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Updated: May 28, 2025
Then almost oppressive good luck, came a note from her mountain Castle, telling that the Chatelaine would be glad to receive me whenever my travels led me her way. She mentioned our common enthusiasm for the Venetians and graciously wanted my opinion on the Giorgione, which the enemies of Mantovani, her friend and my spiritual father, as she called him, had spitefully slandered.
Long before, when the old pictures first began to speak to me, I had learned that the critic Mantovani, the master of us all, owned an early Giorgione, unfinished but of marvellous beauty. At his death, strangely enough, it was not found among his pictures, which were bequeathed as every one knows to the San Marcello Museum.
Among these are "Sympathy," sold as first prize in Derby Art Union; "Diverse Attractions"; "Interesting Discoveries"; "Coming," sold from the Royal Academy; "Gossips"; "The Wedding Gown," etc. Miss Manly has done much work for publishers, which has been reproduced in colors and in black and white. She usually combines figures and landscape. <b>MANTOVANI, SIGNORA S. ROME.</b>
It appeared that Mantovani in his last days had given the portrait to his old friend the Carlist Marquesa del Puente, in whose cause picturesque but irrelevant detail he had once drawn sword. Anitchkoff's full enthusiasm was handsomely recorded after he had made the pilgrimage to the Marquesa's crag.
All these things must remain problematical for Mantovani cannot tell, and the Marquesa del Puente will not if indeed she knows. Professor Hauptmann dropped wearily into his chair at the noisy Milanese table d'hôte and snarled out a surly "Mahlzeit" to the assembled feasters. It was echoed sweetly from his left with a languishing "Mahlzeit, Herr Professor." The advance disconcerted him.
I seized his hand impulsively, and clumsily offered him, in a breath, whisky, shuffleboard, or cowboy pool sound Pretorian remedies for all human woes. These consolations he refused and took his leave. Midnight found me in the same chair, thinking less of Anitchkoff, whose case now lay clear, than of Mantovani and the Marquesa del Puente, about whom it seemed there still might be something to say.
I was ridiculously young." "You may imagine," he pursued, "that the flight of the Giorgione to the Pyrenees only embittered my curiosity. For years I might have seen it shabbily to be sure by merely opening a door when Mantovani was occupied, now it had departed to another planet.
The thought that Mantovani had owned it for twenty years and more made a sleepless night hideous; at sunrise my loyalty reasserted itself by a lame compromise. "I daresay you will not blame me for hoping against hope, as I did the next day and for some months after, that somewhere under that modern paint there was indeed a sketch by Giorgione's hand.
For years I hoped my time would come, but the opportunity was provokingly delayed. How should you feel if Mrs. Warrener should show you all her things but the great Botticelli?" I nodded understandingly. Mrs. Warrener, for a two minutes' delay in an appointment, had debarred me her Whistlers for a year. "That's the way Mantovani treated me," Anitchkoff continued.
He may have withheld it from Anitchkoff maliciously, or again out of simple considerateness for a trusting disciple. When Mantovani came to set his worldly affairs in order, however, it must have struck him that the joke could not be perpetuated on the walls of the San Marcello gallery, while the panel was one that a great connoisseur would not willingly have inventoried by his executors.
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