Imagine this: like most other civilized people,
you have more than a superficial interest in the great music
of the past. For decades you have been aware of a rumor
circulating among music professionals that a manuscript
score for an early Mozart quartet—an autograph by the
teenage prodigy—was found soon after the last war in one
of the Lobkowitz castles near Prague, having inexplicably
eluded the scrutiny of the diligent Ritter von Köchel. It
had then languished through the long Communist night in a
safe of the Ministry of Culture. Only tantalizing bits and
pieces of third-hand transcriptions had filtered out—a pale
reflection of the delights that the work in
its entirety
might reveal. Suddenly, today’s front page of the Times
informs you that, after years of musicological research and
endless legal squabbling, this 647th Mozart composition will
receive its first full performance in over two centuries—by
the Guarnieri—at Carnegie. Quel frisson!

The art-world equivalent of such a dream-event has just
occurred, and the frisson it produces is no less
memorable. One needs only to bear right at the top of the
Metropolitan Museum’s grand staircase and step into the
first room: correct, the one where those peculiar Italian
“primitives” often merit, at most, only fleeting glances.
Here, drawn together by a tiny, miraculous newcomer, are the
Metropolitan’s other magical, early (fourteenth-century) Sienese
paintings, surrounding it as if to pay homage to their
illustrious predecessor. And well they should, for they are
the “Duccesque” followers and the newcomer