Rogue's Gallery

When the Gallery of the Palazzo Cenci-Corombona was about to be opened for the first time to the public there was a private viewing in advance of opening for art critics and newspaper columnists, and a further one two days later for princes, dukes, counts and the assorted riff-raff of Roman society. On the first of these days the critics strolled around the high and densely-packed rooms and galleries, sniffing a little at the dim Teniers landscapes, raising an eyebrow at allegorical nothings by Angelica Kauffman, wondering whether the rubric under the Caravaggio shouldn't have read ‘School of', and generally being interested rather than impressed.

Antonio Scaltri (‘Toni' to his friends), the art critic of the
Corriere della Mattina,
went round rather more quickly than most, because he'd given the collection the once-over at a party two or three years before. It was only when he came to a little alcove with a curtain across the entrance and the legend ‘Van Dyck Room' above it that his interest
was quickened. He did not remember a Van Dyck in the collection. As he reached to draw aside the curtain a light automatically came on in the little side-room, and he registered that there was only one picture, and turned to look at it. For some seconds he was speechless.

‘
Dio mio
!' he said at last. Then, since he was an international expert on seventeenth-century portraiture, known in five continents, he added in English: ‘Wow!'

The idea of opening up the gallery wing of the palazzo had come to Prince Paolo, or been fed to him, one day after lunch, when his wife had driven off in her new Smart car, which parked in half the space of a normal car and cost decidedly more than one – ideal for her afternoon round of visits to her smart middle-aged friends to talk about ancestry and clothes, and to the current smart boutique to do the same. The son and heir was out with his younger smart friends, speeding around the town high on heroin or alcohol, and probably with the current bimbo to whom the prince so strongly objected, though when it came to brains most people would feel that she and the young heir were ideally suited.

So the prince could meditate on his financial predicament.

The Cenci-Corombonas were only a distant branch of the great Cenci line, but like them they believed in keeping things within the family. In their case this meant hoarding their wealth, adding to it in safe, traditional ways, and handing status and loot on unimpaired from one generation to the next. They delighted in profitable, risk-free positions such as the prince's own Vice-Chairmanship of the Banco
dei Ladri Siciliani. This policy, however, had been subtly changed in the last twenty years by Prince Paolo. Where his ancestors had despised the Stock Exchange as being full of dubious characters of low birth and hare-brained projects, the prince had decided that it was the only way for a wealthy family to prosper in the modern world. Unfortunately he had entered into this new world with more enthusiasm than flair. He had invested a great deal of money into Microsoft companies that were all prospectus and no funds, and into the firms created by the privatisation of the British railways, having always been an Anglophile by inclination. It was two weeks after the declared bankruptcy of Railtrack that the prince sat at table, with coffee and brandy, and entertained thoughts of the most gloomy.

‘If I sell a picture,' he said to Silvio, his butler, with whom he had, in truth, more in common than with any of his family, ‘it will have to be a good one.'

‘That would be sad, sir,' murmured Silvio.

‘Sell one of the lesser ones and it would only bring in a few million lire. Tide me over for a few months and that would be all.'

‘On the other hand, sell one of the good ones, sir, and it would make the collection much less interesting were you ever to decide to open it to the paying public,' said Silvio, making a judicious exit.

The prince's mind ticked over slowly, but a minute or two later he said aloud:

‘What a peach of an idea!'

He could open the gallery separately, so there would be no vulgar intrusion on the family part of the palace,
and he would charge twelve or fifteen thousand lire admission (what would that be in Euros?), and prepare a lavish and glossy guidebook himself, free of the doubts and condescensions of the professional art historians. The Doria Pamphilj family had been doing it for years, and the tourists flocked to their undesirably-placed palace at the bottom of the Via del Corso. Opening a gallery would mean that he could keep all his pictures and create a regular and continuing source of income. It was a brilliant, brilliant idea!

It was characteristic of the prince, who was not optimistic by nature except in his gambling and his share dealings, that by the time Silvio returned for the coffee cups, he had spotted a snag.

‘That idea about opening the gallery to the public,' he said.

‘Sir?'

‘The Doria Pamphilj do, and they pull in the masses. But they've got one marvellous picture.'

‘The Velasquez of Innocent X, sir. Quite.'

‘That's it. I knew you'd remember. One of the greatest portraits ever painted, they say, and popularised by that English johnny.'

‘Bacon, sir. Francis Bacon.'

‘I knew the name was familiar. Well, the truth is, good though our collection is, we haven't got anything of absolutely first-class standard. Not anything that would stand out and bring in the hoi polloi.'

Silvio coughed.

‘Aren't you forgetting the Van Dyck, sir?'

Since in fiction only brilliant ideas, rather unrealistically, seem to emanate from butlers, it is only fair (since the prince in the preparations for opening always referred to the idea as his own) to underline that it was the butler of the Palazzo Cenci-Corombona who bore the responsibility for originating this particular brilliant wheeze.

The suggestion of Silvio certainly presented the prince with problems, both of a familial and a practical nature: would the exhibition of that particular picture, remarkable though it was, rebound to the credit of the family, or – more importantly – attract visitors to the gallery?

The elevation of Cardinal Aldo Cenci-Corombona to the papacy in 1623 represented a distinct deviation from the family's traditional avoidance of positions of prominence that demanded integrity, public scrutiny or hard work. His surprising promotion arose from a situation familiar to those choosing the winner of the Booker Prize or the next leader of the Conservative Party. In the Conclave to choose a successor to Pope Gregory XV there were two brilliant candidates, both with roughly equal support: there was the Cardinal-Archbishop of Pistoia, a man of notable piety who had very little control over his lawless flock, and there was Cardinal Salvini, a member of the Vatican's administrative hierarchy, who had a genius for organisation extending from the high ground of strategy and policy to the low ground of who cooked the papal polenta, but who was someone who never let ‘that religious nonsense' interfere with his grand or his little schemes. These two candidates dominated the first six attempts to select a new
pontiff, and as the crowds in St Peter's Square waited in vain for the puff of smoke that would give them the news that a new pope had been chosen, the cardinals sweated for three weeks of a Roman summer, quarrelled among themselves, missed their mistresses and got shorter and shorter tempered. One died, another lost whatever reason he had ever had. A compromise candidate had to be found. That candidate was Cardinal Cenci-Corombona of Naples.

That much might be found in any official account of that particular papal election. What it would probably not include were the rumours. These told that Cardinal Cenci-Corombona, immediately on the death of Gregory XV, had made a very shrewd assessment of who the leading candidates would be and their probable level of support. In the world of today he would have made a superb bookmaker of a rather dodgy kind. Foreseeing a likely stalemate he had told all and sundry that his doctor had diagnosed him as suffering from the wasting disease of phthisis, and had given him only six months to live. Six months! That suited the two supporters of the other two candidates down to the ground. The College of Cardinals was elderly (apart from the scapegrace ‘nephews' of the two previous popes), and numbers could change dramatically in six months.

So, as a compromise candidate, the cardinal was elected Supreme Pontiff, and reigned as Julius IV for the next nineteen years.

It was in the year after his election, 1624, that the new pope was painted by the rising star of Flemish painting, then on a long-term stay in Italy. Van Dyck was gentle, retiring
and notably sitter-friendly, softening ugliness to mere ordinariness, reducing obvious villainy to mere worldliness. With all his enthusiasm and hopefulness the young painter was bemused as to how to paint the new pontiff. Julius was small, twisted in body, unprepossessing to the n
^th
degree. But pity can be aroused for an unsightly exterior. What made the problems of presentation almost insurmountable was the face; mean, beetle-browed, gnarled into a perennial expression of rage and loathing that directed itself on his interlocutors – and hence on the painter of his portrait – with terrifying force and intensity. Van Dyck confessed himself beaten.

‘I try,' he confessed to his Flemish friends at the inn off the Piazza Navona where they met at nights. ‘I try so hard – to give him dignity, benignity, even pathos. Nothing will help. Something – I don't know what – keeps breaking through.'

‘I think it's called Evil,' said his friend Sustermanns.

Certainly Van Dyck took the finished painting to the Vatican with no high hopes. He shivered as he removed the covering veil. The new pope was outraged, incandescent. After ten minutes of rant he had the upstart painter kicked out as unceremoniously as that other upstart Mozart was later to be by the Archbishop of Salzburg.

Nourishing his hurt and his grievance, Van Dyck returned to his home base in Genoa, where he worked night and day for three weeks on the picture, removing all the softening effects he had vainly tried to introduce, attempting finally to capture the atmosphere of brutal malignity which the pope communicated to all who came into contact with him.
When he had achieved to his own satisfaction a version which captured the hellish horror of the man, he offered it to the Cardinal-Archbishop of Pistoia, the new pope's saintly rival, who accepted it with alacrity.

‘I need to be reminded,' he said via his envoy, ‘that Satan does indeed walk among us.'

It was from descendants of that man's brother that the Cenci-Corombonas bought the picture in the early 1700s, immediately putting it in store in an inaccessible part of their cellar. They had no desire to remind Romans of the pontificate of Julius IV, and were glad to prevent anyone else doing so.

It was in that same inaccessible cellar that Prince Paolo, accompanied by Silvio, had viewed the picture soon after he became head of the family in 1978. It was from there that they removed it when the time came to open the gallery to the public in 2001.

‘
Dio mio
!' said Toni Scaltri of the
Corriere della Mattina.
‘Wow!'

The man in the picture that overwhelmed him had all the trappings of the papacy as assuredly as Innocent X did in the famous portrait by Velazquez that the prince had alluded to: the purple-red of the vestments and
biretta
, the throne-like chair, the
mozzetta,
and the token sign of piety too – in Julius's case, a prayer book in his right hand. But the trappings could only serve to highlight the face: topping the hunched-forward body it thrust itself at you, seeming to deliver a rebuke at you – no, not a rebuke, Toni decided, but a string of vituperative obscenities from that
twisted mouth, beneath that flaring nose and that mean, grasping, low brow. But that inventory missed out on the eyes. Through the grime of centuries – for Silvio had wisely advised against cleaning the picture, feeling the force of it would be more generally acceptable from appearing beneath a veneer of dirt – they still seemed to consume both themselves and the viewer with their flaming rage and hatred. Satan indeed, said Toni to himself, unconsciously echoing the Archbishop's words: Satan viewing the world's last vestiges of goodness and piety with outrage, and issuing a strident proclamation of war.

For five minutes Toni stood alone before this great unseen portrait of his chosen century. Then he staggered back to his fellow critics and newsmen, feeling weakened by the experience. Confronting their polite indifference to the body of the collection, Toni had difficulty finding appropriate words.

‘Wait till you see the Van Dyck,' he warned them. ‘It's … tremendous … too much … too horrible.'

Something similar was said two nights later at the special society viewing by Paolo's wife, Princess Francesca, who looked into the room with her friend the Countess Malatesta, glanced at the picture, then looked hurriedly away.

‘Too ghastly, my dear,' she muttered to her friend. ‘Just too hideously ugly. But you wouldn't expect looks or style from a pope, would you? Especially not a Cenci-Corombona one.'

For the princess was born a Strozzi, and had nothing but contempt for the parvenu branch (four and a half centuries)
of the family she had lowered herself into by marriage. Her friend gazed at the picture for a minute as if mesmerised, then dragged her eyes away with a harsh laugh.

‘He looks like a dustman dressed up for carnival,' she said.

The two preliminary viewings certainly paid off. The news of an extraordinary picture of an ancestor of the Cenci-Corombonas filtered down from the society guests as wealth is supposed to but seldom does. The critics sent out a great buzz of interest, and Toni Scaltri, feeling the need as the greatest expert in the field to absorb the experience before writing about it, postponed coming to terms with this unexpected side to the gentle and pliable Flemish master by adding a final note to his fortnightly piece urging readers to go hotfoot to the Palazzo and view the extraordinary new picture which had previously been kept exclusively within the family. ‘See it, see it, see it,' he urged, promising to return to the subject at length in his next article.