Of all the visual engines pulling the long freight train of
Western art, alone, inscrutable, regal is Piero della Francesca. With
Giotto, Velázquez, Goya, Cézanne, and several others, Piero—as he’s
always referred to, like a familiar—is perhaps the Western painter most
universally loved by artists. The towering majesty, poignant silences,
mystic geometries, and stately, breathtaking color in his scenes of
saints in conversation, contemplation, or simply standing are
spellbinding sources of awe, magnificence, and an almost immortal
optical poetry. Piero gives us the astounding power and plaintiveness of
early Italian Renaissance art, shakes us to our moral core, bringing
the intellectual, spiritual, emotional, and soulful closer together than
any artist who ever lived. I want to say Piero is perfect.
He worked and lived in what’s now called Tuscany between 1411
(probably) and 1492, and was renowned in his own lifetime, sought after
by princes and potentates. The best way to see his work is to travel
what’s called the “Piero della Francesca Trail,” visiting his hometown
of Borgo San Sepolcro, Urbino, Monterchi, Rimini, and the tremendous
fresco cycle in Arezzo known as The Legend of the True Cross. I
took this tour in my thirties and still feel the impassive profundity of
Piero’s pictorial power. Otherwise, to see Piero’s work one must go to a
handful of museums in Europe and America.
Until now. Our own local embarrassment of painterly riches, the
Frick Collection, has brought together seven paintings; that’s all but
one of the Pieros in this country (the holdout is at the Isabella
Stewart Gardner Museum, in Boston). They’re installed in its graceful
Oval Room. The sight astounds. Six of the oil paintings on panels are
quite small, not much bigger than a table lamp. The Crucifixion gathers
saints, sinners, soldiers, banners, and foreshortened horses in a
barren landscape, and it especially beguiles with its restrained
passion, balance, and sumptuous celestial color. All six of these works
transport you to another visual realm.
The last work is a fully intact large altarpiece, Virgin and Child Enthroned With Four Angels.
My advice to viewers is to throw everything you’ve got at this
world-class, mind-bending, trance-inducing masterpiece. You owe it to
the painting to take all the time you can trying to understand it—even
though you never will. This is what John Ashbery may have meant when he
wrote of “pure Affirmation that doesn’t affirm anything.”
The scene is simple. The Virgin offers a pale rose to the naked
becalmed Christ child on her knee. He reaches to grasp it. Surrounding
them are four stately figures. They’re angels, though they look like
otherworldly living intellects. Go in close, and you’ll see their
iridescent, translucent wings. Like the Virgin, they’re almost
expressionless, pensive, and serious, and they all look in different
directions—at the child, at us, over our shoulders, into space. This
creates a supercharged force field; invisible beams extend from the
pictorial space, creating an uncanny cone of calm and clarity that
envelops us, including us in its visual kingdom, but protects them. This
space produces inner suffering, grandeur, respect, and an influx of
love.
The grouping is situated in a shallow, classical setting. Let
your eye follow the angels’ bare, almost Egyptian-positioned feet up the
legs to their Greek columnar bodies to their Roman heads and bowl-like
Renaissance hair. You’ve traveled from one realm to another, through
time and civilizations, into the past and up to the heavens. The Virgin
and child are elevated two steps. They are in a world itself apart from
this world apart. Mary isn’t looking at her child and looks instead at
the rose he reaches for. You begin to glean the revelation she is
having. The flower represents love, devotion, and beauty. It also
symbolizes blood and the crown of thorns Christ will wear. This child
who will suffer a horrendous death reaches for his acceptance of fate.
Mary does not pull the flower back. You sense an inner agony, noticing
her deep-blue robe open to reveal scarlet beneath, symbol of outward
passion and pain to come. In the dead-center vertical line of the
painting is Christ’s right palm that will be nailed to the cross.
The emotional and visual power of the painting is triggered by
layers of algorithmic geometry, spheres, cylinders, cones, subtly
spiraling cyclones, and careful pyramids of space and shape, arranged in
euphonic ways that take over your mood and mind. Wallace Stevens wrote
that “the world must be measured by the eye.” Yet, in conjuring these
sky beings and earth goddess with the power of a shaman, Piero takes us
to the edge of another dimension of dignity, cold fire, pain, passion,
worlds intersecting, and edifices of infinity. I love him.
Piero della Francesca in America; The Frick Collection. Through May 19.
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