The dangerous secret behind this forgotten painting 5/5 Detail of Francis Cleyn's painting 'John Bankes and his Tutor, Sir Maurice Williams' Credit: Bridgeman Images The forgotten painting at the heart of The Ghost of Galileo would not strike many people as an obvious subject for a book. Neither the artist, Francis Cleyn, nor his sitters, John Bankes and his tutor Sir Maurice Williams, are much remembered today; and the painting itself does not make the forgetting seem unjust. It is the sort of piece art snobs might call “fine but undistinguished”: a 17th-century double portrait of a morose youth, lost and pallid beneath Cavalier curls, with an older man looking on, composedly grave. From the handsome clothes down to the obtrusive stagy clutter of up-to-date learning in the left-hand corner – globe, telescope, the book casually disclosing its frontispiece – it is rather standard Caroline fare. You can see how it ended up where it hangs now, “a remote spot in a dark corridor” in the upmost reaches of the Bankes family’s former seat, Kingston Lacy.