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with the narrow chisel. Bianca came almost every day. There was no need for her to come so often but she did. She would put on the vesti di madonna . Sometimes she brought things, Trebbiano wine, galantined meat, red musk melons from the Litto Maggior, almonds coated with sugar. Once a big basket of cherries. She would sweep up the room, bring a wet cloth for my face. Often she sang as she moved about. All that time she must have been frightened. They took me to see her drowned body, I saw the marks of the cord. I would not have hurt her, I needed her for my model. She

Restoration 1
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    The Lower Draperies

1
    SOME FEELING OF superstition prevented him from looking up at the Madonna as he approached, as if it might be unlucky to have a premature view of her. Even mounting the narrow ladder he did not look up, not until there were only three or four rungs left and his eyes were level with her knees. Here for a moment or two he stopped, obliging Steadman to stop also and below Steadman Signor Biagi, the contractor whose men had put up the scaffolding. These two stood on the middle rungs of the ladder, flapping slightly in the March breeze, while Raikes gazed up at the statue.
    Everything that was known about her he knew; nevertheless her appearance at these close quarters came as a strong surprise, almost a shock. She was imposing, of course, even awesome, seen thus from below, but it was not mainly this, nor the appalling damage to her, the bemonstering accretions of time and chemical pollution – these he had expected from his study of the photographs: what he had not been prepared for was her unprotectedness, the licence of the air around her, something none of the photographs had conveyed. She stood clear of the façade, as subject to weather as any rock on the shore, but in a way that her human image made seem stoical, and which Raikes found unexpectedly moving. It was as if her disfigurement too, the blackened, blinded face, the crusted robes, were part of this patience and endurance.
    Becoming aware of the men waiting below him, with their own brand of patience and endurance, he started climbing again, leaving the ladder at last to set his feet on the wooden platform, no more than five feet square, bolted firmly to its scaffolding poles against the wall, too close, Raikes noted, too zealously flush with the façade – the boards had skimmed the brick, scraping a band of fresher pink. No point in mentioning it now of course: Biagi was a key figure in the enterprise and had to be kept well disposed.
    By now the others had climbed up on to the platform beside him. ‘Well, here she is,’ he said to Steadman. ‘Isn’t she terrific?’
    Steadman nodded with his usual gloomy sagacity and after a moment said, ‘Poor bloody cow, she’s had a pasting.’
    The deliberate impiety of this and the flat, non-committal tone irritated Raikes, seeming to accuse him of emotionalism. He had known Steadman for some years now but it continued to strike him as extraordinary that a man who at thirty-one – two years younger than himself – was an authority on Venetian Gothic should go on affecting this hard-boiled manner. You’ll be talking out of the corner of your mouth next, he felt like saying, almost said.
    He kept his eyes on the Madonna. Her face with its badger stripe of bleach was averted, glancing away across the rooftops to the pale rim of the Lagoon; but her body was inclined towards him, right arm laid across the breast, left held low and slightly extended inwards, as if to ward off some threat. She had turned her body, though not her eyes, from the vehement archangel who had come to her with the news. Gabriel would have been on the other side, presumably – one of the several mysteries about her was that her Gabriel was not known to exist anywhere. ‘I hadn’t realized’, he said, ‘how far her trunk turns from the plane. Unusual for the period.’
    The judicious tone of this had been intended as a rebuke, but he