Sidney Chambers and The Forgiveness of Sins

by James Runcie

  The travelling party returned to the vicarage shortly before seven and Francesca cooked simple spaghetti with ragù as a starter and left after producing a tray of veal cutlets. She had an important date with her boyfriend, Umberto Camilleri, who was set to go far in the state police. Padre Tim said that the family had a long tradition of working in law enforcement. Francesca’s father Nico was Head of Security at the Uffizi, her brother Giovanni was an officer with the Municipal Police, and her mother worked as a cook for the carabinieri. They could hardly be in safer hands.

  The guests retired to their room as soon as it was polite to do so. They were tired and Sidney wanted to review his sermon for the morning.

  ‘Are you glad we’ve come?’ Hildegard whispered, anxious not to disturb their sleeping daughter.

  ‘I am only happy if you are,’ her husband replied. ‘It’s quite a thing to be here.’

  ‘You have not told me anything about your time in Italy during the war,’ Hildegard said. ‘You do not have to. Only, if you want . . .’

  ‘I was at Monte Cassino in 1944, and then Trieste. This is my first time without violence.’

  ‘Does it feel far away, like another country? Does it look as if there had been no war?’

  ‘Not quite; not yet. But when I am with you, I don’t have to think about these things.’

  ‘Then I am glad. I hope the holiday will be beautiful. We need beauty, I think.’

  It was a brisk Sunday morning with a light rain. Timothy Jeffers apologised for the weather as they walked to St Mark’s English Church for the family communion. He said that it had been bad for the past few days but he hoped it would improve. At least it might remind his guests of England.

  The congregation numbered around thirty and consisted of twelve to fifteen regulars together with the last of the English tourists. Hildegard and Anna shared a pew with a woman called Lydia Huxley from the British Institute and an Anglophile doctor, Luigi Cannavaro.

  Amanda had sent a message to say that she was not able to attend but would meet the family for lunch. ‘I go to church enough when I’m at home and, delightful as your preaching is, Sidney, I have heard you many times before. I’ve booked a lovely restaurant in Santa Croce.’

  Sidney preached on the idea of travel, journey and pilgrimage. He wanted to explain how people are always on the move, whether it is from home to the workplace or out to see friends. Each one of these forays was a pilgrimage of sorts, and we should be mindful wherever we go, aware that our travels are all part of a larger journey towards death.

  He quoted from The Pilgrim’s Progress, conscious that it might be foolish to attempt a reading of Dante in the poet’s home town, and then worried that he was being overserious. The congregation was elderly and probably needed cheering up rather than being given a grim reminder of their inescapable mortality. But Sidney could not think of any jokes to lighten his message. Had his new status as archdeacon begun to reduce his sense of humour? Was he becoming more pompous? It would be good to see Amanda.

  They met at the Ristorante Boccadama, in the Piazza Santa Croce. It was just about warm enough to eat outside, although only foreigners did so. Timothy Jeffers explained about the tradition of Italian Sunday; how church was followed by lunch in a restaurant and then the children were told to play outside ‘so that the parents can go back home and get down to their weekly hanky-panky. In a few hours this square will be full of children.’

  They were joined by Sir William and Lady Victoria Etherington, who were keen to demonstrate that they were such old hands in Florence that they might just as well have a part in governing it. They spoke in a loud anglicised Italian in order to dismiss a group of Neapolitan singers trying to earn a few lire with their rendition of a Puccini aria. They were negotiating a loan of a couple of paintings from their family collection at Rushworth Hall, in Shropshire, and tried to visit Italy at least twice a year. They had just come down from Fiesole and were thinking of buying ‘the most divine’ little farmstead.

  Sir William was a tall, lugubrious man, dressed in a battered raincoat draped over a two-piece grey flannel suit and a spotted red bow-tie. His wife was pale, distinctly English, and easily bored: a petite woman in a navy twin-set, with a white blouse and matching silver accessories that were worn as a uniform, even on a Sunday. She had short dark hair, suspicious eyes, economic lipstick and sensible flat shoes. Sidney guessed that no one would ever think of calling her ‘Vicky’.

  Her husband continued the conversation with what was clearly a well-rehearsed story claiming that Jesus was, in fact, Italian: ‘because he believed his mother was a virgin, he stayed at home until he was thirty, and his mother thought he was God’.

  It was the Etherington’s second visit to Italy that year. Their first had been to the Palio in Siena. ‘All too cruel,’ Victoria complained. ‘They had to put one of the poor horses down. No one was even surprised.’

  ‘The Italians have a rather more stoic attitude to death,’ her husband observed. ‘It must be the centuries of violence and corruption.’

  ‘Some people do say that the country’s charms are fatal . . .’ said Amanda.

  ‘Unlike your charms, Miss Kendall, which are eternal.’

  ‘I’m flattered.’

  ‘I am sure you know the saying: “Un momento senza lei sembra come un’eternità.”’

  His wife interrupted. ‘That’s enough now, William.’

  Sidney did not think he had ever met a man who was so much less charming than he thought he was. Hildegard had avoided the general discussion by concentrating on her daughter, keeping Anna’s hunger in check by introducing her to grissini, but these were now finished, and it was time to order their meal. The adults had fettuccine Alfredo and Anna was given her first small Margherita pizza. Two armed policemen passed by eating ice creams, amused by this English group dining outside in weather they would consider to be inclement. Sidney noticed the guns in their holsters and imagined Anna asking how those men could fire a weapon and enjoy an ice cream at the same time.

  After lunch they walked into the cloisters of Santa Croce. They were perfect, Sidney thought to himself, so naturally rhythmic and clear; as healing as music. He would learn from this: the need for balance and proportion in a life, how equilibrium consisted of matching the opposing forces of duty and pleasure, public and private, expectation and reality.

  He took his daughter’s hand and Amanda continued the conversation. Could there be such a thing as objective beauty, she asked, and could comparisons be made, for example, between Brunelleschi’s architecture, Piero’s paintings and the music of Bach? Perhaps the spaces between architectural columns were like rests in music.

  They walked through a delicate colonnaded porch into the minimalist interior of the Pazzi Chapel. Amanda explained how proportion, symmetry, circle and square combined to create a mathematically lucid space.

  ‘Strange how such beauty also contains the echo of so much Renaissance brutality,’ Victoria Etherington observed.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Hildegard asked.

  Sir William told her about the Pazzi Conspiracy and how the peaceful chapel in which they were standing had been built for a family who had tried to assassinate Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici. ‘Leonardo even drew one of the conspirators after he had been hung.’

  ‘He probably drew the body after it had been cut up as well,’ Amanda added.

  ‘Please,’ Hildegard intervened. ‘Not in front of Anna . . .’

  ‘But what is it about blood and beauty, art and murder?’ Sidney asked.

  Sir William thought for a moment. ‘Does one compensate for the other, perhaps? Too much beauty must be destroyed because it is precious and impossible; and, conversely, a surfeit of violence requires some kind of compensation.’

  ‘The consolation of art,’ said Amanda.

  ‘Sometimes everything exists in contradiction: good and evil, black and white, beauty and ugliness. Think of Ancient Rome. It was the greatest civilisation the wor
ld has known and yet it was supported by slavery and injustice. The Italians have always known that beauty is a counterweight to horror.’

  ‘At least beauty lasts longer,’ Sidney answered. ‘It outstays the violence: in paint and stone if not in flesh.’

  Sir William stopped to take in the sight of a beautiful girl crossing the square and he began to recite from Lorenzo de’ Medici on the fleeting beauty of youth:

  ‘Quant’è bella giovinezza

  che si fugge tuttavia!

  Chi vuol esser lieto, sia:

  del doman non c’è certezza.’

  * * *

  The next few days saw heavy skies over the Arno, and the city was washed with a low grey light. No one in the streets appeared to look up and most Florentines dressed in black, darting into bars and cafés during the showers of rain either for a morning ristretto or for the odd sharpener to lighten the mood. Anna was wearing a bright-blue PVC raincoat and they bought her a matching pair of waterproof boots that allowed her to stamp and dance in the puddles, scattering both pigeons and passers-by. Sidney brought out his cloak, and his wife joked that he looked less like a vicar and more like a vampire. In fact he bore a strange similarity to Christopher Lee.

  ‘I’d prefer being him to Bela Lugosi.’

  ‘As long as you don’t expect me to be one of the Brides of Dracula.’

  Anna pulled at her mother’s coat. ‘Who’s Dracula?’

  ‘Your father will explain.’

  Sidney improvised. ‘He’s a very frightening man who hides in cloaks and comes out when no one is expecting him. Would you like to try?’

  They began a new game of Anna running into Sidney’s cloak, hiding in it, and then coming out to surprise people with the word ‘Boo!’ This activity had little sign of ending and both Amanda and the Etheringtons were keen to move on and take in some more art.

  The Uffizi was closed to the public and a private tour had been arranged. They stopped at Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Picking up on the conversation of the previous day, Amanda reminded them that this idealised woman was herself the product of violence; arising from the sea after Zeus had killed her father, torn off his testicles and thrown them into the foam.

  ‘I don’t think we need to know every detail,’ Sidney commented, anxious that Anna might ask further questions.

  They moved on, in chronological order, past works by Uccello, Leonardo, Raphael and Filippo Lippi, through the Quattrocento and the Cinquecento, until they reached a painting by Artemisia Gentileschi: Judith Slaying Holofernes.

  Amanda touched Sidney’s arm. ‘This is the artist I was telling you about: an example for Anna to follow.’

  Her friend made his inspection. ‘I thought it was a Caravaggio.’

  ‘Not a bad guess. The chiaroscuro is not as pronounced, the flesh tones could have greater modelling, but there is power and a sense of the dramatic, don’t you think?’

  ‘It seems rather matter-of-fact for a murder scene,’ Sidney replied. ‘She might as well be killing a pig.’

  ‘Perhaps she thought she was,’ said Amanda. ‘Gentileschi had a cold eye. She was raped by her tutor, Agostino Tassi.’

  ‘More brutality . . .’

  ‘Inescapable, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Do you know that in Webster’s plays,’ Sir William began, speaking to no one in particular but assuming that all might listen, ‘the Italians are always poisoning people: by the leaves of a book, the lips of a portrait, the pommel of a saddle, and an anointed helmet. It’s a country of traitors, cheats, pimps, spies and murderers.’

  ‘Is there something simpler we can see?’ Hildegard asked. ‘Without horror?’

  One of Amanda’s favourite works, Piero della Francesca’s double portrait of Federico da Montefeltro and his wife Battista Sforza, painted in 1472, was not on public display but was being restored and she took them down to the conservation workshop to inspect it.

  ‘This tells you all you need to know about vanity and beauty in the Renaissance,’ she said. ‘At first sight, it’s all about volume and detail, poise and majesty.’

  She pointed out the miniaturistic description of Sforza’s jewels; the wrinkles, moles and blemishes on Federico’s olive-coloured skin. ‘As in all portraits of the duke, the viewer only sees his left profile; a sword blow earlier in his life had cost him his right eye and the bridge of his nose.’

  ‘So he is only ever seen from the one side?’

  ‘In portraiture. Although, curiously, the duke was praised for his aquiline nose. Piero stresses this characteristic to give him an eagle-like appearance, because that’s the classical symbol of authority.’

  ‘That’s one way of explaining away a big nose,’ Sir William laughed.

  Amanda ignored him. ‘There’s also something particularly moving about the portrait of his wife, Battista. It was painted after she died of pneumonia. If you look carefully, you can see that her blanched features and expressionless face are rather like a death mask. The strong flow of light almost diminishes her features. She is already absent.’

  Sidney walked around the painting. ‘Extraordinary. Once you know something it changes the way in which you look at a work of art.’

  ‘And so these two paintings,’ Hildegard asked, ‘are a memorial to their marriage?’

  ‘They are both idealised portraits. Battista Sforza had nine children but here the white pearls symbolise purity and chastity, the blonde hair nobility. This is meant to be a portrait of a woman at her most magnificent. She is made permanent in paint. Her beauty will not fade, while her husband lives to fight another day; and he certainly battled on.’

  She explained that there was a theory that Federico da Montefeltro had been behind the Pazzi conspiracy. He had six hundred troops waiting outside the city to move in as soon as the Medici brothers were killed. But they only managed to get rid of one of them, the crowd turned on them, and they bungled their escape, unable to get out of a room with a hidden latch.

  ‘The hidden latch!’ Hildegard smiled. ‘It makes me think of one of your escapades, Sidney.’

  ‘I am glad that the Church of England is a rather more peaceful institution. We tend not to go round murdering each other.’

  ‘That is not entirely true,’ Amanda interrupted, remembering the Patrick Harland murders that had taken place only four years previously.

  ‘These are double-sided portraits, I think?’ Hildegard asked, changing the subject. On the reverse of each painting were two paintings showing the protagonists ‘in triumph’.

  ‘This is a rare example of husband and wife being seen as partners in a joint endeavour to bring authority, art and culture to their subjects,’ Amanda explained.

  ‘Even if it takes murder to do so?’ Sir William asked.

  ‘As I think we have discussed, in the Renaissance death was considered a necessary correlative to beauty.’

  ‘Morality is often something of an afterthought,’ Sidney observed.

  Amanda smiled. ‘Although sometimes the rich find it easier to afford than the poor.’

  ‘Which is why they should be better at it,’ Sidney snapped. He was puzzled by his mood. Despite the beauty of his surroundings, he found it curiously disconcerting. The art was almost too good to be true. What was it saying about humanity, and how much was the Renaissance culpable of creating the myth of individual rather than collective achievement? Was this the beginning of the desire for individual fame and recognition that contradicted Christian humility and shared responsibility; licensing the modern notion of ambition and selfish aspiration?

  On the way out they met the small, and rather sweaty, Head of Security, Nico Tardelli. Francesca’s father greeted them all warmly. Sidney could not imagine how a man who looked as he did had produced such a beautiful daughter. It made him wonder all the more what her mother was like.

  ‘Do the family know everyone?’ he asked Timothy Jeffers.

  ‘I think they run their own little mafia. As a result, Francesca’s a very useful hous
ekeeper to have.’

  ‘And beautiful too.’

  ‘I try not to think too much about that.’

  ‘That must be quite difficult.’

  ‘It isn’t easy, Sidney, but I have to acknowledge both that she’s out of my league and that she’s too young. Furthermore, she already has a boyfriend.’

  ‘And she’s keen on him?’

  ‘Actually, I don’t think so.’

  ‘There you are then.’

  ‘Her family will have to approve whoever she ends up with. In the meantime I will probably find a delightfully stout Englishwoman with an eccentric hobby. Something like beagling.’

  ‘Really, Tim. You don’t have to live up to expectations. You can always surprise people.’

  ‘I suppose you did.’

  ‘And I’m very happy. A foreign wife has its advantages.’

  ‘Oh, Sidney, don’t tempt me.’

  Over the next few days the temperature dropped, the wind gusted in fits, the rain set about the city, and the waters of the Arno steadily began to rise. The tour party visited the Michelangelo sculptures in the Medici Chapel, the Fra Angelico murals in San Marco, and climbed the four hundred and sixty-three steps into Brunelleschi’s great cathedral dome, holding on to the handrails as staircase after staircase, their treads worn down at the centre by the footsteps of visitors over the centuries, opened up before them.

  ‘When will we get there?’ Anna asked, even though Sidney was carrying her up through the narrow passageways. ‘I’m frightened.’

  They passed chambers full of old statuary, angels and medallions. They listened to the wind, looked out through the roundels in the drum that showed they were already higher than the rooftops, and finally emerged beneath the lantern to see the city stretch out before them: Giotto’s bell tower, the church of San Lorenzo with its similar dome, the Bargello, the Badia Fiorentina, and Santa Croce.

  It was midday. The rain and wind picked up as church bells rang throughout the city and the family sheltered inside before the descent. Sidney reflected on the fact that they had found protection so close to danger; that at one moment a man could be inside, shielded from the elements, with half an orb of heaven above him; and yet, within a few paces, he could be on the precipice of suicide or murder.