[NB: this short story first appeared in The Store of Joys: Writers Celebrate the North Carolina Museum of Art's Fiftieth Anniversary, published in 1997. Spoiler alert: although the people in this story are fiction, this does illustrate how I researched Fugitive Colors, the last Sigrid Harald novel.]
"Beautiful, isn't it?"
Startled, she looks around and sees a guard, a pleasant, smiling, gray-haired man, slightly smaller than his dark gray uniform.
She smiles back politely. "Yes, it is."
"You really like these pictures, huh? I saw you here yesterday, didn't I? And maybe last week, too?"
"Yes."
Heretofore she's been unbothered in this quiet room of the museum. Italian primitives don't seem to be high on the pop charts of most visitors.
"You taking an art course?" the guard persists. "Maybe writing a term paper?"
She glances down at her note pad. A reasonable guess. The pages are covered with scribbled notes and crossed-out possibilities.
"Not exactly."
"Reason I ask, not a lot of people stop for a second look unless it's for a course or something."
That figures, she thinks. Despite the brilliant colors and all the gold, everything in this small gallery has an austere religious cast. This might be the Bible Belt, but the Bible of authority is the King James Version, the imageless Bible of Calvin and Wesley, not the illuminated gospels of medieval Catholicism.
"Actually," she says, "I'm researching a book. Is there someone here who could talk to me about a picture?"
"That Madonna?"
"Yes."
Once the Renaissance hit its stride, Mary would soften into a real mother with rosy cheeks and rich blue robes and she would gaze fondly at a chubby pink infant straight out of a Gerber baby food ad. In the early 1300s though, Mary was an unsmiling, abstract idealization and in this case, the baby that balances stiffly on her boneless hands has the solemn brow of a miniature adult.
She decides abruptly that she has wasted enough time wandering through the museum's collection of religious art. This picture will fit the needs of her current book as well as anything else. The period is off-beat enough to interest the character who is slowly taking shape in her mind and surely one primitive Madonna is much like another.
Isn't it?
"You might could ask somebody at the front desk," says the guard.
"Oh, I'm so sorry," says the receptionist. "Our curator of painting will be in Italy all summer, but maybe one of our interns could help you."
The receptionist summons a young man who appears knowledgeable about the period.
"Researching a novel you said?" he asks when they are standing in front of the picture she's settled on.
"Yes. A mystery novel. I need a picture that someone would kill for and I thought a Madonna might make an ironic contrast to the modern art setting I'll be using. This one looks interesting, but I need more information so I can sound as if I know what I'm writing about."
"Well," he says dubiously, "it's certainly a fine example of the period. Are you going to have it stolen from us?"
"No, no. I'll fictionalize a legitimate sounding provenance. Maybe change a few details. After six hundred years, you can't prove that this artist didn't paint one more picture, can you?"
"Probably not," he says. "Especially since uniqueness wasn't a great virtue back then and artists rarely signed their work."
The young man is steeped in knowledge recently acquired in pursuit of a Ph.D. and he is happily voluble about the techniques the artist must have used. He explains how the wooden panel was prepared to receive paint, why the gold leaf around the Madonna's head was applied over a base coat of red, why the flesh tones are now the greenish gray of terre vert instead of a rosy pink, and he discusses the problems of restoration and maintenance. He even explains some of the symbolism inherent in the picture. "Her face, her head, her halo—those three concentric circles echo the Trinity, and the red swaddling clothes foretell the crucifixion."
He is patient and he answers her questions without patronizing, but she goes away vaguely dissatisfied, feeling as if she's just been released from an Art 101 lecture.
She borrows library books about fourteenth-century Italian art. Several are literate and lively, and all are full of technical terms and aesthetic speculations that bring her no closer to the nameless something that she senses she is lacking.
She returns the books and spends the rest of the summer writing, hoping that the killer's passion for the picture will become clearer as his personality emerges.
She decides to make him an international art dealer. European.
French?
Too bloodless.
Italian then?
Yes. Mature and cultured and a lover of beautiful things. A citizen of the world who moves easily between his gallery in Milan and a smaller, satellite gallery in New York. A decent, well-respected man who makes a comfortable living dealing in 20th Century European art; a warm man, well loved by his friends; a man she herself would enjoy knowing.
"Why would someone like you kill for a Sienese Madonna?" she asks him.
He gazes back at her with intelligent brown eyes and does not answer.
Summer passes, autumn arrives, and she continues to doubt the validity of the motivation she has, by default, given to her character. She goes back to the museum and stands again in front of the picture and is pleased to realize how much she has learned since she first chose it.
Thanks to that young intern and the books she has read, she now has more knowledge—more vocabulary, anyhow—with which to assess the picture. She knows this is the central third of a wooden triptych, she knows that craquelure is the technical term for the fine red lines of the bole ground that show through the cracked gold leaf around the Virgin, and she can see clearly how the proportions of the figures have been altered to fit the religious requirements of the age. "Hieratic medieval theology wrapped up in a single painting," she can tell herself glibly.
But she's no closer to the essence. Something is still missing and she wonders if she's too far removed in time and temperament. Perhaps she should choose a more accessible work? One of the French Impressionists or maybe an American realist like Copely or Eakins?
And yet—
"You ever talk to the curator about that picture?" asks the guard, who has approached unnoticed.
"No."
"I hear he's back from Italy now."
She takes a second look at the man and is dismayed by the changes three short months have made.
He's shrunk even more inside his uniform and his skin is now almost as gray as the Madonna's.
"Fugitive colors," she thinks and doesn't realize she has spoken out loud until he nods.
"Yeah, that's what he called it," he says. "I asked him once how come so many of the faces have that ashy green skin and that's what he said. I forget exactly how it worked—something about how the artists used white for light and put in the shadows with green and then painted over both of them with some pink to make it look like real skin? But the pinks, they didn't hold up good—fugitive colors, that's what he said."
He gazes at the picture with proprietary pride.
"You like it, don't you?" she asks, surprised. (And is immediately ashamed of the snobbery implicit in her surprise.)
"Yeah," he says simply. "The real colors may be gone, but you can still imagine how she looked when she was first painted—all pink and red and gold. That's twenty-four-carat gold, you know, and it must've really shined when it was new. And I like it that she's serious. See the way her fingers curl around that little foot, all sweet and tender? She knows she's the Mother of God."
His gaunt face echoes the same certainty.
"Sometimes, when nobody's in here, I think about what it must've been like back then, back when it was new and had all its parts. It used to have two little side panels, you know? See where they hinged? They folded down over this one and when it was shut, it must have looked like a plain wood box. I think about a gloomy little stone chapel where the good priest comes to say mass. He stands the closed box up there on the altar, then he lights the candles and opens it up and the Queen of Heaven glows like the golden promise of salvation in a world all dark with sin and disease and——"
His bony fingers sketch the glory of his imagination and she wonders if he knows he is dying.
He sees her staring at him and breaks off. "Sorry. I guess I shouldn't be bothering you and you trying to look at the pictures."
She assures him that he isn't bothering her and to encourage him, she says, "It's too bad that the gold leaf has cracked so badly."
"Oh, I don't mind that. It's like one of those pictures you see in medical books, isn't it? Where they show somebody without his skin and you can see like a net of healthy red blood vessels?"
He gazes intently at the delicate red lines that spiderweb the gold.
"Blood of Christ," he whispers, almost as if he's forgotten she's there. "Blood of life."
Yes, she thinks. He knows.
And suddenly her elusive character stirs within her. For the first time, she who has no faith can feel the depth of his.
And the core of his despair.
"Now you know, too," he tells her.
——— Margaret Maron
