by Larry WithamTHE FIRST INTERNATIONAL ART CRIME TEAM A NATURAL FOR ART NOVELS
MEET THE "ITALIAN Art Squad" in fiction. In the real world, it
was formed in 1969 as a seminal event, the first national police force in the world
dedicated to art crime. The squad began to appear in novels in 1991, and since
then, three authors have tapped the Italian institution’s bravado, or
otherwise, to craft stories of crime, art and mystery.
The first
out the gate was British novelist Ian Pears, whose The Raphael Affair (1991) launched his “art history” mysteries (seven
installments through 2000) with the story of a forlorn British art history
academic in Rome meeting his match, a female art-crime investigator.
He is Jonathan
Argyll and she is Flavia di Stefano, the “brightest assistant in the Italian
National Art Theft Squad,” according to her boss, General Taddeo Bottando.
Argyll, unable to land a good job, has become a traveling agent looking for
good art purchases for a London art dealer. This takes him to Rome, embroils
him in an art theft and murder, and mingles his and Flavia’s lives.
She is all
business, a feisty northern Italian. In contrast, Argyll’s detective instincts
prevail in spite of his bookish self. In each novel, while General Bottando
fights for his budget, and against the Italian police bureaucracy, Jonathan and
Flavia—sometimes he in the lead, sometimes she—traipse into murder cases linked to art world figures, typically academics, collectors, and dealers.
The delight
of these novels is not so much the cache of art information (which Pears leaves
to a bare minimum) as the dialogue between Jonathan and Flavia. She is “a woman
with a long-standing disapproval of those who smuggle the Italian heritage out
of the country,” Jonathan reports.
They start
out getting on each other’s nerves. Even by novel no. 3, The Bernini Bust (1993), the story laments that: “She was a
wonderful companion and a perfect friend, but though Argyll had worked hard to
persuade her to be something more, his labors had produced remarkably little
result.” That would change, of course. By the last novel, they are married and
teaming up on art crime.
Taking up
the art-squad-fiction-baton in 2007, art historian Noah Charney wrote The Art Thief. He did so as director of
an institute for the study of international art crime. The novel, much more of
an academic treatise than anything in Pears’s works, opens with the theft of a
Caravaggio painting in a small Italian church. Indeed, as one of the lengthy
lectures in the novel explicates, it was a 1969 theft of a Caravaggio that
prompted the founding of the Comando Carabinieri per la Tutela del Patrimonio
Culturale, or Carabinieri Art Squad (the Carabinieri being the Italian military
and civilian police).
The Art Thief follows a veritable maze
of clues related to the theft of the Caravaggio and a “white on white” painting
by the Russian “Suprematist” Kazimir Malevich. It also takes pains to show the
workings of the Carabinieri and art squads in London (Scotland Yard) and
France. One of the art thieves (we learn in the end) is Gabriel Coffin, a
former special investigator for the Italian Art Squad. He has helped his lover,
Daniela Vallombroso, wreak revenge on a former client who framed her for a past
theft, putting her in prison.
All of this
novel plotting involves a good deal of technical explanation about forgery,
overpainting, and cleaning. It keeps the reader’s head spinning. In all,
however, it boils down to Daniela’s victory over a corrupt collector, in fact,
the very man who had hired Coffin to steal the Caravaggio. With Coffin’s help, Daniela
has tricked her nemesis out of the Caravaggio, and, “We’ve also deprived him of
his family’s greatest treasure, his original White on White,” she summarizes.
To tell
this story, novelist Charney has the Caravaggio and Malevich paintings
interchanging quite a lot, both having fake versions and then this: In the end,
in a secret art room, Coffin shows Daniela how he can remove the ‘white on
white” with a mild solvent to reveal the authentic Caravaggio (a fake having
been returned to the Carabinieri).
Then in 2013,
the first novel of the “Rick Montoya Italian Mysteries” series, written by
former Foreign Service officer David P Wagner, presents another take on the
Italian Art Squad. Rick Montoya, who had studied in Italy as son of a diplomat,
returns as a professional translator. To boot, his uncle is an Italian
policeman. Rick’s old school friend is now head of Rome’s art squad, bearing
the title Commissario Carlo Conti. He sends Rick north on a surreptitious
mission.
The suspected
crime is the smuggling and forgery of pre-Roman Etruscan stoneware, valuable
artifacts in the national culture. The scene of the misdeeds is Tuscany,
specifically, the picturesque hill town of Volterra. Rick’s task quickly
becomes ominous when, a day after he visits a gallery, one of its staff falls
over a steep city cliff to his death.
After arriving in the steep town, Rick gradually
meets three suspects on Commissario Conti’s list: museum curator Arnolfo
Zerbino; gallery owner Antonio Landi; and, import/export man Rino Polpetto.
Rick also becomes romantically caught between his old American girlfriend, an
art historian in Italy, and a gorgeous but shady local art dealer, Donatella, who
seems to pursue him (and she, too, may be the villain). Moreover, the police in
Volterra seem to resent Rick sticking his nose into their affairs. They follow
him darkly. Even they seem likely suspects.
We go down
the list of possible villains, always feeling we’ve found him or her, and of
course, it’s the person not on the A-list, or seemingly the most blameless of
them all. Rick always thought it was Landi. But it turns out to be Zerbino, a
learned man who is supposed to be a guardian of the national patrimony. Instead,
he is discreetly selling the museum’s real Etruscan artifacts for money to
support its upkeep, and then hires craftsmen to make fakes to take their place
in the secure glass exhibit shelves.
The story
ends, as it must in Italy, with a good Italian meal.
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