Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the book The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr (@2005 by Jonathan Harr).

The St. John is a painting by seventeenth-century Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. At the time of the examinations, the Doria St. John version belonged to the Doria Pamphili Gallery in Rome, and the Capitoline St. John version belonged to the Capitoline Museum in Rome.

Close up, Francesca Cappelletti could see the damage caused to the Doria St. John by time. Over its entire surface the picture had lost many tiny particles of paint, mere pinpricks—puntinature, Paola Sannucci, the restorer, called them—not discernible from a normal viewing distance. These particles had fallen at nearly regular intervals, at the intersections where the threads of the canvas, the warp and the weft, crossed each other and formed small nodules. The canvas had been cheap, made of poor-quality hemp and carelessly woven. Still, Caravaggio might have used just such a canvas. He had once painted a picture on a bedsheet. Another time, after he’d left the Mattei palazzo and was living alone in a small house off the Via della Scrofa, he had spread a half-finished canvas on a kitchen table and dined off the back of it.

The earlier examination of the Capitoline St. John had revealed it to be in much better shape than the Doria, in large part because the Capitoline canvas was of higher quality, more tightly woven with linen threads of uniform diameter.

The technical examination lasted the entire day, and for long periods Francesca had nothing to do but observe. The portable X-ray machine could capture only a small portion of the painting, and the technicians had to keep repositioning the machine, sixteen times in all, to get a composite of the entire picture. Francesca wandered in and out of the room and tried to dream up an excuse for leaving early.

Giampaolo Correale had a particular interest—an obsession, one could call it—with finding incised lines in Caravaggio’s paintings. Few other Baroque painters had made these types of lines, scored with the butt end of a brush into the wet undercoat, and no one had made them in quite the same way as Caravaggio. He painted from life, from models sitting before him, and most art historians believed that he didn’t make preliminary drawings. In this, he had departed from a long-established tradition by which painters made detailed studies before applying brush to canvas. The scored lines, it was surmised, had served as a guide for positioning his models. In the finished paintings, the lines were sometimes visible to the naked eye, usually at a certain angle, in a raking light. Not every one of his paintings revealed signs of these marks. But to Caravaggio experts, their presence was almost as good as the artist’s signature.

Two weeks earlier, during the examination of the Capitoline St. John, Correale had hoped to find incised lines, and thus add to the proof that it was Caravaggio’s original. He and Paola Sannucci and the technicians had scrutinized every inch of the painting, but in the end they had not found a scoring mark. True, there were a few faint ridges on the borders of the boy’s figure, and for a while Correale maintained that these could be scoring marks, but everyone else interpreted them merely as brushstrokes in wet paint, places where Caravaggio had defined the boy’s flesh against the dark background.

But evidence of a different kind had emerged from beneath the surface of the Capitoline version, and it seemed to confirm the painting’s authenticity. The X rays and the infrared images had revealed a ghostly image—a pentimento—at the precise point where the boy’s arm and the curved horn of the ram intersected. The artist had painted the arm first, and then had painted the ram’s horn over the finished arm. This constituted a clear sign that the painting was the authentic one. A copyist, following the outlines of an original painting, would not have bothered to paint the arm and then paint the horn over it. The infrared images also revealed other pentimenti, in the folds and drapery of the red and white cloths, and in the foliage in the dark background. These were false starts and adjustments that no copyist would have needed to make.

So Correale had come to accept the Capitoline as the original even before the technical examination of the Doria version. All the same, the paintings were so strikingly similar—the outline of one placed atop the other matched in almost every contour—that it seemed necessary to examine the Doria picture as fully as the Capitoline. But how, Correale wondered, could anyone make such a near perfect copy?

This question interested Francesca, too. She thought of all the copies art historian Roberto Longhi had found of Caravaggio’s lost Taking of Christ. None of them had been good enough for Longhi to mistake for the original. Yet the Doria St. John had fooled him completely.