The Raphael Affair Read Online Free PDF Page B

appropriate attention as Byrnes himself ran through the now well-known story of how the painting was discovered; long forgotten in the little church in central Rome, and covered by another painting as a result of one of the greatest artistic fraud attempts of all time. Byrnes did a competent job of it, but was far from coming across as the archetype of the smooth art dealer. A small, timid-looking man with horn-rimmed spectacles and a bald head which ducked and bobbed nervously as he spoke, he was not at all like most people’s image of an international aesthete.
    Nor, to Flavia in the fifteenth row on the right, did he look like the Machiavellian beast of Jonathan Argyll’s evidently fevered imagination. She was there largely out of curiosity; the presentation having come during one of her visits to London for informal discussions with the London art squad.
    Flavia had gently asked her opposite number inLondon to organise an invitation. The squad was out in force to guard the picture, and Byrnes could hardly refuse them. So she sat and listened to him making his concluding remarks. Then he introduced Professor Julian Henderson, doyen of Renaissance studies, who gave a brief lecture. The picture, he told them, in an eminently polished delivery, was, without doubt, Raphael’s masterpiece; the apogee of the Humanist ideal of feminine beauty.
    The lecture hall was not one that the journalists in the audience were used to, but they listened politely, and the photographers got on with their business. Henderson concluded by comparing the picture to other portraits by Raphael, and suggesting that the evidence now indicated that Elisabetta had been the model for the portrait of Sappho in the mural of Parnassus in the Vatican. The new work that the discovery would engender was enough to keep historians of the Italian High Renaissance in business for years.
    Amid minor laughter and light applause he sat down and Byrnes moved towards the picture.
    Flavia was beginning to find the showbiz style of the meeting a little wearisome, and was glad that Byrnes avoided any excessive display in the final stages. Not that it was needed; the audience’s sense of anticipation needed no further stimulation. With only a minor flourish, the cover was gently removed, and there was a quiet gasp as the onlookers, and the cameras, focused on what had become one of the most famous paintings in the world.
    Because of the incessant coverage it had received inthe last few months, almost everyone had some idea what the portrait looked like. Seeing it in the flesh was nonetheless exhilarating. It was a beautiful painting of a very beautiful woman. From her position, Flavia could not see very well, but it seemed to be a bust length with the head turned slightly to the right. Fair hair was gathered loosely at the back of the head so that the left ear was partly covered. The left hand reached up to touch a necklace, and the subject was dressed in a close-fitting dress of a gorgeously rich red. The background was conventional, but excellently produced. The sitter – lean and with none of the fleshy appearance that made many of Raphael’s Madonnas look just a little overweight – was in a room. In the left background was a window giving out to a wooded hill, on the right, wall hangings, a table and some ornaments. The organisation of the figure itself radiated an air of remarkable tranquillity, with just a hint of the sensuality that the painter so often brought out.
    But she was most struck by the reaction from the audience. They were not admiring the delicacy of the brush strokes, the masterly application of shading or the subtleties of the composition, that was certain. They were ogling. Not a usual reaction for connoisseurs. She herself was caught up in the enthusiasm. The picture, both in its history and subject, was extraordinarily romantic. This most beautiful woman, nearly half a millennium old, had been lost for nearly three hundred years. It could