyway. And there were some strong advocates for protecting the original as a historical part of the community.”

  “Including me,” said Lizzie.

  “Ultimately I convinced the local people to let me at least remove the latex paint, which honestly wasn’t worth saving; to repaint those sections of the wall that were clearly the favorites, and to do it without changing the way they looked; and to add some new material with the assistance of local kids, which is what I mostly like to do now anyway.”

  “So they got a new and different mural,” Carmine said.

  “With clear links to the original,” Lizzie added.

  Martin put his hand on the mummy case. “I would never think to alter this in any way,” he said earnestly, “because I respect the integrity of the original artist. But in the L.A. case, I’m the artist, and I look upon that wall as something that reflects a changing community.”

  “It’s a terrific case study anyway,” Carmine said. He handed Martin a pair of latex gloves. “And please use these if you really don’t want to make any changes in the mummy case.”

  They all laughed.

  “I like a man who knows his business,” Martin said, snapping the gloves into place.

  “As do I.”

  It was a companionable and productive morning, with Martin making suggestions on ways to think about some of the objects that were helpful for Lizzie, and providing an extra set of hands for Carmine as he moved the things that had been processed from one end of the ballroom to the other. When they began to talk of breaking for lunch, Carmine asked if they would like to walk over to the Basilica di San Domenico.

  “The tomb of St. Dominic there has the Michelangelo I told you about, Lizzie, and it was largely designed by Niccolo dell’Arca.” he said.

  “Did Lizzie tell you that there is a dell’Arca statue at St. Patrick’s College that will go into the exhibit?” Martin asked.

  “Of course,” Lizzie said. “And I’d love to see his work in its original setting.”

  “He is called ‘Arca’ because he designed the canopy or ‘arch’ over the top of the tomb,” Carmine explained. “His real name was Niccolo de Bari. The ceiling of that same chapel is by Guido Reni, and I think you said you have a painting by him as well.”

  “Tell me about the Michelangelo.” Martin said.

  Carmine smiled. “There are three Michelangelo statues on the tomb, including one of St. Petronio.”

  “Ah,” Lizzie said, “the cover of your book!”

  The Basilica was only three blocks from the Gonzaga house and they strolled there in just a few minutes. The tomb of St. Dominic, founder of the Dominican order, was along the right side of the nave, set off by a large black and gilded gate, and by a flight of stairs. Made of marble and framed by a rotunda ceiling and semicircular wall of paintings, the tomb itself had several tiers, with sculptures and bas reliefs of the life of the saint. Two exquisite angels were on the front corners and Carmine pointed out that the one on the left was by dell’Arca, and the one on the right by his student, Michelangelo.

  Lizzie stepped up to the dell’Arca angel and was immediately struck by its resemblance to the one in the chapel at St. Patrick’s College. She held out her arms to measure it.

  “This is astonishing!” she said. “I think that this angel and the one at St. Pat’s are a pair!”

  Martin and Carmine had been talking about the statue of St. Petronio, but turned to look at her. It was obvious from their expressions that neither thought she could be correct.

  “How could that be possible?” Martin asked.

  “I don’t know,” Lizzie said, “but they are. This is a mirror image of the one at St. Pat’s.”

  She explained how she had put her arms around that angel to see if it could be lifted and it was just the same size as this one. “Plus the faces are just alike, the placement of the candlestick on the knee, the long hair, the feathered wings. They are a pair, I’m sure of it.”

  Carmine was thoughtful for a moment before he spoke. “In researching the St. Petronio statue I found references to two pairs of angels holding candlesticks that were made for this tomb, one by dell’Arca and one by Michelangelo, but the presumed wisdom has always been that dell’Arca didn’t finish the work here and Michelangelo was hired to complete it.”

  “What does that mean, though?” Lizzie asked. She moved to the other side of the altar to look at the Michelangelo angel. “He certainly didn’t try to copy the dell’Arca figure; this angel doesn’t look anything like the other. He’s a man, not a boy, much more masculine looking, and the candlesticks, while similar, don’t match.”

  “Completing a pair doesn’t necessarily mean making them identical,” Martin said. “Michelangelo was no copyist. Whoever hired him wouldn’t expect him to make a replica of the dell’Arca.”

  “Did dell’Arca die before this was finished?” Lizzie asked. “Is that why Michelangelo had to be brought in?”

  Carmine shook his head. “That is the story one usually hears, but in fact one can’t be certain about the dates. Michelangelo came here around 1494, and that is the year that dell’Arca died.”

  “But if dell’Arca was commissioned to make a pair of angels holding candlesticks, how could one of them have gone missing?” Martin asked.

  “There are actually a number of plausible explanations for that,” Carmine answered. “Someone could have seen it in his studio and offered a good sum of cash for it before he brought it to the church, or they could have offered the church enough money to break up the set.” He explained that there had been earlier sculptures on the tomb that were sold when dell’Arca took up the restoration. “There are angels at the Louvre in Paris and at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London that used to be in this church, and I think a couple of carvings from St. Dominic’s are even at your Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.”

  “If the church had two pairs of angels, they could have sold one from each set,” Lizzie said. “And the other Michelangelo could have gone with the dell’Arca to the Gonzagas and be the statue stolen from their house during the war.”

  “Why isn’t there more information about this?” Carmine asked. “How could there be a missing Michelangelo that isn’t talked about?”

  “Patrizio said that his mother knew who stole it and didn’t want anyone to know it.”

  Martin suggested that maybe it was someone in her family.

  “That’s an interesting thought,” Lizzie said. “But who?”

  It was difficult to turn their attention to any other topic, but Lizzie paid Carmine the compliment of noting the statue of St. Petronio on the next tier up on the tomb. “Will that be the star of your catalog?” she asked.

  “Of course. He was designed and begun by dell’Arca and finished by Michelangelo, and that is clearly documented.”

  On the ceiling of the chapel was a fresco called “St. Dominic’s Glory” painted around 1615 by Guido Reni. “He was a real Bolognese artist,” Carmine explained. “He was born and died here.”

  “I think that Lorenzo Gonzaga had these things in mind when he made his gifts to St. Pat’s. He wanted the pieces he gave to represent his home city.”

  They stopped for lunch at a small restaurant along the Via Garibaldi and as they walked home, Lizzie asked if they might also stop into the Church of St. Paolo Maggiore, which was close by. It had been the family church of the Gonzagas.

  �
�It is a much newer church than St. Dominic’s,” Carmine answered, “and worth seeing for that reason. The art is quite different.”

  Whereas St. Dominic had lived on the site of his church and died there in the early thirteenth century, the church of St. Paolo Maggiore wasn’t built until four hundred years later, around the time that the Gonzagas moved to Bologna. The three entered and walked to the altar where there was a dramatic larger-than-life-size carving of the beheading of St. Paul. The executioner was a muscular man, dressed only in a cloth that went over one shoulder and around his waist. In his right hand was a sword, his arm raised across his bare chest. One foot was braced behind the other, as if to give more power to the swing of the sword. St. Paul sat before him, his head tilted down, looking off in the opposite direction from the man who would murder him. His long beard came down to his bare chest, and his crossed hands were bound with a cord and resting on his knee.

  “This is extraordinary,” Lizzie whispered to her companions. “I don’t see the usual crucifix.”

  “This is certainly a powerful alternative,” Martin answered. “Still a biblical execution, but somehow seems more violent.”

  This church had a greater range of things with modern connections than St. Dominic’s. One chapel had been turned into a stone grotto to resemble the place where Bernadette had her vision of the Blessed Virgin in 1858.

  The Gonzaga chapel was not what Lizzie expected, but she was only now beginning to realize that though the churches in Bologna were filled with bones of saints, they were not the tombs of ordinary family members. In England, where she had spent a fair amount of time in churches both large and small, local people were crowded into the floors when they died, or buried in tombs that were built along the walls; the excess population spilled out into an adjacent graveyard. Here that was not the case.

  “I expected to see the tombs of the old Gonzagas here, and maybe even Lorenzo, Maggie and Gianna.”

  “It’s not the tradition here. They are in a cemetery outside of town.”

  “Do you want to go there?” Martin asked her.

  “No, I don’t particularly need to see it.”

  They admired the various paintings in the chapel, but concluded that the most interesting things associated with the family were, or had been, in the house and they returned there to continue the work.

  Lizzie had much to keep her busy, but still could not keep the angels from buzzing around her head.

  Chapter 25

  A few days after Maggie wrote to her brother informing him of the murder of her son, Adino, a local newspaper reported that Jewish students and teachers would no longer be welcome in Bologna schools and on November 6, 1943, the first Jews were transported to Auschwitz. Unsure of what was happening to Jewish friends, Maggie reported to her brother that the Resistance fighters were providing false documents and helping people to escape capture.

  “There is now a very large population of people hiding in the hills around Bologna,” she wrote in late November.

  Thousands of Allied prisoners of war have escaped, and partisans are leading them to Switzerland along paths that many of them used before the war to smuggle goods out of the country. Many Bolognese have moved out of the city, I’m not sure to where. Everything is difficult to obtain now and we are worried as winter approaches about how we will keep heat in the house. In the summer, we had about eighty people camped out in our courtyard, but now they are all gradually moving up into the ballroom and then out to other rooms in the house. Food is scarce, as is fuel for cooking and lamps. We no longer have electricity.

  In addition to the families staying here more-or-less permanently, we have a constant stream of people at the door hoping we can provide them with a much-needed meal or something to wrap around themselves to keep them warm. We have, each of us in my family, reduced ourselves to two outfits of clothing and given the rest away. Clothes, shoes, all the basics are seriously wanting, and every now and then there is a banging on the front door and the Germans swarm in and take anything they can find of value, making themselves quite at home, stripping naked in the laundry to wash their clothes and eating everything in the kitchen.

  I do not mean to burden you, my dear brother, by telling you what life is like here now, but to inform you, and through you other Americans, about what is happening in Italy as we wait for the Allies to come to our aid. The fact that we continue to be bombed by British and American planes makes this very hard to take, as I’m sure you can understand.

  On Christmas Eve she wrote again.

  I have now been warned of a new law that calls for the arrest of all American and English women in Italy, and for their transportation to concentration camps. What am I? I ask myself. Certainly many people here know that I am an American by birth, but I have lived so long in Italy that you would not know by my accent. Of course I cannot leave here. Perhaps the strangest thing in all this chaos is the change in myself. Having rejected everything having to do with the position of Renzo’s family for so long, I now feel some responsibility on behalf of the Gonzagas to provide for the people in this community. I actually feel that if a Nazi officer showed up here to arrest me I could draw myself up and with a fearsome accent claim the nobility of the Gonzagas. It would not fool Colonel Hoffman, of course, who knows my history through his wife, Greta.

  She has, by the way, written to Gianna. I have passed the letters along and hope that Gianna, if she has responded, has done so cautiously. That her actions are too bold for her safety is my constant fear. In this I am joined by Archie, who has worked very hard to keep any attention away from my house.

  January 31, 1944

  Dear Tommy,

  Two days ago the Archiginnasio Library, directly across the Galvani Plaza from my house, was hit by a bomb. The explosion when it hit was ferocious; it knocked me right out of my bed. We very timidly opened the door yesterday to see what was left and found the whole front of that great old building gone. My emotions were very strong and very mixed. On the one hand, I saw how lucky I was that the bomb hadn’t been let loose a fraction of a second later than it was, in which case it would be my house that was destroyed and I would be dead. The great church of St. Petronio is so near that it also could easily have been the victim. On the other hand, the destruction of the Library, the original home of the University of Bologna, has distressed me more than I can say.

  March 17, 1944

  Dear Tommy,

  It’s St. Paddy’s Day in Boston and I am thinking about the parade and celebration on the campus. Our dear old papa will be well remembered today, and I know you and all of our family will be gathered there together. It is so strange to think of normalcy there when all semblance of it is gone here. (I know I should not speak of normalcy to either you or Frank, who have sons fighting.) I wish I could get some real word from you. I imagine and hope that you are writing me and those letters are somewhere in transit across the Atlantic and across Europe, though when I think of all the bags of mail that are sent awry because of the war I wonder if I will ever see anything from you that tells me how you are right now. My own letters wait for known opportunities to send, when someone I know is traveling into neutral Switzerland, or is likely to meet up with an American soldier who is still with a unit that might be able to send messages.

  Water is in short supply here now. We no longer have it coming into the house and are getting it from either the Neptune fountain or the old canals, and then boiling it before we drink it or cook with it. Shops are mostly closed, stripped of their contents either by Germans, by partisans, or by starving citizens, and no new stock is coming in.

  The next page was in a much shakier hand.

  Since I wrote the last I have had terrible news. Patrick has been captured as a partisan. This is the great fear I have lived with for the last year. The Germans have shot, hanged or imprisoned dozens of partisans in the last year and they seem to be increasing their
raiding parties to round them up. With so much desperation, homelessness and hunger, hopelessness is the worst malady, and it has led people to do things they would never have done in ordinary circumstances. Patrick may have been betrayed by someone he knew well and trusted, but whose fear of the Nazis was greater than any other feeling.

  Gianna is here in the house with me and tells me that Archie is working on a prisoner exchange, which is a common way to deal with the Fascists, but not so common, I think, as a way to deal with the Germans. I must end this now as the courier I expected is here and leaving immediately for Switzerland. When I write again I hope it will be with better news.

  April 14, 1944

  Dear Tom,

  I wish I knew if you were receiving my letters. I guess I write as much for myself, as I feel I need to be keeping some sort of record of what is happening here and I am fearful of keeping a journal lest it be found by the Germans.

  The tale I began in such a frenzy of fear last month has been resolved favorably, I’m happy to say. Archie and a small group of partisans captured Col. Franz Hoffman and exchanged him for Patrick’s freedom. Patrick is now confined to my house, and Archie and Gianna have gone so far underground that I do not expect to see them for the remainder of the war. German sentries are now a permanent fixture in Galvani Plaza and I know they are there to watch my house. I am extraordinarily lucky to have so many good and trusted friends, but to carry information at this time puts people in danger of immediate execution and I do not want to put anyone in that position; consequently I ask no questions.

  September 12, 1944

  Dear Tommy,

  It has been a hard summer with very little opportunity to get news or send it. The Germans took the radio that we used to listen to the BBC, so we do not know where the Allied armies are on their march through Italy, except with very rare messages. There have been a number of strikes in the factories against the poor working conditions, and they have been brutally suppressed. Many people have returned to the city after depleting the produce and stock in the countryside, and in expectation of an Allied advance, and we have been able to get some much-needed supplies in the process. Not only have Eleonora and Margherita sent us baskets of vegetables and fruits, but the relations of many of the people staying in the house have brought gifts of food for all to share. It seems like such a bounty to see it all piled up on the table, but I know that with the crowd we have we could easily go through it all in a day, and so I am trying to develop some good way to ration it.