The Fallen Angel

TWO

Costa flashed his police ID and was allowed to park the battered Vespa in a staff area next to the patio of the imposing marble palace on the hill, though not without a few raised eyebrows from the security officers at the gate. They entered through the porticoed entrance and marched up Borromini’s winding helicoidal staircase into the stately residence of the Barberini. He followed the girl as she strode through the vast halls and glittering corridors of a palazzo with which she was clearly familiar. In Rome it was impossible not to stumble over an unexpected nexus in places like this, some snaking, unforeseen connection between events that were, on the surface, unrelated. The most famous member of the Barberini family was Maffeo, Urban VIII, the very Pope who had forced Galileo to recant his beliefs on pain of death. He was a despot, pillaging Rome for his own purposes, removing the precious bronze girders from the portico of the Pantheon in order to make cannons for his army. Knowledgeable Romans still muttered a cynical Latin saying that had been repeated in the city for nearly four centuries: quod non fecerunt barbari, fecerunt Barberini. What the barbarians didn’t do, the Barberini did. The clan was now extinct. It was ironic that their principal legacy in Rome was a palazzo famed for its rich art collection gathered by others, with Raphael’s supposed mistress La Fornarina and Holbein’s portrait of Henry VIII among its treasures.

Mina walked as if he wasn’t there, heading straight for the early seventeenth-century portraits. It all came back. Guercino’s St Matthew and the Angel. The Flagellation of Christ. A minutely detailed Annibale Carracci wooden altarpiece. And behind, high on the wall, with some other, lesser works, the face he’d come to recognize as the girl who died on the scaffold in front of the Ponte Sant’Angelo.

She was as he remembered, a solitary figure mainly in white, set against shadow, staring back at her audience over a shoulder wrapped in pale material like a shroud, her face luminous, sad, dark eyes intent on the viewer, unyielding. Over the centuries this image had become Beatrice Cenci, for the public, for an army of poets and writers and artists. These features had come to sum up the very essence of the young woman’s character: defiant yet submissive to her fate, an innocent forced to resort to the ultimate sin in order to defend her own dignity and independence.

Just then he glanced at Mina. The resemblance between her and the portrait was, he now saw, fleeting, more a matter of a look, an expression, an attitude. Yet there was a connection between them, a bond visible in the way this modern girl’s eyes were fixed on the painting with an avid intent so heated that Costa wanted to walk straight out of the room, out into the scorching, sunny day and forget everything he knew about the Cenci, their prison in the ghetto, the terrible family intrigue which had led to Beatrice’s tragedy.

‘You see what they’ve done?’ Mina asked, dragging him back to earth. ‘They hide her up there, so you can’t see her eyes, her pain and how she forgives them too. All of them. So they make you stand back, hoping you won’t see the truth. When Shelley was here. .’ He caught sight of her hands. Her delicate long fingers were balling into tense, angry fists. ‘That picture wasn’t high on the wall like that. He could look her straight in the face. Read the books. He was allowed to see. It’s as if they’re still ashamed. Four hundred years later.’

‘The Barberini has a lot of paintings to show,’ Costa said, and that was true.

She was chewing gum like any other teenager, thinking, looking like any other teenager. There was a music player and a set of cheap headphones poking out of her jeans pocket. She squinted at the canvas and said, ‘Thanks for reminding me.’

Then she dragged him by the arm back into the room they’d just passed quickly through, and he knew exactly what they were going to see, understood that she had made the very link that had occurred to him some fifteen years or so before, when he was around the same age, mooching in these great chambers, staring at the dead faces on the walls.

Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes was a canvas on a different and darker scale. A large painting, it occupied much of its wall in the adjoining hall, tenebrous and violent, screaming to be seen, to be witnessed. It depicted the young woman, Judith, in a virginal white smock as she decapitated the naked Holofernes, the warrior she had seduced in order to save her city from destruction. The savage, shining blade had hacked through most of the screaming man’s neck as she grasped his hair, pulling, holding tightly. Bone and tissue were visible. Blood flowed freely onto the crumpled sheets beneath him. By Judith’s side stood a servant, a cloth bag in her hands, ready to seize the severed head and return it to the city, proof its tyrannical besieger was dead.

Mina stared at the work, a thoughtful finger to her lips.

‘This was painted the year, maybe the year after, Beatrice was executed. When she died, all of Rome was there. Caravaggio must have been among them.’ She waited, watching him. ‘You don’t sound surprised.’

‘He wouldn’t have missed it for anything,’ Costa said quietly.

She hesitated for a moment, her expression quite impenetrable, then asked, ‘So is this a version of what he saw? The death of Beatrice painted through some kind of mirror? I don’t mean the physical details. They’re unimportant. Look at Judith’s face.’

He saw what he always did when he came into this room. A woman forced to commit a terrible act out of duty, not desire. There was shock, regret, even shame in her pained features, which were not dissimilar to those of Beatrice Cenci in the adjoining room.

‘What do you want me to see?’ he asked.

‘That she’s sorry! Holofernes was the general sent to wipe out her people. By killing him she saved them. Why would she pity him?’

‘Because in the classical tradition a woman was thought to be more compassionate, gentler, more merciful than the man.’

‘Weaker, you mean?’ Mina muttered. She glanced back to the portraiture room and repeated her question. ‘What do you think? Is this her too?’

‘I think that, without Beatrice’s execution, Caravaggio wouldn’t have painted this Judith. That the two are linked. One dependent on the other.’

‘Action, reaction,’ she said in a low, unemotional tone.

‘Precisely.’

The girl said nothing. She walked out of the room, and Costa followed.