Reading

=== City Kid ===
This passage is adapted from the memoir City Kid by Nelson George (©2009 by Nelson George). I am in the living room of apartment 6C in the Samuel J. Tilden housing projects in Brownsville, Brooklyn. It is 1960. I am four. I stand on my tiptoes in my stocking feet. My small brown fingers clutch the edge of a Motorola high-fidelity stereo, which is made of shiny lacquered wood and has a lemony smell, from the polish my mother applies every Saturday afternoon. I feel the bass speakers in my stomach. I smell the polish. I feel the music. Looking over the edge, down into the bowels of the hi-fi, I watch the turntable needle roll across the grooves of a seven-inch record with a blue-and-white label at 45 revolutions per minute. The song is 'Please Mr. Postman' by the Marvelettes. Not only was her ever-growing stack of 45s a testament to her love of music and dance, but she regularly held parties in that sacrosanct living room for her girlfriends and their male admirers.

=== The Lost Painting ===
The St. John is a painting by seventeenth-century Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. At the time of the examinations, the Doria St. John version belonged to the Doria Pamphili Gallery in Rome, and the Capitoline St. John version belonged to the Capitoline Museum in Rome. Close up, Francesca Cappelletti could see the damage caused to the Doria St. John by time. Over its entire surface the picture had lost many tiny particles of paint, mere pinpricks—puntinature, Paola Sannucci, the restorer, called them—not discernible from a normal viewing distance. These particles had fallen at nearly regular intervals, at the intersections where the threads of the canvas, the warp and the weft, crossed each other and formed small nodules. The canvas had been cheap, made of poor-quality hemp and carelessly woven. Still, Caravaggio might have used just such a canvas. He had once painted a picture on a bedsheet. Another time, after he’d left the Mattei palazzo and was living alone in a small house off the Via della Scrofa, he had spread a half-finished canvas on a kitchen table and dined off the back of it. But evidence of a different kind had emerged from beneath the surface of the Capitoline version, and it seemed to confirm the painting’s authenticity. The X rays and the infrared images had revealed a ghostly image—a pentimento—at the precise point where the boy’s arm and the curved horn of the ram intersected. The artist had painted the arm first, and then had painted the ram’s horn over the finished arm. This constituted a clear sign that the painting was the authentic one. A copyist, following the outlines of an original painting, would not have bothered to paint the arm and then paint the horn over it. The infrared images also revealed other pentimenti, in the folds and drapery of the red and white cloths, and in the foliage in the dark background. These were false starts and adjustments that no copyist would have needed to make. The earlier examination of the Capitoline St. John had revealed it to be in much better shape than the Doria, in large part because the Capitoline canvas was of higher quality, more tightly woven with linen threads of uniform diameter. The technical examination lasted the entire day, and for long periods Francesca had nothing to do but observe. The portable X-ray machine could capture only a small portion of the painting, and the technicians had to keep repositioning the machine, sixteen times in all, to get a composite of the entire picture. Francesca wandered in and out of the room and tried to dream up an excuse for leaving early. Correale had a particular interest—an obsession, one could call it—with finding incised lines in Caravaggio’s paintings. Few other Baroque painters had made these types of lines, scored with the butt end of a brush into the wet undercoat, and no one had made them in quite the same way as Caravaggio. He painted from life, from models sitting before him, and most art historians believed that he didn’t make preliminary drawings. In this, he had departed from a long-established tradition by which painters made detailed studies before applying brush to canvas. The scored lines, it was surmised, had served as a guide for positioning his models. In the finished paintings, the lines were sometimes visible to the naked eye, usually at a certain angle, in a raking light. Not every one of his paintings revealed signs of these marks. But to Caravaggio experts, their presence was almost as good as the artist’s signature. Two weeks earlier, during the examination of the Capitoline St. John, Correale had hoped to find incised lines.