The Lost Painting Read Online Free PDF Page B

first page of the article, in a footnote, the German had thanked Her Excellency Principessa Donna Giulia Antici-Mattei for having “so generously made available” the family archive in the town of Recanati.
    Recanati was a small and ancient hill town, little more than a village, located on the Adriatic coast, in the region known as Le Marche. Laura had called the Department of Culture for Le Marche, but no one there knew about a Mattei archive. She’d also called the city hall in Recanati, and gotten the same answer. Then they had tried to find the German scholar, but they’d had no luck. They didn’t even know if she was still alive.
    Correale pondered this. They could, of course, just go to Recanati and ask around, he suggested. It was small enough that they might find somebody who would know about an archive.
    Francesca and Laura had considered doing that. But there was no guarantee that the archive was still there. The German had seen it, but that had been more than two decades ago. And getting to Recanati was not easy. There were no direct trains, and by car it was a trip of many hours across the Apennine Mountains.
    A T HOME ONE MORNING, F RANCESCA DID SOMETHING BOTH OBVI ousand ingenious. She got out the Rome telephone book and looked up the name Mattei. The listings filled four pages. She ran her finger down the columns, looking for Giulia Antici-Mattei, and stopped at a listing for Guido Antici-Mattei.
    A woman, elderly by the sound of her voice, answered the telephone.
    Francesca asked if she could speak to the prince, Guido Mattei.
    The woman gasped. Francesca imagined her hand fluttering to her chest. The prince had been dead for forty years, said the woman. She was his daughter, the Marchesa, Annamaria Antici-Mattei.
    Amazing, thought Francesca. After forty years the family had not changed the telephone listing. Francesca expressed her regrets, apologized for her intrusion, and then said she was looking for the Mattei archive. Did the Marchesa know by chance anything about it?
    The old lady was immediately suspicious. “Who are you?” she asked.
    Francesca explained that she and a colleague were doing research on a painting by Caravaggio, a painting that the Mattei family had once owned.
    The Marchesa spoke dismissively. “A German woman visited the archives some years ago. She wrote an article that contains everything. And another German has also come there, doing some research. You won’t find anything new. The Germans already did everything.”
    Yes, replied Francesca, she had read the article. But perhaps there was something more in the archive that the Germans had overlooked, especially concerning this one painting. Would it be possible to visit the archive, just briefly?
    “No, no, no,” said the Marchesa, her voice querulous and high-pitched. “Impossible, completely impossible. It is all in Recanati, too far away. And I would have to be present, you understand. I cannot let just anyone rummage around among those papers. And besides, the Germans have already seen everything.”
    And with that the Marchesa said a firm good-bye.
    Francesca felt the sort of frustration a child might feel peering through a store window at a coveted doll. The Mattei archive, unlike the Doria Pamphili, was virgin territory, explored only by a couple of scholars, and many years ago at that. It was precisely the sort of place where she and Laura might have a real chance of finding something original and important.
    That evening Francesca called Laura and recounted her conversation with the old lady. Laura, of course, favored the direct, blunt approach. They should call the Marchesa back. They should implore her to let them see the archive.
    “It’s no use,” said Francesca. “The woman has made up her mind. Calling her again won’t change that. It will just annoy her.”
    They had no choice, it seemed, but to go back to the libraries and through the motions of research, citing documents by other historians, who had