The Monster of Florence Read Online Free PDF Page A

cleaned it up that first time as best he could and carried on and I waited until he’d put in plenty of work on it before it hit the dust again! That time I couldn’t resist going over to him. I suggested that the easel was defective and offered him mine. The silly fool accepted it and
thanked
me. Doesn’t that show how idiotic people are? He should have suspected at once. What reason had I to help him? And a half-witted fool like that sets himself up in judgement on me! You can’t imagine how much I wanted to tell him the truth but I didn’t. I left him looking ruefully at his painting which was ruined beyond hope and I went and sat down.”
    The Marshal wished he could do the same. It must be late because he was beginning to feel not only tired but quite hungry. Above Benozzetti’s finely tailored shoulder the eyes of the handsome young man in the portrait gazed down at him calmly. If he’d known his portrait was going to give rise to all this fury he would surely have been as baffled as the Marshal. What was the fellow going on about now?
    “And
you
think I’m talking purely about content but you’re wrong. You’re wrong because the value, the
true
value of the content can be judged by the materials used. A cathedral is built of stone and marble and seasoned wood but you can knock up a garage or a tool shed from corrugated tin—well, you wouldn’t use marble, would you? And why? Because the idea, the content, as it were, has no intrinsic value
and it doesn’t need to last
! Worthless materials for a worthless idea!”
    The finger wagging in front of the Marshal’s nose was suddenly whisked away. Benozzetti was reaching for a huge tome from a nearby bookshelf and searching through it for something. The Marshal looked at his familiar friend in the painting and murmured under his breath, “It’s a funny business even so …”
    It was still bothering him. There was no getting away from the fact that the distance at which the painting stopped being all blobs and strokes and became clear as a photograph was one big stridemore than it had always been before. Would there be any harm in asking? Why should there be? It might start another avalanche, of course, and he’d probably be unable to follow the answer but—
    “Look. Here. And here.”
    There were drawings he was being shown now, a whole page of them. Hands, all of them.
    “Let me tell you something about this ink.”
    “I—do you mind if I ask you something? I don’t like interrupting what you were saying about the ink and so on, but it’s about this painting …”
    “What about it?”
    “Well, there’s something different about it and I thought you wouldn’t object to explaining it to me since you know such a lot. It’s something that’s always fascinated me—in fact, I remember I once asked Dr. Biondini about it and he did try to explain about it being something that happens in your brain, an illusion you create yourself, he said, only I can never understand why there isn’t a distance where you can see it happen. Do you know what I mean? It’s either the blobs or the perfect picture and you can never see it happen. I’m probably not explaining myself very well but, anyway, what I can’t understand about this painting is why it happens at four strides away instead of three, like it always is with Titian—or like it always is with me … of course the light’s different here, could that be the reason?”
    He turned to Benozzetti and waited. What had he done? What was the matter with the man? His face was red but under the Marshal’s gaze it drained itself of colour. The snake’s eyes darted from the painting to the Marshal and back again. All he said was, “Biondini?”
    “That’s right. He’s the curator of the Palatine Gallery. He knows a lot about Titian.”
    “Yes? And you. Marshal? What do you know a lot about?”
    The voice was icy. He was reaching up for the cloth at the top of the easel.
    “Me? Nothing. I mean I