Gabriel stood motionless before the towering canvas for several minutes, hand pressed to his chin, head tilted to one side, eyes fixed on the haunting image. Nicodemus, muscular and barefoot, stared directly back as he carefully lowered the pale, lifeless body of Christ toward the slab of funerary stone where it would be prepared for entombment. Next to Nicodemus was John the Evangelist, who, in his desperation to touch his beloved teacher one last time, had inadvertently opened the wound in the Savior’s side. Watching silently over them were the Madonna and the Magdalene, their heads bowed, while Mary of Cleophas raised her arms toward the heavens in lamentation. It was a work of both immense sorrow and tenderness, made more striking by Caravaggio’s revolutionary use of light. Even Gabriel, who had been toiling over the painting for weeks, always felt as though he were intruding on a heartbreaking moment of private anguish.

The painting had darkened with age, particularly along the left side of the canvas where the entrance of the tomb had once been clearly visible. There were some in the Italian art establishment-including Giacomo Benedetti, the famed Caravaggisto from the Istituto Centrale per il Restauro-who wondered whether the tomb should be returned to prominence. Benedetti had been forced to share his opinion with a reporter from La Repubblica because the restorer chosen for the project had, for inexplicable reasons, failed to seek his advice before commencing work. What’s more, Benedetti found it disheartening that the museum had refused to make public the restorer’s identity. For many days, the papers had bristled with familiar calls for the Vatican to lift the veil of silence. How was it possible, they fumed, that a national treasure like The Deposition could be entrusted to a man with no name? The tempest, such as it was, finally ended when Antonio Calvesi, the Vatican’s chief conservator, acknowledged that the man in question had impeccable credentials, including two masterful restorations for the Holy See-Reni’s Crucifixion of St. Peter and Poussin’s Martyrdom of St. Erasmus. Calvesi neglected to mention that both projects, conducted at a remote Umbrian villa, had been delayed due to operations the restorer had carried out for the secret intelligence service of the State of Israel.