“I guess a man would do better now not to build himself a fine house or a church, or to get who did you say it was to paint frescoes?”
“Giotto, I said. But it could be Piero della Francesca or Mantegna. Could be Michelangelo.”
“Do you know a lot about painters, sir?” the driver asked.
They were on a straight stretch of road now and were making time so that one farm blended, almost blurred, into another farm and you could only see what was far ahead and moving toward you. Lateral vision was just a condensation of flat, low country in the winter. I’m not sure I like speed, the Colonel thought. Brueghel would have been in a hell of a shape if he had to look at the country like this.
“Painters?” he answered the driver. “I know quite a little about them, Burnham.”
“I’m Jackson, sir. Burnham’s up at the rest center at Cortina. That’s a fine place, sir.”
“I’m getting stupid,” the Colonel said. “Excuse me, Jackson. It is a fine place. Good chow. Well run. Nobody bothers you.”
“Yes, sir,” Jackson agreed. “Now the reason I asked you about painters, is these madonnas. I thought I ought to see some painting so I went to that big place in Florence.”
“The Uffizi? The Pitti?”
“Whatever they call it. The biggest one. And I kept looking at those paintings until madonnas started to run out of my ears. I tell you, Colonel, sir, a man who hasn’t been
