Us полностью

I stopped and turned. ‘I don’t know how you feel about visiting art galleries on your own,’ she said, ‘but I prefer not to.’

‘Um …’

‘I’m going to the Accademia first thing this morning. It opens at eight thirty. It’s really not far. We can walk around very slowly, sit on benches. If you’d like.’

Might I find Albie there? Would he really be queuing at opening time for a museum of Venetian art? Unlikely, but would it really be so bad to devote an hour or so to the Grand Tour?

‘I’ll meet you back here in fifteen minutes.’

And so Freja and I walked out along the Riva degli Schiavoni, which was still cool and quiet in the morning sun, and I found myself hoping, perversely, that I would not bump into my son.

Freja and I liked the Accademia very much. There was a sense of the art belonging to a city that, on the evidence of many of the canvases, had barely changed in seven hundred years. Crisp and vivid Bellinis; exquisite, bright Carpaccios; and, in one room, an immense Veronese the size of an advertising hoarding, three great arches swarming with figures, twenty, thirty of them all distinctly individualised and dressed in anachronistic Venetian garb, with a biblically robed Christ at the centre, preparing to eat, somewhat unconventionally, what looked like a terrific leg of lamb.

‘The Feast in the House of Levi,’ said Freja, consulting the caption on the wall and stepping unwittingly into my trap.

‘That’s what Veronese ultimately called it, but in fact it was originally The Last Supper. The Inquisition didn’t like the picture, they thought it was irreverent — all these people, bustling around, Germans, children, dogs, black people. You see that cat, under the table by Christ’s feet? They thought it was blasphemous. So instead of painting out the animals and the dwarves, Veronese simply changed the title. Not a Last Supper, but The Feast in the House of Levi.’

Freja looked me up and down. I realise this is a cliché, but her eyes really did scan up then down. ‘You know a great deal about art,’ she said.

I shrugged modestly. ‘My wife’s the expert. I’ve just picked up a thing or two along the way.’ … from the internet, I should have said. My expertise lies entirely in looking things up, but I kept my counsel and strolled on, hands locked professorially behind my back.

‘So what do you do?’

‘I’m a scientist, a biochemist by training. Nothing to do with art, I’m afraid. You?’

‘A dentist, so to me biochemistry sounds fascinating. Dentistry is also not very artistic.’

‘But necessary!’

‘I suppose so, but there’s not much room for free expression.’

‘You have terrific teeth,’ I said, somewhat idiotically.

‘Well, I’ve learnt that as soon as you say you’re a dentist, people start peering into your mouth. I suppose they want to see if you practise what you preach.’

‘“Practise what you preach” — you see? Your English is incredible.’

‘You mean I know a lot of clichés?’

‘Not clichés. Idioms. You’re very idiomatic.’

‘So much praise!’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘No, I don’t mind. Why would I mind?’

In the final gallery we found a terrific mural by Carpaccio, occupying a whole room and telling the legend of the life of St Ursula in comic-book form. If I knew anything about Renaissance art, it was that stories of saints rarely end well. In this case, the virtuous Ursula says goodbye to her betrothed and leaves Britain to go on a pilgrimage with 10,000 virgin followers, but they’re all beheaded by the Huns in Cologne. In one canvas, an arrow is fired point blank into Ursula’s chest, and I wondered what message could be drawn from that?

‘The moral is, don’t go to Cologne,’ said Freja.

‘I went to a conference in Cologne. I thought it was a charming city.’

‘But were any of you virgins?’

‘Well, we were all biochemists so, yes — almost certainly.’

She stepped closer to the canvas, tilting her head. ‘Poor St Ursula. Poor ten thousand virgins. Still, it’s a comfort, I suppose, to know that someone is having a worse holiday than you.’

For all the gore of the final frames, it was a wonderful painting, full of colour and life and strange, imaginary cities under cobalt blue skies, with that precise perspective that is so conspicuous in early-Renaissance art, as if they had all been issued with really terrific geometry sets. ‘I don’t want to sound conceited, but I’m pretty sure that, if I’d been around in the early Renaissance, I could have come up with the theory of perspective.’

‘Yes!’ said Freja, grabbing my forearm. ‘I’ve always wondered, why did no one pick up on that before? “Listen, everyone! I’ve just realised, when things are far away they appear smaller.”’

I laughed, then remembered my new guise as an art historian. ‘Of course it’s a little more complicated than that.’

‘Of course, of course.’

‘I love Carpaccio’s version of England.’

‘Yes,’ said Freja, ‘it just so happens to look exactly like Venice.’