Calvesi nibbled thoughtfully on the stem of his eyeglasses before answering. “I took her under my wing when she arrived, and she made an extraordinary amount of progress.”
Gabriel decided to add a touch of false flattery to his fiction. “I’m not surprised, Antonio. I learned a great deal from you.”
“If memory serves, you rejected every suggestion I ever gave you. As for Signorina Radcliff, she was a far more receptive student. So much so that I agreed to let her carry out a restoration of her own.”
“On what?”
“A painting, Gabriel. What else?”
“Not a painting from the main collection?”
“Goodness, no. We found something down in the storerooms for her to work on. A Madonna and Child with John the Baptist.”
“Italian?”
“Florentine School.”
“Support?”
“Walnut panel.”
“Unusual for Florence,” Gabriel pointed out.
“Quite.”
“And the attribution?”
Calvesi gave a noncommittal shrug. “Manner of Raphael.”
It was one of the weakest of all possible attributions, implying that the work had been made in the style of a prominent artist sometime after the artist had passed from the scene. In the case of Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, that would have been in 1520.
“When was it painted?”
“Probably sometime in the eighteenth century.”
Two centuries after Raphael’s death. “Probably?” asked Gabriel.
“The provenance is rather thin. In fact, we’re not quite certain how the painting even ended up in the papal collection. If it were put up for auction in London, it would be lucky to fetch a thousand pounds.”
“Which made it the perfect picture for a novice conservator to take out for a test drive.”
“With me sitting in the passenger seat,” added Calvesi.
“How did it go?”
“After successfully calibrating the strength of her solvent, she began to remove the dirty varnish. That was when she discovered the pentimento.”
Pentimento was the reappearance of imagery or discarded material that the artist had painted over—a different version of a hand, for example.
“Was the pentimento from the Madonna and Child?”
“We thought so until we examined it with infrared.”
“And?”
“It was an entirely different painting. And a rather good one at that.”
“How good?”
