The Black Madonna (14 page)

The next morning the sun shone again as if the summer storm that had brought such a bleak end to the day before had never happened. Nazreem beamed over her breakfast orange juice as though she too had dismissed the dark forebodings that had clouded both their minds on the journey back into the city.

To Marcus the images of the dark riders on their black motorbikes speeding after them then disappearing into the night were still all too vivid. He could not escape the foolish fantasy that they were updated versions of Tolkien’s ‘ring wraiths’: anonymous, faceless – even
soulless
– riders sent to stalk them by some unknown sinister power guiding their destinies. Common sense told him it was nonsense, but that didn’t make the imagery any less pervasive or persistent.

‘I think we should go back to Altötting, I would like to see Sister Galina again,’ said Nazreem, pouring Marcus a cup of
strong-looking
black coffee as he sat down beside her. The breakfast room of the little hotel was bright, airy and decorated with fresh flowers, for all that its main occupants seemed to be tired-looking travelling
salesmen
and a few tourists.

The hotel had been as easy to find as the woman at the airport tourist office had promised, just a short walk from the city’s central square, the Marienplatz. Marie, Mary, Maria. Miriam in Hebrew, Maryam in the Arabic Nazreem had quoted to such powerful effect in Altötting. In front of the square’s great neo-Gothic city hall a statue of the virgin in her role as protectress of Munich stood high on a column: the Virgin Mary to Western European eyes: white and saintly with her halo and the Christ Child in her arms, one hand raised in a gesture of benediction. Almost a deity in her own right. Even so, Marcus felt he would never look at even the most banal representation of the Madonna in the same way again.

‘But first,’ Nazreem was saying, breaking into his thoughts: ‘I would like to go to see the painting, the one you mentioned, by the Dutchman. It is here, in Munich, you said?’

Marcus blinked for a moment, his train of thought disjointed. Then he remembered: the painting of St Luke sketching the first portrait of the Madonna, by the fifteenth-century Flemish painter whose name still escaped him, the one he had mentioned to her over dinner in Brick Lane, before the chaos overtook them.

‘Uh, yes, at least I think so. We need to check where though. Munich has a lot of art galleries.’

It turned out not to be as easy as Marcus had expected to find out exactly which of Munich’s cornucopia of galleries was in possession of a particular painting, especially if you were unsure of both its title and the artist’s name. But most of the major galleries were close together near the university buildings, a short U-bahn ride north of the city centre, and it seemed a safe guess that the great
nineteenth-century
gallery known as the Alte Pinakothek was the most likely place to house a painting by a Flemish master of the early
Renaissance
period.

Marcus found himself unable to stop searching the faces of people in the street and on the U-bahn, as if he suspected any of them – at least any of vaguely Middle Eastern appearance – to be part of some nefarious conspiracy that had designs on them, or at least on Nazreem. Several people matched the racial profile which he
realised
with some personal embarrassment he was applying, none of them appeared remotely interested in either Nazreem or himself. None of them obviously got on or off the U-bahn at the same stops they did. There were no clear-cut suspects, no menacing men on motorbikes lingering on street corners, at least not in the vicinity of the Pinakothek itself.

The gallery was a vast neoclassical stone building, with bomb damage from the Second World War patched in red brick like scars from ancient wounds. It held an enormous collection of European paintings from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Their task had been made somewhat easier: Marcus’s brain had finally dredged up from his subconscious the name of the artist. The work they were looking for was by Rogier van der Weyden.

But even that did not make it as easy as it ought to have been. Van der Weyden was a significant figure for his day, important enough for him to have most of one room to himself on the first floor, but the painting of St Luke and the Madonna was not on display. Nor was it mentioned in the gallery’s current catalogue. Yet Marcus was
sure he had known it was here. Now he began to ask himself if he could have been mistaken. Was there another gallery in Munich with a similar collection? He found it hard to believe.

A tubby man nodding gently on a metal-framed chair in the doorway between the two rooms displayed a name badge which indicated he was gallery staff. Security probably, although he did not offer very much of that. At Nazreem’s prompting, Marcus approached him. The man jolted and gave him a rude stare but his attitude changed when Marcus made clear he was from London and inquiring about a painting. But the best Marcus could glean from the man’s almost impenetrable Bavarian dialect was that the
painting
was ‘gone, taken away.’

Where? He asked, but got only a brusque shake of the head and an indifferent shrug. Only when Nazreem appeared at his shoulder with a beseeching look on her face and pressed a ten-euro note into the attendant’s palm did his reaction alter, abruptly. Marcus waited for a shocked German reaction to her instinctive Middle East
baksheesh
, but the man palmed the note and grunted that they should wait here and disappeared into the next room.

A few minutes later he returned with a younger man sporting a short, spiky haircut and a leather jacket. For a moment Marcus thought he had fetched help to have them thrown out, but then the younger man, in perfect unaccented English, said: ‘My name is Helmut Vischer. I am curator of the old Dutch paintings. This man tells me you are also academics and wish to see the Van der Weyden St Luke.’

The attendant at his side was smiling as if the role of expert
facilitator
was second nature to him. Marcus nodded and introduced himself as a don from All Souls in Oxford and Nazreem as his research assistant, which earned him a sharp look from her.

‘Yes, we were surprised to find it not on display.’

Vischer raised his almost invisible blond eyebrows as if
minimally
surprised.

‘But if it is at all possible,’ said Nazreem.

He turned and gave her a brief cool smile, before turning back to Marcus.

‘As it happens, you are very lucky I was available. I should be happy to show you the painting. It is hanging in my office.’

Marcus’s eyes clearly suggested that this was something of an
extravagance even for a gallery curator, but Vischer laid a hand on his arm almost conspiratorially: ‘We are allowed our little
indulgences
, you know. I couldn’t bear to let such a fine piece of work be confined to the cellars, simply because some group of pedants had declared it not to be the original.’

Nazreem shot Marcus a puzzled glance as they followed the man through a panelled door into an institutionally painted side corridor.

‘Although personally speaking that doesn’t detract from its worth, and in any case as you know these attributions are for ever
changing
,’ Vischer was saying.

‘You’re telling us that the St Luke painting is a fake, a forgery?’ Marcus could not conceal a note of incredulity in his voice.

‘Oh no, good heavens, nothing of the kind. Just that it might not have been wholly painted by the master himself. Anyway, there you are.’

He opened a door on their left and ushered them into a small functionally furnished office which was completely dominated by the painting that hung opposite the desk.

‘A fine thing,’ said Vischer. ‘I find it inspirational.’

Marcus was taken aback. The painting was bigger than he had imagined from pictures in books – over a metre across and maybe a third as much again in height. Also, it was painted not on canvas but on wood.

‘Oak. Quite common at the time, especially for religious
paintings
,’ said the curator, positioning himself alongside the painting as if admiring his own handiwork.

Marcus stood back to examine the work as a whole. The
composition
was exquisite, divided into three by the device of a window in the background with the graceful upright pillars. In the centre frame, beyond the window looking out over battlements at a winding river and a townscape that was wholly mediaeval down to the Dutch gables, stood a couple seemingly unrelated to the main subjects, yet giving perspective and a sense of unity.

In the foreground, inside the window on one side of the central aperture a man in russet robes with a skullcap half knelt with a quill pen hovering over a sketch pad in his hand. Opposite seated on the step of a wooden throne draped in cloth of gold was a woman
offering
her breast to a baby.

The appearance of the child itself was strangely stilted, with the
fingers of the left hand arranged in a sign of blessing. The face had a strange, otherworldly smile and he seemed unnaturally
disinterested
in the proffered breast. The woman herself, however, could have been an archetypal Dutch beauty of the day, her eyes cast down towards the baby in her arms, demure, brunette and immaculately white of skin. Only the full heavy robe which draped her form was a rich velvet black.

‘The real beauty lies in the balance of the composition, the subtle semi-symmetry and the sharply contrasting use of light and shade,’ said Vischer.

Marcus nodded. ‘It’s quite remarkable,’ he said. ‘I’d come across illustrations before, in books, but never paid quite this much
attention
.’ By his side Nazreem too appeared wholly riveted by the artwork in front of them.

‘But what were you saying about it not being the original?’ Marcus asked.

Vischer sighed. ‘That is why it no longer hangs in the main gallery, despite the fact that for decades it hung there and was much admired.’

‘I’m not sure I understand.’

‘It is a question of authentication: our modern concern with brush strokes and pigments. The painting is not unique, you see. Few of this style, of this period are.’

Vischer was addressing himself to Marcus, but Nazreem had turned towards him with a strange gleam in her eye.

‘There are others, also in fine collections you understand, one very like this indeed in the Groeninge Museum in Bruges, which for a long time was claimed to be the original because it is near where the artist lived, and another in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, on a continent he did not even know existed. And another, this time on canvas, in the Hermitage in St Petersburg.

‘People who know more about such technical things than I do say they reckon that the only one of the series that was wholly painted by van der Weyden himself is probably the one in America. I’m not convinced that detracts from the intrinsic value of ours … or mine, as I sometime dare to think of it.’

‘Why so many versions of the same painting?’

‘Nowadays we regard works of art – old ones anyhow – as unique, masterpieces which must be allowed to stand alone and which must
never be copied. But at the time these paintings were produced, they weren’t seen like that. It was the image that mattered, not the artist – of course, people wanted things to be as well painted as possible, but it simply wasn’t viable for one man to churn out endless copies.

‘That’s what they had assistants for – “schools” they called them then, but they weren’t all to do with learning. “Workshops” might have been a better equivalent in modern terms. Just like the scribes producing all those illuminated manuscripts before the invention of printing. Just a primitive form of mass production really.’

‘I hadn’t looked at it like that before,’ said Marcus.

‘No,’ said Vischer. ‘Not many people do. But I believe that even from today’s point of view it’s the beauty of the object that counts, not the attribution.’

‘It’s a very different Madonna.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Hmm?’ Marcus had been thinking aloud, rather than addressing the curator standing next to him. ‘We’ve just been out to Altötting,’ he added, suddenly aware that Nazreem beside him was throwing dagger looks in his direction. If Vischer noticed them he gave no indication. Instead, he appeared mildly puzzled by the comparison.

‘Ah, Bavaria’s famous black Madonna. No indeed, quite another thing. That’s an older piece of work too, of course, although not as old as a lot of the pilgrims would like to believe. But you can’t really compare a sculpture to a painting, can you, not unless you’re trying to get some idea of what the actual person looked like. And that’s hardly the case here, is it?’ he laughed.

‘No, indeed,’ said Marcus dryly.

‘So what did you think of our Altötting? You aren’t pilgrims, in the religious sense?’ Vischer asked with just a slightly nervous edge to his laugh. ‘I thought all Englishmen were Protestants,’ this with just the hint of a sideways glance at Nazreem.

‘No. Not pilgrims,’ answered Marcus, seeing no point in
explaining
. ‘It’s a fine place. Some remarkable architecture.’

‘Oh yes, quite a collection of curios, Altötting, in every sense of the word. You know Pope Benedict was a local boy.’

‘Hard to miss the fact.’

Vischer grinned. Somehow Marcus thought this was one
Bavarian
who was not a particular fan of His Apostolic Majesty. ‘Did you see the Death?’ he asked.

It was Marcus’s turn to look puzzled.

‘The Death of Eding? Oh I do hope you didn’t miss it. It’s sublime.’

‘I think you’ve lost me again.’

‘Oh what a pity. Perhaps you should go back. It really is – how does Michelin put it “worth a detour” – it’s in the main church. A little statue, a figurine really on top of a very tall, quite fine,
grandfather
clock. It’s a bit macabre really: a skeleton swinging a scythe. It swings back and forth every couple of seconds and superstitious people believe that every swing brings someone’s death.’