Black Cat Weekly #18

REDISCOVERY, by James Holding-2

“What clues?” Carter snapped.

“Two almost infinitesimal imperfections in the folds of the Christ Child’s garment, imperfections which I have always assumed were caused when the bronze did not completely follow the mold during the statuette’s casting.”

“If not casting imperfections, what were they?”

“They were skillfully applied patches of bronze, artfully discolored and antiqued to match the rest of the figurine. But to the discerning eye modern patches for all that.”

Carter said sarcastically, “Restoration or partial repair of masterworks is not entirely unknown.”

“Wait,” said the professor. “The location of these patches was what suddenly assumed new significance to me: one on the front of the Christ Child’s garment below the knees, the other on the Christ Child’s—ah—posterior. Do you see my point, Orville?”

Carter said nothing, only stared sourly at the professor, who continued, “Well, it instantly occurred to me, of course, that it was quite possible the patches were intended to cover scars left when some villain had brutally separated the Christ Child from another figure to which it had originally been joined.”

“Our Hercules is not necessarily that figure!” Carter protested.

“Ah, but it is! Take my glass, Orville, if you please, and examine the surface of your Hercules’ left shoulder and the inside of his left hand.”

Carter accepted the magnifying glass and did as the professor asked, already certain of what he would find. “All right,” he said ungraciously after a moment’s inspection, “there are faint marks there that could be tiny patches.” He gave the professor back his lens. ‘But you are not, I hope, trying to tell me that your artistic erudition is so nearly total that you immediately dredged up from your memory these almost undetectable marks on our Hercules to match up with the marks on the Christ Child in the Louvre? Out of thousands of sculptures?”

“No,” said Professor Ferucignano, “my artistic erudition, as you call it, led me to the much simpler conclusion that since the Christ Child was an undoubted Bellano, he had probably been separated, if separated he was, from another piece of Bellano’s sculpture—of which the Honeycutt Gallery owns an outstanding example, Orville, in this statuette which you persist in calling a Donatello Hercules.”

A docent, closely followed by a group of students, entered the Sculpture Hall and approached them. “We now come,” the lecturer was saying, “to the famous statuette of Hercules, executed in bronze by Donatello, one of the greatest masters of sculpture the Italian Renaissance produced.”

“Come back to the office,” Carter said to the professor. “We’re in the way here.”

Ferucignano assented readily. They returned to Carter’s office. Carter sat down behind his desk after waving the professor to a chair. He sighed audibly. “Did you say anything to the Louvre about this, Benny?” he asked.

“Nothing. I wanted to examine your Hercules to be sure I was right. And I thought it only fair to acquaint you with the news before the Louvre, since yours would be the greater disappointment.”

“That was decent of you, Benny. I appreciate it.”

“I did, however, in my capacity of Renaissance scholar, evince curiosity as to the provenance of the Louvre’s Christ Child, and a curator readily supplied me with the story of how they acquired it.”

“How did they?” asked Carter, lighting a cigarette with nervous fingers.

“Public auction in 1935,” said the professor, “in the sales rooms of a respected French firm, Garbeau Freres.”

“How much did the Louvre pay for it?”

“One hundred and sixty thousand francs...somewhere around forty thousand dollars in those days.”

Carter groaned. “We paid ten times that for our—” he hesitated “—St. Christopher.”

Ferucignano nodded. “Of course. You thought you were getting a Donatello.”

“Did the Louvre s records show who owned their Bellano Christ Child before they acquired it?”

“An antique dealer in Ferrara named Giuseppi Bruno, who brought the figurine to Gabreau Freres himself, having smuggled it out of Italy.”

“Bruno,” Carter said. “Then Bruno must have been your villain who separated the Louvre’s Christ Child from our St. Christopher? What a barbarous, uncivilized thing to do!”

“Barbarous, yes,” said the professor, “and profitable as well, if Bruno was responsible for making two sculptures out of one, and selling them separately at high prices. If, I say. Because the separation could have taken place any time within the last century, you know, judging from the condition of the bronze patches we’ve just seen.”

“Where did Bruno get the Christ Child in the first place? Antique dealers in Ferrara don’t carry priceless Bellanos and Donatellos in stock, you know that!”

“The story the Louvre gave me is this, Orville. Bruno, along with other antique dealers, was asked to bid on the contents of an old D’Este House of Grace and Favor when the last owner died without issue. He went to inspect the goods being offered and found them to consist mainly of worthless junk, as is usually the case with such houses in Italy after a long series of impecunious owners have sold off, one by one, the good pieces the family possessed. Worthless junk—except for the bronze Christ Child. Bruno speculated that generations of the family’s girl children must have used it as a doll baby, since he found it in the cellars of the house with broken toys and a child’s crib. He recognized it at once as something quite good, although he didn’t realize how good until he found the artist’s initials. He bought the whole collection of junk just to get the Christ Child. Bruno was very frank about all this when he asked Garbeau Freres to auction the piece off for him in Paris. He told them, too, that his business in Ferrara was on its last legs, and he needed money desperately to save it. As it turned out, he got the money from the Louvre, which has not for one moment regretted its bargain.”

“Didn’t they check Bruno’s story about having a shop in Ferrara?”

“Of course. He had one, all right.”

“Well, it’s a likely enough story, I guess,” Carter said. “Such lucky discoveries have happened before and they’ll happen again. I can’t help wondering though, if Bruno found the entire St. Christopher statuette in that house, and deliberately divided it into two figures.”

“It seems probable,” Ferucignano said, “although I am puzzled as to how the St. Christopher part of it turned up here in America as a Donatello. You said a few moments ago that you thought the Honeycutt had bought it from an English collector who needed money to pay his taxes. Did you buy direct from him, or was your statuette acquired at auction too?”

“I can’t remember, Benny.” Carter lifted his telephone receiver and asked his secretary to bring him the gallery’s file on the Donatello Hercules. When he said “Hercules” he glanced the professor’s way and smiled wryly.

A few minutes later, he looked up from his perusal of the documents in the Hercules file and said to the professor, “Here it is. We bought our Hercules in 1947 from Hamilton Langley, a New York art dealer.”

Ferucignano nodded. “He’s a personal friend of mine.”

“Well, Langley was acting for a collector in England who had retained him because it was thought, quite rightly, that so soon after the war the Hercules would bring a better price in America than in England or on the Continent.”

“Eleven years between the sales,” the professor said. “The Christ Child in 1935, the St. Christopher in 1946. That could shoot down our theory that Bruno found the whole statuette in Ferrara. Why such a long interval between the first sale and the next? Do your records say anything about where the English owner of the St. Christopher obtained it?”

Carter read from a document in the file. “The owner claimed to have liberated the St. Christopher statuette just after World War II, when, as an officer in the British Army, he happened across it in the rubble of a bombed-out museum storage shed in Berlin.”

“Liberated,” said the professor, “means stolen, I presume?”

“Of course.”

“From a museum storage shed? That’s odd. I never heard of any Bellano piece, or any Donatello piece, either, being displayed in a Berlin museum, did you?”

“No. But the St. Christopher was obviously a genuine Renaissance work by a great master. Anyway, in the light of what you found out at the Louvre, I think we can discount that whole story as a fairy tale.”

“Really?’ said the professor, raising his eyebrows. “I’m not quite—”

Carter cut him off peremptorily by holding out the document he had been consulting. “Take a look here, Benny,” he said, “at the name of the English collector who liberated our St. Christopher in Berlin. Second line on the page. Right there.”

Professor Ferucignano leaned forward, read the name and began to laugh. “Joseph Brown!” he chortled. “Joseph Brown. That should convince you, Orville!”

Carter capitulated gracefully. “I am convinced, Benny,” he said, “and although belatedly, I congratulate you none the less heartily on your detective work. Even I can’t miss that hefty coincidence: a Bellano St. Christopher sold to the Honeycutt Gallery of Art by a man named Joseph Brown!”

* * * *

The Christopher Case, as it came to be known, aroused only passing interest outside art circles but caused a considerable stir within them. Professor Benozzo Ferucignano, predictably, came off as the hero of the affair, having demonstrated by his brilliant detective work that he was indeed worthy of his fame.

In October, he drove to New York for his semiannual visit with his oldest American friend, Hamilton Langley, now retired. The former art dealer, in spite of his eighty years and his failing health, retained a keen interest in the doings of his former colleagues and customers.

“How does it feel, Benny,” he asked his guest as they sampled before-dinner martinis, “to be the Sherlock Holmes of the art world?”

The professor laughed. “Quite satisfying, I must admit. I received the final accolade yesterday, an engraved invitation to the private, black-tie reception at the Louvre next week, when the reunited St. Christopher and Christ Child goes on display for the first time.”

“I also am invited,” said Langley, chuckling, “as is only fitting for the man who sold the Donatello Hercules to the Honeycutt.”

“Are you planning to go? Perhaps we can go together.”

“I’m too old to fly so far now. I hope I’ll see the reassembled statuette when it comes to the Honeycutt in April. The Louvre is to have it for six months each year, the Honeycutt for the other six, isn’t that the agreement?”

“That’s it. And a surprisingly practical solution under the circumstances.”

Langley nodded. Then, looking over the edge of his martini glass at the professor, he asked curiously, “What made you do it, Benny? After all these years?”

The professor pondered. “I don’t really know.’ he said at length, “aside from the fact that I wanted to show Orville Carter that my credentials as an authority on Renaissance sculpture are bona fide. The Honeycutt is one of the few really important museums left which has never retained me as a consultant.”

“But that wasn’t the only reason, I take it?”

“I suppose not. Perhaps it was partly to satisfy my artistic conscience too, as I told Carter. The thought of such a lovely piece being deliberately broken up for commercial gain seemed more and more like sacrilege to me as I thought about it. Can you understand that?”

“Of course I can understand it.” Langley rang a silver bell to summon his houseman. “Another martini for Professor Ferucignano,” he told him, stumbling slightly over the professor’s name. When the man went out, he continued, “I can understand it only too well, Benny, because I’ve felt the same way upon occasion.” He paused to grin at the professor.

“What I can’t understand, however,” he went on, “is why a man with the simple Italian name of Giuseppi Bruno when he lived in Ferrara, and the simple English name of Joseph Brown when he lived in London, should have selected an impossible tongue twister of a name like Benozzo Ferucignano when he moved to America!”