I Am Pilgrim(149)

‘Then again,’ he added with a smile, ‘sometimes even art restorers can work miracles. Ready?’

I nodded, and he flicked a switch on the wall. The four opaque walls turned completely clear. They were made from a type of glass called liquid crystal – an electrical current had rearranged the molecules and turned it transparent.

We were standing in a glass cube, suspended in mid-air, looking down on a remarkable space.

As big as a football field and at least sixty feet high – arched, vaulted and pure white – it was probably even older than the reign of the Medicis. Standing in it, dwarfed by the vast expanse, were hydraulic hoists for lifting monumental statues, gantries to raise and lower oil paintings, stainless-steel cleaning baths big enough for an obelisk and a steam-room to remove centuries of grime from marble and stone. Moving between them were silent, battery-operated forklifts, small mobile cranes and dozens of supervisors and specialists in white scrubs. Some workshop – it looked as if NASA had taken over the catacombs.

Almost directly beneath me a Titian was being cleaned and, not far away, men and women were working on a set of bronze doors by Bernini which I had once seen at the Vatican. But most spectacular of all was a group of panels which had been joined seamlessly together and fixed to one wall. Produced from the huge photographic plates used in its restoration, it had been put there either as an inspiration or a memento of the facility’s outstanding work.

It showed da Vinci’s The Last Supper.

It was life-size and as vivid as if it had been painted yesterday, and I had a fleeting sense of what it must have been like five hundred years ago to have entered the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie and seen it for the first time.

The director, putting on a wireless headset, pointed out two gilt frames standing against the wall. The mirrors had been removed and both of them were hanging from an overhead crane. As we watched, it lowered them into a tank of blue liquid – a solvent which they were hoping would separate the film from the glass without damaging it. If it failed, or the silver nitrate fell apart, we could all go home.

Almost immediately, a large tent was lowered over the tank, blacking it out. ‘If they can get the silver nitrate off, it has to be treated like a film negative – it can’t be exposed to light,’ the director said.

I was consumed by doubt. What hope was there really? Sure, the Uffizi had restored Michelangelo’s marble Pietà after a deranged Australian had taken a hammer to it, but even they didn’t believe you could tease an image out of old mirrors.

The director clamped the headset to his ear, listened for a moment then turned to the rest of us: ‘It worked – they’ve got the film off intact.’

As the others smiled and clapped, he turned to me: ‘They’ll encase the film in a frozen slab of gelatin to stabilize it, then move it into the darkroom for processing.’

Two minutes later, men in white scrubs wheeled a large trolley out of the tent and pushed it into a glass-sided freight elevator. I watched the two mirrors, wrapped in foil blankets, rise up.

The elevator stopped at a block-like room, cantilevered over the vaulted space, which I guessed was the darkroom.

‘It could take a while,’ the director said, ‘but once they’ve “developed it” the technicians will be able to tell if the film has captured anything.’





Chapter Twenty-eight


I WAS SITTING in the uffizi’s staff canteen with the rest of the team, picking at a meal of espresso and more espresso, when the call came.

The director took it on his cellphone then turned to me, but spoke loud enough for everyone to hear: ‘There’s something on the film.’

We ran down white, silent corridors, past a startled group of wealthy donors being given a behind-the-scenes tour, into a freight elevator and towards the conference room.

Through its glass wall we saw the technicians huddled round one of their two large computer screens, one of them at the keyboard while the water-cooled hard drives spun fast.

The director had kept up with me all the way. ‘Whatever they found on the silver nitrate will have been digitized and put on to disk. That’s what they’re looking at.’

We sprinted through the doors. The image of two people – just two people standing in the room – was all I needed. Anything to identify the visitor would be a bonus.

There was nothing on the screen. Well, that wasn’t exactly true – there was a darkness of varying shades, like looking at a pond on a moonless night. The director must have seen the distress on my face.

‘Don’t panic – not yet,’ he said. ‘They’ll use the software to force the image, then try to fill in the missing microscopic dots from the surrounding fragments. It’s the same method we use on damaged frescoes.’