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sp; 36
NIGHT CAME and the last tourists were shooed out of the Palazzo Vecchio. Many, feeling the loom of the medieval castle on their backs as they scattered across the piazza, had to turn and look up a last time at the jack-o’-lantern teeth of its parapets, high over them.
Floodlights came on, washing the sheer rough stone, sharpening the shadows under the high battlements. As the swallows went to their nests, the first bats appeared, disturbed in their hunting more by the high-frequency squeals of the restorers’ power tools than by the light.
Inside the Palazzo the endless job of conservation and maintenance would go on for another hour, except in the Salon of Lilies, where Dr. Lecter conferred with the foreman of the maintenance crew.
The foreman, accustomed to the penury and sour demands of the Belle Arti Commission, found the doctor both courteous and extremely generous.
In minutes his workers were stowing their equipment, moving the great floor polishers and compressors out of the way against the walls and rolling up their lines and electrical cords. Quickly they set up the folding chairs for the meeting of the Studiolo—only a dozen chairs were needed—and threw open the windows to clear out the smell of their paint and polish and gilding materials.
The doctor insisted on a proper lectern, and one as big as a pulpit was found in the former office of Niccolò Machiavelli adjacent to the salon and brought on a tall hand truck, along with the Palazzo’s overhead projector.
The small screen that came with the projector did not suit Dr. Lecter and he sent it away. Instead he tried showing his images life-sized against one of the hanging canvas drop cloths protecting a refurbished wall. After he had adjusted its fastenings and smoothed out the folds, he found the cloth would serve him very well.
He marked his place in several of the weighty tomes piled on the lectern, and then stood at the window with his back to the room as the members of the Studiolo in their dusty dark suits arrived and seated themselves, the tacit skepticism of the scholars evident as they rearranged their chairs from a semicircle into more of a jury-box configuration.
Looking out the tall windows, Dr. Lecter could see the Duomo and Giotto’s campanile, black against the west, but not Dante’s beloved Baptistry below them. The upturned floodlights prevented him from seeing down into the dark piazza where the assassins awaited him.
As these, the most renowned medieval and Renaissance scholars in the world, settled in their chairs, Dr. Lecter composed in his mind his lecture to them. It took him a little more than three minutes to organize the lecture. Its subject was Dante’s Inferno and Judas Iscariot.
Much in accord with the Studiolo’s taste for the pre-Renaissance, Dr. Lecter began with the case of Pier della Vigna, Logothete of the Kingdom of Sicily, whose avarice earned him a place in Dante’s Hell. For the first half-hour the doctor fascinated them with the real-life medieval intrigues behind della Vigna’s fall.
“Della Vigna was disgraced and blinded for his betrayal of the emperor’s trust through his avarice,” Dr. Lecter said, approaching his principal topic. “Dante’s pilgrim found him in the seventh level of the Inferno, reserved for suicides. Like Judas Iscariot, he died by hanging.
“Judas and Pier della Vigna and Ahithophel, the ambitious counsellor of Absalom, are linked in Dante by the avarice he saw in them and by their subsequent deaths by hanging.
“Avarice and hanging are linked in the ancient and the medieval mind: St. Jerome writes that Judas’ very surname, Iscariot, means ‘money’ or ‘price,’ while Father Origen says Iscariot is derived from the Hebrew ‘from suffocation’ and that his name means ‘Judas the Suffocated.’”
Dr. Lecter glanced up from his podium, looking over his spectacles at the door.
“Ah, Commendator Pazzi, welcome. Since you are nearest to the door, would you be kind enough to dim the lights? You will be interested in this, Commendatore, as there are two Pazzis already in Dante’s Inferno….” The professors of the Studiolo cackled dryly. “There is Camicion de’ Pazzi, who murdered a kinsman, and he is expecting the arrival of a second Pazzi—but it’s not you— it’s Carlino, who will be placed even farther down in Hell for treachery and betrayal of the White Guelphs, the party of Dante himself.”
A little bat flew in through one of the open windows and circled the room over the heads of the professors for a few laps, a common event in Tuscany and ignored by everyone.
Dr. Lecter resumed his podium voice. “Avarice and hanging, then, linked since antiquity, the image appearing again and again in art.” Dr. Lecter pressed the switch in his palm and the projector came to life, throwing an image on the drop cloth covering the wall. In quick succession further images followed as he spoke:
“Here is the earliest known depiction of the Crucifixion, carved on an ivory box in Gaul about A.D. four hundred. It includes the death by hanging of Judas, his face upturned to the branch that suspends him. And here on a reliquary casket of Milan, fourth century, and an ivory diptych of the ninth century, Judas hanging. He’s still looking up.”
The little bat flickered across the screen, hunting bugs.
“In this plate from the doors of the Benevento Cathedral, we see Judas hanging with his bowels falling out as St. Luke, the physician, described him in the Acts of the Apostles. Here he hangs beset by Harpies, above him in the sky is the face of Cain-in-the-Moon; and here he’s depicted by your own Giotto, again with pendant viscera.
“And finally, here, from a fifteenth-century edition of the Inferno, is Pier della Vigna’s body hanging from a bleeding tree. I will not belabor the obvious parallel with Judas Iscariot.
“But Dante needed no drawn illustration: It is the genius of Dante Alighieri to make Pier della Vigna, now in Hell, speak in strained hisses and coughing sibilants as though he is hanging still. Listen to him as he tells of dragging, with the other damned, his own dead body to hang upon a thorn tree:
“Surge in vermena e in pianta silvestra:
l’Arpie, pascendo poi de le sue foglie,
fanno dolore, e al dolor fenestra.”
Dr. Lecter’s normally white face flushes as he creates for the Studiolo the gargling, choking words of the agonal Pier della Vigna, and as he thumbs his remote control, the images of della Vigna and Judas with his bowels out alternate on the large field of the hanging drop cloth.
“Come l’ altre verrem per nostre spoglie,