Quattrocento Read online

  Sally stepped forward, trying to gain a sense of the true dimensions of the room, and then turned in a slow circle. The imaginary latticework doors of the cabinets had been left ajar, affording tantalizing glimpses of shelves crammed with the everyday life of the Quattrocento. Candlesticks, an inkwell, a pair of eyeglasses carefully folded and put away in their case, in the warm glow of the subdued light it was all as real as a waking dream. Books abounded, along with manuscripts, one left unrolled as though the reader had just been called away and would be back at any moment. Musical instruments were everywhere, from the delicate bodies and fretted necks of lutes and citterns to a tambourine and drum. A crescent ivory horn chased in silver hung from a hook, ready at hand for the next hunt, while for a dance, a pair of cornetti and a rebec had been left nearby. On the next shelf lay a harp, the fine thread of an errant string curling upward, while hanging beneath it a thoughtful hand had provided a tuning key, its tiny shadow just visible on the wall behind.

  One cabinet had been stocked with armor, a brutal reminder of the source of the wealth that had made the room possible. A mailed glove had been thrown carelessly on shin greaves and spurs with a mace propped up next to them, its graceful execution giving a deadly beauty to the barbs and sharp ridges of the heavy iron head. In the shadows an eagle perched on a helmet, its wings raised defiantly and its beak open in a silent snarl, a shield clutched in one taloned foot.

  Sally found a birdcage tucked inside a cabinet to one side of an alcove barely large enough for a small window. A parrot, its feathers the pale green and red of dried flowers, perched behind the delicate tracery of the bars that held it captive. She leaned in for a closer look.

  “Wood,” she said, and looked around the room, astounded. “This isn’t painted. It’s all wood.”

  “Intarsio,” Matt said. “The Florentines were famous for it.”

  “It’s simply amazing.” She circled the room again and then turned to him. “We should go. Could you hold this for me?” she asked, handing him her coat. “I’ll be right back.”

  Matt drifted around the room, gazing at the panels, Sally’s coat draped between his clasped hands. A couple looked in the door but left, leaving him in solitary possession of the still room. The wooden paneling dampened what was left of the sounds of the reception outside, making it seem worlds away. Going from panel to panel, he ended up at the long wall across from the alcove. Staring at one side, he found the cabinets slightly distorted, as though seen out of the corner of his eye. He moved step by step toward the center of the wall, and then backed away. Finding that he had gone too far, he moved slightly in again and then stopped, transfixed by the sight. The wall vanished, the world beyond revealed as clearly as though he had thrown open a window. The shelves receded in front of him, the cabinets to each side, the inlaid shadows as real as though cast by the light from the window behind him. The books, a tour de force of marquetry before, now waited for him to pick them up, the candle to be lit, the harp to be tuned and played. Matt had found the vanishing point, the spot where all the lines of the perspective converged. He closed his eyes and then slowly opened them, enjoying the slight vertiginous rush as the wall between him and the cabinets again dissolved. The scene had been executed so perfectly that the imaginary pilasters framing the doors and the bench that ran below the cabinets seemed to extend right out into the room toward him.

  Lying on the bench directly in front of him was a checkered circle, a faceted octagon the size of a man’s head. A mazzocchio, the wooden form around which the men of the day had wrapped the material of their elaborate headdresses, Matt could see now that the builders had placed it precisely on the vertical axis of the inlaid scene. But where was the horizontal axis? It should be at eye level. He looked back up at the panel in front of him. There it was. Not the middle shelf, as he had first thought, but just under it. Suspended from a hook, centered on the horizontal axis as the mazzocchio was on the vertical, was another circle, much smaller. Made to appear as though it had been worked in cloth, the circlet was looped and buckled with a dangling tail capped by a tiny pearl that seemed to gleam translucently against the dark background.

  Of course, Matt thought; what better for the vanishing point than the symbol of the Knights of the Garter, the most elite of the honorary orders of the Renaissance? Appointed a member by King Edward IV of England, Federico had considered it the highest honor of his career. But something was wrong. Looking at the Garter Matt felt off balance, as though he were trying to look around a corner. He glanced down at the mazzocchio, and then back up at the circle of cloth. There was the same sideways tug. The Garter was out of true. How could it be? The builders of the room, masters though they had been, had misplaced the focal point of the entire wall. Or had they? He leaned closer, like someone trying to make out the bottom through the surface of a pond. There was something else, something on the wall behind the Garter. An echo of the cloth circle, its shadow could just be seen, black against the dark under the shelf. The shadow was the true vanishing point. But was it even a shadow? Staring at it, now that he saw it, he wasn’t sure.

  It stood out from the wall, sharply etched, the Garter next to it now the double image, a new moon and a full, both rising. He looked from one to the other, seeing both at the same time. Light and shadow, circling, almost merging, one black, one light, patterns against the shadows, black and white, squares—the mazzocchio. Odd, he thought, he had been looking at the Garter, but here now was the mazzocchio. The black and white squares mapped the circle, echoed in its own shadow on the bench. There was a bench, and on it a mazzocchio, and on the wall, behind the wall, inside the cabinet, hanging from a hook was a Garter, he could see it; with a pearl and a silver buckle and there was the shadow, black and sharp, looking back at him, regarding him with a steady, unblinking gaze.

  He remembered once sitting by a window, waiting for his train to move, his gaze on the cars next to his, also motionless, squares of light against the black night, people reading, talking, staring into space, one looking back across at him. His thoughts elsewhere, he had noticed that the other train had begun to move, only to discover that his was the one that was drawing away, the bright squares vanishing behind as his train swayed and bumped, picking up speed, the flashes of light faster and faster, like the sun sparkling through the canopy of trees high overhead. Shadows and light, a raised sword, a harsh laugh changing into a deep discordant howl, like a wolf—

  “Ready?” Sally walked back in. “Matt,” she said, taking him by the arm.

  Matt, tense and rigid, relaxed. He looked at her. “What is it?” he asked.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Something’s bothering you. What is it?”

  “Nothing. It’s just a dream I’ve been having.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “The usual thing. You’re running and you can’t get away.”

  “We both need to get away. I can’t wait for June. It will be here before we know it.”

  chapter 3

  Leaning against a gust of cold rain, Matt and Sally dashed the short distance from the curb into the quiet lobby of Charles’s apartment house. As they waited for the elevator Matt shook out the umbrella, still soaked from their long search for a cab outside the museum.

  “Are we going to see Gubbio?” Sally asked, combing the tangles out of her hair as she examined her reflection in the brass doors.

  “I hope so,” Matt said. “It’s not far from Assisi, and June would be a lovely time to be there. There’s no art worth seeing, but you’ll love the town. Most of it’s medieval,” he added, following her into the small car. He pressed the button for Charles’s floor. “All stone and narrow winding alleys, and above it on the hillside the palazzo where the studiolo came from. There’s an old Roman amphitheater outside the town that’s one of the best preserved in all of Italy,” he added, thinking of the last time he had been there. He had wakened before dawn one early morning from a vivid dream
. Unable to get back to sleep, he had decided to do what he had been thinking of for the past week, to climb up to the hillside above the town and watch the sun rise over the valley. It had been a cool night, and with the rising mist the old city and the ancient amphitheater would be a sight that he would remember forever; it was why he was there, he told himself. He had second thoughts, though, stepping from the warm house into the damp cold. The ancient cobblestone alleys, slick underfoot, disappeared in the impenetrable black, uninviting and vaguely threatening. But dark as it still was, there was the indefinable feeling in the air that morning had begun, so he had set off to find his way out of town.

  Once walking, he began to enjoy the stillness of the early morning, fresh with the scent of the wet stone and the poplars by the river that cascaded down a narrow ravine through the town. He was well up the hillside with the houses barely taking form against the blackness when he heard the sound of hooves coming down toward him, echoing off the stones of the alley and the silent houses. Soon an old peasant appeared out of the shadows leading a donkey laden with packs. The donkey had his head down, and the old man never looked at him as he passed, but riding on top and holding on with both hands as if he were on the largest elephant in the world was a little boy. He gave Matt an enormous smile. Matt hadn’t looked back to watch them go after they had passed, feeling that it would have been a betrayal. He had gone on, and as he left the town behind, the sun had greeted him, the warmth flooding through him as he climbed the steep hillside, winding along a path through rugged olive trees and grass, yellow, with delicate wildflowers that he couldn’t identify. The mist lay in the valley below, obscuring the old Roman ruins and the town, any sign of human presence, and he had felt a wonderful freedom, walking in the brilliant sunshine of the early morning.

  “Medieval?” Sally asked. “Do they have indoor plumbing?”

  “Don’t worry,” Matt said. “They even have television in the rooms. But, still, that’s the sense you get of the whole area, that it hasn’t really changed since Roman times. They still hunt wild boar up around there. I saw a wolf, once, when I was hiking in the hills above the town. When I got back to the hotel and told them, they said that wasn’t unusual.”

  “Maybe not for them. No, thank you. I don’t care how cute people think they are, to me they just look hungry.”

  When they reached the apartment Matt recognized the woman who opened the door, but couldn’t place her. At first envious of the wide circle of friends and acquaintances that Charles had acquired, he now wondered where he found the stamina, much less the time, to keep up with them all.

  A glass of wine in her free hand, the woman waved them in. “There’s no food yet,” she said, “but corks are flying. You haven’t seen our host, have you?”

  “He’s doing some last-minute donor stroking,” Sally replied. “He said he’d be here soon.”

  The apartment was comfortably crowded. In the kitchen, bustling with activity, all the burners on the stove were being used and the door to the refrigerator was opened again as soon as it was shut. Dishes clattered, a cork popped, everyone and no one was in charge.

  “Here, Renaissance man,” a thin woman with short blond hair and bony wrists said to Matt, handing him a flute with bubbles cascading down the stem. She wore a black jacket with its sleeves turned up, rayon shimmering blue and green in the bright kitchen lights. “You look like you could use this.” She began to fill another, cupping the glass in the palm of her manicured hand. She stopped pouring just as the bubbles surged to the rim, and then smiled as they ran over and down the side. “And for you,” she added, handing it to Sally.

  “I’m Sally,” she said, taking the glass.

  “Karen,” the woman replied, watching the wine as she filled another glass, this one for herself.

  “So how are things at the gallery?” Matt asked. He had last seen Karen at the opening of a show that she and Kent had collaborated on a few months before. The artist, a Buddhist from Los Angeles who divided his time between Fez and New Mexico, had achieved a certain renown by arranging wood in circles on the floor. Kent, with some sharpness, had corrected Matt when he had referred to it as firewood. That was not what it was at all. In a heuristic sense, perhaps, since it called upon the communal memory of fire that is within all of us, but the installation was about displacement. The artist had lived with the Pueblo Indians, who as Matt knew—yes?—had left their art outdoors, not so much exposed to nature as in recognition that it was a part of it, inseparable, and that its transience as a discrete object was illusory in the greater context of permanence. It was all about what was there before and what would be there afterward. It was about eighty grand, Matt remarked, reading from the list he had picked up. The artist supervises the installation, Kent told him, adding that it had been acquired by the Whitney.

  “We’ve got a group show opening in a week,” Karen replied. “Recent work of the Chicago women’s cooperative. I’ll send you an invitation. Aren’t they beautiful?” she asked, studying the thread of bubbles floating upward as she held her glass against the light. “Like a waterfall to the sky. The laws of gravity have been repealed.”

  There was a loud round of laughter from the living room, a voice rising above the others, and then Kent appeared around the corner. He slipped through the crowd, a gazelle leaping through tall grass. “All this food,” he exclaimed, reaching Karen and giving her a kiss on the cheek. “Hello, Matt,” he said, “Sally.” He took the glass that Karen had filled for him. “Really, Karen,” he said, transferring the glass to his other hand and shaking the sparkling wine from his fingers, “this drip thing is cute, but it’s been done. Jackson Pollock, anyone? Does the name ring a bell? Alton, take this.” He passed the glass to the young man who had followed him through the crowd and now stood by his side. His skin dark enough so that his short dreadlocks didn’t seem affected, Alton still had a reassuringly prep school air. Dealer and artist, they were like a place setting in a museum gift shop—a knife and a fork, stylish and readily identifiable. Alton eyed the platter of penne with basil and olives on the counter next to him. “Man, I’m hungry,” he said, with the faintest trace of an English accent. “I haven’t eaten all day.”

  “Eat?” Kent asked. “What would you want to eat for? All it does is fill you up.”

  Karen, laughing, steadied herself with one hand on Matt’s shoulder and the other holding her glass away so that it wouldn’t spill on her.

  “Food is so inefficient,” Kent continued. “What do cars run on? Or airplanes? Liquid is the way to go. Solid food just slows you down.”

  “Rockets use solid fuel,” Sally said.

  “Yes, but they’re going to outer space,” Kent returned. “What’s that all about? That’s like moving to the suburbs. Start eating solid food and next thing you know you’ll be in Scarsdale in a split-level. Mowing the lawn and spending Saturday mornings in a station wagon on Route One.”

  “There’s Charles at last,” Matt said.

  Seeing him at the same time, the crowd in the kitchen broke into applause and loud cheers. Charles flushed and waved them down. “Food,” he said. “Let’s focus on what matters.” He came up to the group and took the glass Karen offered him.

  “So was it an enormous hit?” Kent asked.

  “Whatever it was, at least it’s done,” he replied, and drained his glass. “È finito.”

  “I love it, Charles,” Karen said, refilling his glass. “I’m going to do one for the gallery.”

  “A studiolo?” Charles asked.

  “Yes. When you showed it to me a few weeks ago, I started thinking. About what we have and what we don’t have. Every home used to have a room like that. I mean, not like that one, of course, but you know what I mean. They called it the library. My grandfather’s house, that’s what it made me think of, with the wood paneling and the books, how quiet it was. And that’s the thing. What happened? TVs and record players, and then VCRs and computers and CDs and play stations. Media centers. And no
w DVD and broadband and streaming. But the Zen. No Zen. That’s what we’ve lost.”

  “Zen is key,” Alton said, heaping penne onto a paper plate.

  “It’s key,” Karen said. “Think interior space for a new millennium. The studiolo.”

  “No one could afford anything like that these days, not even a cyber baron,” Charles protested. “They might have the money, but who would have the patience? It took ten years to build that room.”

  “Old thinking, Charles. New millennium. Wood is cute, but is it now? I think not. It’s not about the walls, anyway. It is but it isn’t. The continuum, yes, but inside the mind. That’s what we need to key on.”

  “We?” Charles asked.

  “Alton, tell him what we’ve come up with.”

  “Alton, this is Charles,” Kent said.

  “Hi,” Charles said.

  Alton lifted his plate in acknowledgment of the greeting. “Pretty simple, really. What you see is what you get. It’s inside your head, it’s on the walls. Colors, patterns, but also images. From a data bank. Anything you want—old photos, film clips, whatever.”

  Charles laughed. He looked at Karen and then at Kent. “You’re not serious,” he said.

  “It’s going to be huge,” Karen replied. “Huge.”

  “I think it here and it shows up there?” Charles said, gesturing at his head and then the wall with his glass. “That’s impossible.”

  “Technology’s all there,” Alton said with a shrug.

  “So’s the software,” Kent added. “Alton did this at the New School a year ago. That’s how I met him.”

  Charles gave Alton a more appraising glance. “A year ago.”