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In the M section of art books, we found a slim volume devoted to Martini. Scurrying upstairs to the mezzanine — which we had to ourselves today — we huddled over the plates of Martini’s paintings.
One of his earliest works enchanted me. The image — a fresco in a chapel in Assisi, Italy — depicted Saint Martin being knighted by the Roman emperor. With a golden disk behind his head and his hands folded in prayer, Martin looked every bit the pious saint. But other figures in the scene looked like entertainers at a medieval party. Three singers had been captured in midnote, open mouthed, forever singing in close harmony. Beside them, a dark-haired man in a colorful, bejeweled robe strummed a stringed instrument — a mandolin? a lute? Accompanying the strummer was a flute player, smiling slyly, and for good reason. I pointed him out to Miranda. “Look,” I said, “he’s playing two flutes at once.”
“Cool,” she marveled. Then — a slight variation on her favorite utterance—“How does he do that?”
One of Martini’s final works—The Holy Family—was striking in its treatment of Mary, Joseph, and a youthful Jesus, age ten or twelve. “Wow, a family quarrel,” I told Miranda. “Mary and Joseph are scolding Jesus — you don’t see many pictures of that, huh?”
“And get a load of that pout Jesus is giving them,” she said. “What a brat!”
But it was Martini’s Avignon portrait The Blessing Christ—the red-ochre sinopia drawing I’d seen in the palace — that I kept flipping back to stare at again and again. The drawing had been made as a study for a fresco at the cathedral, one of four scenes tucked beneath the small roof of the front porch. The paintings themselves were gone, but the underlying sinopia of Jesus had been found and moved to the palace to preserve it, along with a companion drawing of Mary. The eyes of Jesus seemed to be looking right at me, as if to say, “You’re right — the Shroud, the bones, and I: Martini’s Holy Trinity.”
Miranda translated the artist’s biography for me; it didn’t take long, since details of his life were sketchy. “His first known work was in Siena, Italy, in 1315,” she said. “He worked in Siena, Padua, Naples, and Florence for twenty years. He moved to Avignon in 1335 or ’36 to paint at the papal court. He died here in 1344.”
“At the papal court? So he might have had a connection to the bones,” I noted. “Might have had access.”
“That’s a mighty big might,” she said. “Hey, this is interesting. He was friends with Petrarch, the sonnet-spinning chaplain who loved to hate the papacy. Martini painted a frontispiece for Petrarch’s copy of the writings of Virgil. Oh, cool—he also painted a portrait of Laura, Petrarch’s not-quite girlfriend.”
“Let’s see it,” I said. “What page is that on?”
“None, alas — it’s long lost. But we know it existed because Petrarch wrote two poems praising the picture, and praising Simone’s artistic genius.”
But was it possible that Martini had a dark side? Was it possible that he’d created a “snuff shroud,” as Miranda had speculated in Turin — a work made expressly to document the murder of the man it depicted? The idea was horrifying but undeniably fascinating. Wouldn’t it be ironic if the relic revered by millions was actually a piece of forensic evidence — the world’s most sensational and incriminating piece of forensic evidence, one whose meaning had been misunderstood for centuries?
But was Martini capable of committing a cold-blooded murder for the sake of…what? Did he have both motive and opportunity, as my detective friends had taught me to wonder? What might drive a talented and prominent artist to commit and document such a crime, and then commit the sacrilege of passing off the evidence as a holy relic?
I took out a pocket-sized notebook and flattened it open. At the top of a left-hand page, I wrote “Motive?” and — on the facing page—“Opportunity?” I stared at the neatly lined pages awhile, feeling foolish and bereft of ideas. Finally, shaking my head in frustration, I forced myself to put pen to paper. Under “Motive?” I wrote “artistic rivalry?” Did Martini have a competitor in Avignon he felt jealous of, threatened by? I nudged Miranda. “Know of any artists who’ve killed other artists?”
She looked amused. “Dueling paintbrushes? Spray cans of Krylon at twenty paces?”
“Come on, be serious. I’m talking poison, a dagger, a bludgeon, whatever. Murder motivated by artistic jealousy?”
“I think character assassination is more common in cases like that,” she said. “Premeditated bitchiness.”
“What about romantic rivalry? See if you can find anything on Martini’s love life.”
“Like, self-portraits showing him in a jealous rage?”
“Hell, I don’t know,” I said. “But Petrarch left a boatload of poems about his love life.”
She gave me a skeptical look, but she humored me by scanning the rest of the bio. “Sorry,” she reported. “Looks like your man Martini was the model husband.”
“What’s your evidence for that?”
“Spotty,” she conceded. “Just before he got married, he bought a house for his bride, Giovanna — Italian for ‘Joanna’—from her dad. He also gave Giovanna two hundred twenty gold florins as a wedding present.”
“That doesn’t prove anything,” I argued.
“Okay, try this,” she said. “Martini died in Avignon in 1344; three years later, when Giovanna moved back to Siena, she was still wearing widow’s weeds. He must not have been too scummy if she was still mourning. Of course, who knows what evil lurks in the heart, right? But from the little bit of bio there is, he seems like a stand-up guy.”
“The flower of Avignon?”
She nodded. “The flower of Avignon.”
CHAPTER 28
AVIGNON
1330
The flower of Avignon is unfurling, bursting into full and glorious bloom. By now, twenty years after the papacy arrived for a “temporary” visit, Avignon has grown from a sleepy village of a few thousand souls to a bustling city ten times that size. The cobbled streets clatter with the wheels of carts bringing in wine, meats, cheeses, spices, silks. Every square inch of ground within the old perimeter has been claimed, and the noise of prosperity is deafening: carpenters’ saws rasping through framing timbers; hammers pounding pegs into newly raised posts and lintels; tiles scraping and clattering onto new roofs, occasionally slithering off to shatter in the streets below. Most of the new buildings are modest — tenements, tanneries, bakeries, butchers’ shops — but others are grand. Avignon and Villeneuve, just across the Bénézet bridge, now boast a score of cardinals’ palaces, many of which outshine the pontiff’s own makeshift quarters, which are crammed into what had been the bishop’s palace until the papacy arrived and took it over.
Pope John XXII has now worn the papal crown for fourteen years. During his reign, he has steadily refilled the papal coffers; under his watchful eye, the treasury has swelled from a paltry 70,000 florins to 17,500,000 florins — an increase of 250-fold, which must surely p
lease our Lord. The profusion of florins is heaven-sent—“sent” in a manner of speaking, that is, for the tithes and rents and payments for offices and indulgences must always be collected, sometimes upon threat of excommunication, by God’s tireless, toiling clergy. But never before has the machinery of collection been so well oiled; Pope John has been blessed with a genius for organization and administration, and that genius has yielded a rich harvest. Still, wealth can be a heavy burden, imposing the responsibility of sound stewardship, of protecting what God has entrusted to His humble servant for safekeeping.
And really, could there be any better steward than Pope John? A banker’s son by birth, a lawyer by training, John has brought the church’s administrative and banking systems into the modern era. By consolidating and centralizing his minions and their work, he can keep watch over his flocks of clerks and accountants, his vast expenditures and vaster revenues. His eagle-eyed oversight has brought unprecedented protection against embezzlement and fraud. But administrative protection isn’t enough; the ever-richer prize of the treasury must be physically protected as well. The snake pit that is Rome, God knows, became a hotbed of assassins and thieves during the papacy’s thousand years of residence there. Now, with the papacy’s wealth and power centered here, Avignon’s gravitational pull is strong, attracting some of Europe’s finest painters, sculptors, musicians, and poets. And where money and artists converge, can thieves be far behind? No, the treasury must be secured.
Such are the cares that increasingly occupy the thoughts and prayers of John XXII. The pontiff is now eighty-six — an age prone to mistrust and fear — and lacks the strength to undertake the project needed to safeguard the Church’s assets. That work must fall to his chosen successor, Jacques — Cardinal Fournier — who stands before him in the plain monk’s robe he still insists on wearing. The robe suggests pious simplicity, but the pope happens to know — His Holiness has spies in every cardinal’s palace — that Jacques owns no fewer than twenty such robes, so he will never lack for a spotless one.
