The Monster of Florence Read Online Free Page B

painting—no, modern paint.
    “Acrylics! In five years they deteriorate, in ten they disintegrate! Look at the flesh tones on this portrait! Look here, and here! Flesh tones of this quality continue to develop and grow to their full beauty over a period of two hundred years. A painter who uses materials like that cares about painting, not about seeing himself in the next issue of some fashionable art magazine!”
    And so on and on in the same vein. Of course, he was probably right, there was no denying that. You only had to look around the studio to see the man was a professional and must know what he was talking about. Only that didn’t mean that anybody else knew what he was talking about and the Marshal soon gave up trying to follow him. Almost automatically, the way he did when Mario the custodian was deep in some long-winded family saga, he took a step back. Then another. Then a step forward.
    “That’s funny …”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    The Marshal stepped back and then forward again, oblivious of his impolite interruption. “Now isn’t that a turn up … oh, it’s nothing, just … you know the way these pictures just look like blobs and splashes when you’re standing right up close to them and then you step back and all of a sudden they’re as real as a photograph—I’m sorry, I interrupted you …” And he’d no idea either what the fellow had been saying except that it was something about makingcolours. He tried to pay attention but he couldn’t help edging back and forward a bit, just to check that he hadn’t been mistaken.
    Determined to gain his attention, Benozzetti inserted himself between the Marshal and the easel and continued his angry discourse nose to nose. If the Marshal edged back he followed, beating the air with his right hand to mark the rhythm of his rhetoric and sending wafts of fine perfume into the Marshal’s face.
    “When I was twenty years of age and a student at the academy …”
    Lord, were they going to have his entire life story? What time would it be? No chance of that ferocious stare losing its grip for a second to permit a glance down at his wristwatch. Snake’s eyes …
    “This is a man who calls himself a Professor of Fine Arts! I didn’t suffer it in silence, I can tell you. I stood up and interrupted him. I said, ‘Professor, you’ve made some comment about almost every painting in this end-of-year exhibition. Am I to understand that my own works are invisible to you, or is it that they are unworthy of your comments?’ Do you know what he answered?”
    “I … no …” The Marshal tried to back away from the man’s hot breath and heavy perfume but Benozzetti closed in on him.
    “ ‘The only thing worthy of comment in your work,’ he said, without so much as a glance at it or me, ‘is its extraordinary antiquated style.’ The other students laughed. They laughed!” He broke off. He seemed to be staring straight through the Marshal rather than at him now. A few beads of sweat broke at his temples and then, quite suddenly, he began to laugh. A harsh and cheerless noise, it might easily have been a sort of strangulated sobbing, so that it wasn’t until he spoke again that the Marshal could be sure.
    “Well, I paid him back nicely for that one! It was so funny it kept me awake at night. I had to wait, of course, until October, but I didn’t mind. It gave me the summer to think out the best way to pay him back. Then I remembered. You have to understand that, though it wasn’t his subject, he often joined us in the life room if the model or the pose interested him—and more often it was the model, I can assure you. He kept an easel there and usually had a painting going. All I had to do was wait until everyone left for lunch, unscrew the supportsholding his canvas and let the painting fall on the floor face down! Simple, you see? Then there was the pleasure of watching him find it and his mystified face as he checked the supports. He