The Night Portrait

THE NIGHT PORTRAIT

A NOVEL OF WORLD WAR II

AND DA VINCI’S ITALY

Laura Morelli

Copyright

One More Chapter a division of

HarperCollinsPublishers

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First published in the USA by William Morrow, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, New York 2020

This edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

Copyright © Laura Morelli 2020

Designed by Diahann Sturge

Part title image © Alik Keplicz/AP/Shutterstock

Chapter opener grunge grey background © Nataliia K/Shutterstock

Laura Morelli asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

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Source ISBN: 9780008422714

Ebook Edition © 2020 ISBN: 9780008422707

Version: 2020-08-17

Dedication

For Max, and for all the others who work for good

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part I: War Machines

Chapter 1: Leonardo

Chapter 2: Edith

Chapter 3: Edith

Chapter 4: Cecilia

Chapter 5: Leonardo

Chapter 6: Dominic

Chapter 7: Leonardo

Part II: A Thing of Beauty

Chapter 8: Cecilia

Chapter 9: Dominic

Chapter 10: Cecilia

Chapter 11: Edith

Chapter 12: Cecilia

Chapter 13: Dominic

Chapter 14: Edith

Chapter 15: Leonardo

Chapter 16: Cecilia

Chapter 17: Dominic

Chapter 18: Cecilia

Chapter 19: Edith

Chapter 20: Leonardo

Chapter 21: Cecilia

Chapter 22: Leonardo

Chapter 23: Edith

Chapter 24: Dominic

Chapter 25: Cecilia

Chapter 26: Dominic

Chapter 27: Edith

Chapter 28: Dominic

Chapter 29: Edith

Part III: Hidden from View

Chapter 30: Leonardo

Chapter 31: Cecilia

Chapter 32: Dominic

Chapter 33: Edith

Chapter 34: Cecilia

Chapter 35: Edith

Chapter 36: Edith

Chapter 37: Cecilia

Chapter 38: Edith

Chapter 39: Dominic

Chapter 40: Cecilia

Chapter 41: Edith

Chapter 42: Leonardo

Chapter 43: Edith

Chapter 44: Cecilia

Chapter 45: Edith

Chapter 46: Cecilia

Chapter 47: Edith

Part IV: Object of Desire

Chapter 48: Leonardo

Chapter 49: Dominic

Chapter 50: Edith

Chapter 51: Dominic

Chapter 52: Edith

Chapter 53: Dominic

Chapter 54: Edith

Chapter 55: Cecilia

Chapter 56: Dominic

Chapter 57: Edith

Chapter 58: Dominic

Chapter 59: Edith

Chapter 60: Dominic

Chapter 61: Edith

Part V: Homeland

Chapter 62: Leonardo

Chapter 63: Edith

Chapter 64: Cecilia

Chapter 65: Edith

Chapter 66: Dominic

Chapter 67: Edith

Chapter 68: Dominic

Chapter 69: Edith

Chapter 70: Cecilia

Chapter 71: Edith

Chapter 72: Dominic

Chapter 73: Leonardo

Chapter 74: Edith

Chapter 75: Edith

Chapter 76: Cecilia

Chapter 77: Edith

Part VI: Recollection

Chapter 78: Dominic

Chapter 79: Edith

Chapter 80: Cecilia

Chapter 81: Edith

Chapter 82: Dominic

Chapter 83: Dominic

Chapter 84: Cecilia

Chapter 85: Leonardo

Chapter 86: Dominic

Chapter 87: Leonardo

Chapter 88: Cecilia

Chapter 89: Edith

Chapter 90: Cecilia

Chapter 91: Leonardo

Acknowledgments

P.S. Insights, Interviews & More …

About the author

About the book

Also by Laura Morelli

About the Publisher

Florence, Italy

February 1476

A DARK SHAFT IN THE HILLSIDE. IN MY MIND, I SEE IT.

Down the long passage, a forgotten recess beneath the city’s fortifications, I watch men loading charges of black powder.

The best laborers for this task, I think, mine coal by day. These men are used to toiling in the thin air, in the darkness, with the careful use of the torch and the pick. Their fingers and cheeks are permanently black, their breeches stiff with soil and char. For them, what better occupation than in the service of siege?

They are brave to advance in the darkness, their lights held high. Quietly, unsuspected, they unload black grit into the farthest recesses of the shaft. When they emerge, the cannoneer turns the wheel noiselessly on its cogs, moving the machine forward into the mine. Citizens scatter amid the chaos and explosions of spewing rocks. The enemy is soon in the attacker’s clutches.

The design lives only in my imagination, of course. I must admit that. Still, I am compelled to put it to paper. These thoughts, these machines. They keep me awake long past the hour when the sun turns the Arno to gold and then sinks behind the hills. These contraptions fill my dreams. I awake in a sweat, desperate to trap the images on paper before they dissipate like first morning fog on the river’s surface.

The fact is that I am surrounded by my old room, with its smoldering fire in the hearth, with precarious stacks of parchment sheaves on the table, with inkwells and their metallic fragrance, with oil lamps and their charred wicks, with an ever-shifting arrangement of lounging cats. I have secured the iron latch on my door to deter those so-called friends who might lure me to the taverns. They can have it all.

I have more important tasks at hand. If I don’t capture them between the pages of my notebooks, they flit away like colorful moths just beyond the reach of my net.

Never mind that troublesome distraction of the panel on my easel. There lies my improficient attempt to capture the likeness of a merchant’s homely daughter. But she glares at me from across the room. Dissatisfied, as she has every right to be. Her father has asked me to make her beautiful before he sends the portrait to a suitor in Umbria. My heart is not in it, if I am honest with myself, but I cannot argue with the remuneration. It keeps bread and wine on my table. Still, the tempera pigments on my poplar plank have long dried hard. I pull the drape over the portrait so that the girl’s reproving gaze will no longer distract me. I am anxious to turn back to my drawing. If only I could convince a patron to pay me for my war machines instead of replicating his daughter’s profile.

Then there are my own parts of my master’s unfinished works. An angel and a landscape for a baptism of Christ. The monks have been pestering Master Verrocchio for months. A Madonna and child—uninspired, if I am honest with myself—for a noble lady near Santa Maria Novella. She has written me another letter asking when it will be delivered.

How can I afford these distractions when there is so much for me to capture from my own imagination? I turn back to my notebooks.

Why the tunnels? They will ask me, these men who think as much of war as I. But I have already thought of that. How the enemy might be surprised when their attackers emerge from the earth to overcome them! They will see that the shaft driving the machine allows it to turn seamlessly, effortlessly, into the tortuous shafts below ground, without making a sound. And when these mines are not being exploded, what treasures might be hidden there from those who might steal them, deep in the underground reserves where there is copper, coal, and salt?

We must keep our enemies close. Or so they say.

But what do I know? I am only one who imagines such fantasies and puts them to paper. One who believes that sometimes, art must be put in the service of war.

I pick up my silverpoint pen and begin to draw again.

Munich, Germany

September 1939

EDITH BECKER HOPED THAT THE MEN AROUND THE TABLE could not see her hands tremble.

On any other Thursday, Edith would be sitting before an easel in her ground-level conservation studio, wearing the magnifying goggles that made her look like a giant insect. There, in the quiet, she would lose all track of time, absorbed in the task of repairing a tear in a centuries-old painting, removing grime built up over decades, or regilding an old, crumbling frame. Her job was saving works of art, one by one, from decay and destruction. It was her training, her calling. Her life’s work.

But for the last half hour, the eyes of the most important men of the Alte Pinakothek, one of Munich’s greatest museums, had been on Edith. They watched her unwind the straps from each binder and remove folios one by one, each one representing paintings in the private collections of families across Poland.

“The identity of the man in the portrait is unknown,” Edith said, passing around a facsimile of a portrait by the Italian Renaissance painter, Raffaello Sanzio. Edith watched their eyes scan the likeness of a fluffy-haired man looking askance at the viewer, drawing a fur cloak over one shoulder.

Edith was glad she had traded her usual faded gray dress and conservator’s smock for the smartest outfit she owned, a brown tweed skirt and jacket. She had taken the time to make sure her hair curled evenly on either side of her jawline, and the seams up the back of her stockings ran straight. The men gave her their undivided attention: the curator of antiquities, the museum board chairman, even the museum director himself, Ernst Buchner, a renowned scholar to whom Edith had never spoken directly before today.

“There have been several ideas about the identity of the sitter,” she said. “Some even believe it may be the artist’s self-portrait.”

Edith was the only woman in a room full of the museum’s executive staff. She wished they hadn’t asked her to abandon the peace of her conservation studio, where, for the last few weeks, she had been working to restore a large battle scene by the sixteenth-century Munich artist Hans Werl. At some point in the 1800s, another conservator had overpainted the human figures and horses in the picture. Now, working at a painstakingly slow pace, Edith was removing the overpaint with a small piece of linen soaked in solvent. She was excited to see the brilliant pigments that the artist had originally intended emerge from the canvas, one centimeter at a time. She wished they would let her get back to work instead of placing her at the center of attention.

Her eyes moved nervously around the table and finally landed on Manfred, a longtime colleague and museum registrar. Manfred peered at Edith over his small, round glasses and smiled, giving her the courage to continue. He may have been the only one in the room who understood how challenging it was for Edith to speak in front of the group.

Manfred, Edith realized, was also the only one of her coworkers who knew something of her life outside the museum. He understood the difficulty she faced in caring for her father, whose mind and memory had deteriorated, day by day. Manfred and her father had been classmates at the Academy of Fine Arts, and it was Manfred who had facilitated a position for Herr Becker’s diligent, studious daughter in the conservation department. Edith knew that if she was to keep her job, let alone find any success as a professional woman at all, she had to protect her personal life from the others. She clung to Manfred’s reassuring smile to help still her shaking hands.

“A masterpiece,” said the board chairman, handling the facsimile of the painting by Raffaello Sanzio with care. “I see that the Czartoryski family had an impressive ambition to collect Italian paintings.”

“Indeed.” Edith, too, had been surprised to learn of the treasures locked away in castles, monasteries, museums, and private homes in the lands to the east. There were vast family collections, amassed over centuries, across the Polish border. Prince Czartoryski’s family art collection alone served as a quiet repository of incalculable value.

And now, Edith was beginning to understand the point of all the hours, days, and weeks she had spent in the museum archives and library stacks. She had been instructed to pull together this research on paintings in Polish collections for the museum board. She didn’t know why it hadn’t become obvious before now. Someone wanted to procure these pictures. Who and why?

“And this is the last one,” she said, pulling the final folio from the stack of images from the Czartoryski collection.

“The one we’ve been waiting for,” said Herr Direktor Buchner, whose brows reached for the dark, wispy hair swept back from his high forehead.

“Yes,” Edith said. “Around 1800, at the same time that Adam Jerzy Czartoryski purchased Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man from an Italian family, he also bought Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine. He brought these paintings from Italy back home to his family collection in eastern Poland.”

“And it remains there?” the antiquities curator asked, suspending his pen in midair as if it were a cigarette. The curator’s old habit hearkened back to the time before the recent ban on smoking in government buildings; just months ago, Edith realized, the room would have been filled with smoke.

“No,” Edith said, relieved that she had reviewed her notes before the meeting. “The Lady with an Ermine portrait has traveled often over the last hundred years. In the 1830s, during the Russian invasion, the family took it to Dresden for safekeeping. Afterward, they returned it to Poland but things were still unstable, so they moved the painting to a hiding place in the family palace in Pełkinie. When things calmed down, the family moved it to their private apartments in Paris; that would have been in the 1840s.”

“And then it returned to Poland?”

“Eventually, yes,” said Edith. “The family brought it back to Poland in the 1880s. It was put on public display then, to great fanfare. That’s where many people first learned of the painting, and when historians began researching it. Several experts identified it right away as by the hand of da Vinci, and people speculated about the identity of the sitter. That’s how it ended up”—she gestured to her stack of folios—“widely published and reproduced.”

“Who is she?” asked Buchner, tapping his fat fingers on the tabletop.

“It is well accepted that she was one of the mistresses of the Duke of Milan, a girl named Cecilia Gallerani, who came from a Sienese family. She was probably about sixteen years old at the time that Ludovico Sforza asked da Vinci to paint her.” Edith watched the facsimile of the painting circulate from hand to hand around the table again. The men pored over the girl’s face, her bright expression, the white, furry creature in her arms.

“During the Great War, the painting came to Germany again,” Edith continued. “It was held for safekeeping in the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden, but it was ultimately returned to Kraków.”

“It is remarkable that the painting survived at all, given how often it circulated,” Manfred noted.

“Indeed,” said Herr Direktor Buchner, handing the facsimile back to Edith. She returned it to her thick binder and began to retie the straps. “Fräulein Becker, you are to be commended for your thorough background research in the service of this project.”

“A senior curator could not have done a better job,” the decorative arts curator added.

“Danke schön.” Edith finally exhaled. She hoped they would let her return to the conservation studio now. She looked forward to putting on her smock and starting on the stabilization of a French painting whose frame had been water damaged when it was placed in an unfortunate position under a plumbing pipe in a storage closet.

Generaldirektor Buchner stood. “Now,” he said, taking a deep breath. “I have an announcement. In recent days, I have had a personal visit from Reichsmarschall Göring, who, as you may know, has been engaged by our Führer in the search for masterpieces like the ones we have seen here this afternoon. There is to be a new museum constructed in Linz. It has been fully funded by our Supreme Commander, who, as you know, has a personal interest in great art and its preservation. The museum in Linz, once it is complete, will be a repository for the safekeeping of all important works of art”—he paused to look around the table—“in the world.”

There was a collective gasp. Edith let the idea sink in. Adolf Hitler had already opened the House of German Art, just a short walk away from her office. She and Manfred had gone to see the work of the officially approved contemporary sculptors and painters. But now … Every important work of art history in the entire world under one roof, all of it under the stewardship of the Reich. It was difficult—almost inconceivable—to envision.

“As you might imagine,” Buchner said, giving life to Edith’s thoughts, “this new vision of our Führer will be a massive undertaking. All of us in the art-related trades are being engaged as custodians in the service of safeguarding these works. As things become more … precarious … we must all do our parts toward this effort.”

“But that’s insanity!” the antiquities curator huffed out. “All the important works of art in the world? Germany will control the world’s cultural patrimony? Who are we to be custodians of such a legacy? And who are we to take them from their current places?”

The room fell into nearly unbearable silence, and Edith wondered if the poor curator was already regretting his outburst. Edith watched Manfred press his pen firmly onto his page, drawing circular doodles, his other hand over his mouth as if to stop himself from speaking.

The museum board chairman broke the silence. “No, Hans, it is a worthy cause. I have good evidence that the Americans want to take valuable European paintings and put them in Jewish museums in America. On the contrary,” he said, “the idea of a Führermuseum … it’s ingenious. And anyway, you must realize that this is just a start. We are also making lists of important German artworks taken by the French and English in past centuries. Those works will be repatriated to Germany in due time.”

Edith studied the director’s face. Herr Buchner ignored the commentary, stood up, and calmly continued, though Edith thought she detected a twitch of the muscles at the base of his neck. “All of us will be receiving orders from officials at the Braunes Haus. We will be working with Germany’s best artists, historians, curators, and culture critics. You will each be given jobs that match your specialty. Many of us, myself included, will be traveling afield to gather works to bring back to our storage rooms here, or to other German museums.”

“But what about our work here?” Edith could not help but ask. “The conservation lab …”

“I’m afraid that our current projects will be mostly suspended. As for the museum itself, we have already begun rearranging our collections in storage to accommodate the works that will be coming to us, and we’ve secured additional space off-site.”

“Where are we going?” asked the antiquities curator.

“We will be receiving our specific assignments later this week,” the director said. “Fräulein Becker, I suspect that there is a very good chance you will be going to Poland.” He gestured to the binders full of facsimiles that Edith had compiled.

Poland.

Edith felt her stomach seize.

“S-s-surely …,” she stammered, “surely we could not be expected to …”

“How long?” a curatorial assistant cut Edith’s question short.

Buchner shrugged, and Edith saw the twitch in his neck again. “Until our work is done. As long as it takes. We are at war.”

The director then picked up his stack of folders, nodded, and exited the room. The stream of museum staff followed.

Edith filed out behind the line of men. Reaching the familiar door to the ladies’ washroom, she pressed it open and sealed it behind her. She dropped her box of folios onto the floor, sat on the toilet seat, and pressed her face into her palms. She gasped for air, feeling as if she might faint.

Poland? Indefinitely? How would she manage? Who would care for her father? What about her plans to marry, finally, after so many years of hoping? Was she really being called to the front lines? In danger of losing her life?

After a few long minutes, Edith stood and splashed cool water from the tap onto her face and wrists. When she emerged from the washroom, she found Manfred pacing the hallway.

“Are you all right?” he whispered, taking her arm.

“I … I’m not sure, if you want to know the truth. Oh, Manfred …” She exhaled, stopping to press her back against the cool tiles along the corridor wall. “What news. I can hardly believe it.” Her hands were still shaking.

“I think we are all in a state of shock,” he said, “even those of us who … who have foreseen this outcome.”