Black Arts

By Patricia Blake

THE CARAVAGGIO CONSPIRACY by Peter Watson Doubleday; 321 pages; $17.95

Early one morning in October 1969, outside the Oratorio of San Lorenzo in Palermo, Sicily, the chapel's caretaker watched in bewilderment as a cat scuttled into the sanctuary through a wide-open door. The building should have been secured against felines, and thieves as well. During the previous night, however, intruders had forced a shutter of one of the chapel windows. Once inside, they cut away the altarpiece with a razor blade and marched out the front door with their prize: an 8-ft. by 7-ft. canvas, the Nativity, painted by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio in 1609. The uninsured masterwork was valued at $3 million.

Ten years later, when British Journalist Peter Watson set out to find the painting, Italian authorities had long since written it off. The Caravaggio Conspiracy is Watson's enthralling account of that search, which led him perilously deep into the byways of the international art underworld. Among the astonishing facts he uncovered is that most art thefts are pulled off with as little difficulty as the Caravaggio caper in Palermo. In Italy alone, 44,000 works of art disappear each year. Indeed, during Watson's dogged investigation, enough masterpieces were purloined from churches, galleries and private homes to furnish a museum. The odds on retrieving the Caravaggio were minuscule. In Italy, only 10% of recorded stolen art is ever recovered; in the U.S. the rate is 13%.

Watson was not put off by numbers.

He decided to pose as Art Dealer "John Blake," with an interest in 17th century Italian painting, pretending to have many rich clients and no moral scruples. Once word of his corruptibility got around the art world, Watson reckoned, he would be offered stolen pictures, including, some day, the Caravaggio.

The undercover man was advised on how to establish his credentials as a crooked art dealer by two former members of Scotland Yard's art squad. The names of some suspected thieves were supplied by the late Rodolfo Siviero, who directed Italy's attempts to recover its stolen art. Also secretly cooperating with Watson were five major U.S. and British art dealers.

With these experts' connivance, Watson adopted a new identity based on false documents and stationery filched from New York City's Metropolitan Museum. To help people in the art world remember him easily, Watson flaunted a quirky bow tie and cultivated a limp by wearing an excruciatingly tight pair of Italian shoes.

An adviser helped him cover up his lamentable ignorance of art by drilling him in such classic art dealers' displays of expertise as spitting on a finger, then rubbing it over a part of an old painting to see how it might look when cleaned.

The underworld rose to the bait. First shady dealers, then smugglers and fences and, finally, the thieves themselves came forward to offer him hot merchandise, including pictures purportedly by Tintoretto, Renoir, Van Gogh and Modigliani. Watson had difficulty in authenticating these works as stolen art, with good reason. Most were forgeries.

The big break came when, acting on a tip from an Italian art detective, Watson finally made contact with a Neapolitan dealer who put him in touch with the Italians who had stolen the Caravaggio. The story of his negotiations with these thugs testifies to Watson's courage and ingenuity. The climax came during a tempestuous meeting in the hilltop village of Laviano in southern Italy. There, in November 1980 the thieves agreed to bring the picture from Sicily to Laviano in two days' time so that Watson could see it. Later, when the time and place of delivery and payment were finally arranged, Watson planned to alert the Italian police.

But history, geography and nature had other plans, and no thriller with manufactured irony could provide a better ending. On the eve of the meeting in Laviano, as Watson waited in his Naples hotel, a tremor seized southern Italy and shook it like an old boot. The famous earthquake of 1980 had begun. When it subsided a week later, Watson went to Laviano. Still in his disguise as Blake, he hobbled up the hill to the village in his excruciating shoes. At the summit he saw nothing but a vast expanse of rubble. The Caravaggio and the thieves were never heard from again; they were presumably buried under the stones. --By Patricia Blake