The Collected Prose

by Zbigniew Herbert

  Searching for the key to Piero’s mystery, some have said he was one of the most impersonal, supra-individual artists in history. Berenson compares him to the anonymous sculptor of the Parthenon, and to Velázquez. His human figures enact the grave drama of demigods, heroes, and giants. The absence of psychological expression unveils the pure artistic movement within mass and light. “Facial expression is so unnecessary and sometimes so embarrassing that I often prefer a statue without a head,” confesses Berenson. Malraux welcomes Piero as the inventor of indifference: “His sculptured crowd comes alive only during a sacred dance…which reflects the principle of contemporary sensitivity. Expression should come from the painting not from the depicted forms.”

  Over the battle of shadows, convulsions, and tumult, Piero has erected lucidus ordo—an eternal order of light and balance.

  I thought that I might do without Monterchi, a tiny village twenty-five kilometers from Arezzo. A pond of stones overgrown with cypress trees and blue sky—like duckweed. But I was swayed by a friend’s letter: “The Monterchi cemetery and chapel are situated on a hill just off the side of the road some hundred meters from the village, where a strange car is a sensational event. It is reached through an avenue of olive trees amid vineyards. The chapel and cemetery caretaker’s house stand in line with the tombs and take their pastoral appearance from the luxuriant vines surrounding them. Girls and mothers with children come here for their evening strolls.”

  Outside the chapel is yellow, inside lime-white; perhaps baroque but really devoid of style. It is minute, with the altar’s mensa situated in a niche. There is hardly enough room for a coffin and a few mourners. The walls are bare, with the sole ornament a framed fresco gravely damaged at the sides and bottom. In their journey through the ages, the fresco’s angels lost their sandals, and some clumsy restorer tried to replace them.

  It is certainly one of the most provocative Madonnas any artist has ever dared to paint. Human, pastoral, and carnal. Her hair, pressed to her skull, leave her large ears uncovered. She has a sensual neck and full arms, a straight nose and a fleshy, determined mouth. Her eyes are lowered, her eyelids drawn over black pupils which stare into her body. She wears a simple, high-waisted dress open from breast to knees. Her left hand rests on a hip, a country bridesmaid’s gesture; the right hand touches her belly but without a trace of vulgarity, as though touching a mystery. Piero has painted for the Monterchi peasants what will be through the ages the tender secret of every mother. Two angels briskly draw aside the drapery like a stage curtain.

  It was fortunate that Piero was born neither in Florence nor Rome—but in small Borgo San Sepolcro, far from the tumults of history, amid quiet fields and gentle trees. He often and eagerly returned from the great world to his native town, held municipal office and died here.

  The Palazzo Municipale retains two works by its greatest son. The polyptych The Madonna of the Misericordia, which Focillon considers Piero’s first unassisted painting. The upper part depicts the Crucifixion. Christ is painted in a tragic and stern posture; but at the foot of the Cross, Mary and St. John possess an emotive force unusual in Piero’s later work. The gestures of their arms and spread fingers portray a violent despair, as if Piero had not yet developed his very own poetics of reserve and silence. But in the main painting, the Madonna shielding the faithful with her robe, the seed of his future style lies. The central figure is tall, strong and impersonal—an elemental form. Her gray-green robe flows like warm rain down upon the heads of the kneeling believers.

  The Resurrection of Christ was painted with the sure hand of a forty-year-old man. Christ stands firmly against a melancholy Tuscan landscape. A victorious figure. He holds a banner in his left hand while the other hand clasps the shroud like a senator’s toga. He has a wise, wild face with the abyss-like eyes of Dionysus. He rests his foot on the edge of the tomb like someone crushing the neck of an enemy defeated in a duel. In the foreground, four Roman guards are paralyzed by sleep. The contrast is striking: the sudden awakening against the heavy slumber of men turned into objects. The sky and Christ are accented with light; the guards and the background landscape are full of shadow. Though the figures appear static, Piero with a stroke of genius reconciles disorder and movement, energy and torpidity: the drama of life and death expressed in measures of inertia.

  Urbino has been compared to a lady seated on a black throne covered with a green mantle. The lady is a palace dominating the small town just as its owners, the Montefeltro dukes, dominated its history.

  They began as robber knights. Dante—an expert on last things—placed one of them, Guido, in an infernal circle where sowers of discord moan. But with time their tempers cooled, and their dispositions became more gentle. Federigo, whose rule began in 1444, was the example of a humanist general. If he engaged in wars, as for instance against the ruthless Malatesta of Rimini who murdered two wives (shown by Piero piously kneeling in front of S. Sigismondo), he did so with an obvious distaste for bloody spectacle. He was both valiant and prudent. Through his condottiere service for the Sforzi, the Aragons, and the Pope, he tripled his domain. He liked to walk alone in the duchy’s capital, unguarded (already then a propaganda trick) in simple red robes and talk with his subjects man to man. Though subjects had to kneel and kiss his hand during these friendly chats, Federigo was considered a liberal ruler for his time.

  His court, renowned for its unusual moral sanitas, was an oasis for humanists. It was the model for Castiglione’s Courtier. The Duke collected antiques, artists, and scholars. He hosted, employed, or at least maintained close contacts with men like Alberti, the most prominent architect of the age, the sculptor Rossellino8, and the masters Joos van Gent9, Piero, and Melozzo da Forli—in10 whose portrait the Duke sits in his library in full armor (but here the junk metal is only the embellishment of power) holding a huge volume set on a book-rest. A book-lover of the highest standard, Federigo after the Battle of Volterra demanded as ransom not horses, not gold, but a Hebrew Bible. His library of rare theological and humanistic manuscripts was certainly richer than his armory.

  We speak of Federigo da Montefeltro at such length because for many years he was Piero della Francesca’s friend and protector, which entitles him to his posthumous fame. Perhaps Piero spent his most enjoyable years here. Vasari, an important source on how many masterpieces were lost, says that Piero painted in Urbino a sequence of small pictures that were greatly to the Duke’s liking, though they disappeared during the wars which ravished the land.

  Piero’s diptych of Federigo and his wife, Battista Sforza, resides not in Urbino but in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. The contrast between the two figures is striking. Battista’s face is waxen, drained of blood (thus the speculation that the portrait was painted after her death), while the Duke’s tawny face vibrates with energy: a vulture-like profile—a head with raven-black hair set on a lion’s neck and strong torso. A red robe and head-dress. Duke Montefeltro’s bust rises like a lone rock against a fantastical, remote, and delicately painted landscape. To span the distance between the figure and the landscape, our gaze must plunge into an abyss without any intermediate planes, without continuity of space and perspective. The figure of the Duke falls into the foreground from an ineffably light sky like a hot meteor.

  On the portrait’s reverse are two allegorical scenes full of courtly poetry. They depict the triumphal processions popular in Renaissance painting. Surrounded by the four theological virtues, the coach of the Duchess is drawn by two unicorns. The dimmed, ash-gray landscape only brightens at the infinite horizon’s line—an evocation of death, no doubt.

  The Duke’s triumphal coach is drawn by white stallions. Federigo is accompanied by Justice, Strength, and Moderation. A fantastic mountain landscape radiates light. A blue afterglow is reflected in the water’s mirror. The allegory’s inscription proclaims:

  Clarus insigni vehitur triumpho

  Quem parem summis ducibus perhennis

  Fame virtutem celebrat decenter
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  Sceptra tenentem

  The gallery in Urbino contains two masterpieces from separate periods of Piero’s life. Sinigalia, named after the church where it previously hung, portrays the Madonna with two angels. Despite a lack of documentation, it is considered one of Piero’s last works. Though some see in it signs of an old man’s falling-off, it is difficult to agree with that judgment. One rather concurs with those who discover in the work an attempted innovation of style.

  The new light came from the North. The Sinigalia Madonna best conveys the dramatic encounter between the Italian master’s imagination and the power of Van Eyck, to whom Piero had turned in his youth as well. This suspicion of influence is confirmed by a devotion to detail unprecedented in Piero’s work. The hands of the angels, Madonna and Child are painted with a typically Flemish love of detail. The whole simple, static scene is placed, not in Renaissance buildings as in the Arezzo frescoes, but in a private interior (an exception for Piero), a fragment of a grayish-blue chamber opening to a corridor on the right side. The corridor’s perspective is discontinued; it stops abruptly at a slanted wall with windows through which falls a radiance unnecessary to the lighting of the foreground figures. It is a chiaroscuro study. The human forms are succinct and monumental. The Madonna has the common face of a nurse, the wet-nurse of kings. Little Jesus raises his hand in a lordly gesture and looks straight ahead with a wise, severe gaze—the diminished figure of a future emperor aware of his power and fate.

  The Flagellation of Christ surprises the viewer with its completely original treatment of subject and perfect harmony of composition, a synthesis of painting and architecture as yet unseen in European art. We have often repeated the term “monumentality,” to indicate the significance of architecture in Piero’s work. We must now look more closely at these matters. They transcend the era, for the loss of architectural sense, the highest art organizing the visible, is the drama of contemporary painting.

  The man who influenced Piero more than any living or dead painter (Domenico Veneziano, Sassetta, Van Eyck, his contemporary perspectivists Uccello and Masaccio) was an architect, Leon Battista Alberti.

  Born in Genoa in 1404, he came from a prominent Florentine family banished from their native town. The importance of the Albertis can be expressed in a figure: the high price offered to slay a member of the family by the vengeful and victorious Albizzis. Leon Battista received a truly Renaissance education in Bologna while living in student poverty after his father’s death. He took his doctorate in law but also studied the Greeks, mathematics, music, and architecture, which were complemented by the travels he undertook as an associate of the Pope. His fortunes changed frequently, only improving when his humanist friend, Tommaso da Sarzana, became Pope Nicolas V. Alberti was praised equally for his looks and his intellectual virtues, he was a model of a Renaissance athlete and encyclopedist, “a man of outstanding mind, acute judgment and thorough knowledge.” This is how Angelo Poliziano11 introduced him to Lorenzo de Medici: “Neither the oldest books nor the most unusual skills are unknown to this man. You can only wonder whether he is more gifted in rhetoric or poetry, whether his style is more solemn or elegant. He has studied the remains of ancient buildings so thoroughly that he has mastered the ancient way of building while imparting these methods to his contemporaries. He has invented machines and automatons, and also constructed beautiful buildings; besides that, he is considered an outstanding painter and sculptor.” His last years (he died in Rome in 1472) were irradiated with fame. People compared him to Socrates. He was a friend of mighty families like the Gonzagas and Medicis.

  He left nearly fifty works: studies, dissertations, dialogues, and moral treatises, not counting letters and apocryphal writings. His lasting fame rests upon his works on sculpture, painting, and architecture. His main treatise, De Re Aedificatoria, is by no means a manual for engineers (even to the degree that Vitrivius’s treatise is) but a charming, learned book for art patrons and humanists. Despite its classical structure, technical subjects are mixed with anecdotes and seemingly trivial subjects. We read about foundations, building-sites, bricklaying, doorknobs, wheels, axes, levers, picks, and “how to exterminate and destroy snakes, mosquitoes, bed-bugs, flies, fleas, mice, moths and other importunate creatures of the night.” Alberti’s treatise on painting, written in 1436, directly influenced Piero. In the introduction, the author warns that he will not tell stories about painters but instead wishes to construct the art of painting ab ovo.

  It is often claimed that Renaissance artists were satisfied with mere imitation of classical styles and nature. Alberti’s writings demonstrate that matters were not as simple as encyclopedias and textbooks make out. He says that the artist, even more than the philosopher, is the architect of the world. Though he may borrow from certain natural relationships, proportions, and laws, his discovery is through vision rather than mathematical speculation. “What cannot be perceived by the eye is without interest to the painter.” The eye’s image is a combination of rays which run like threads from the object to the viewer, constructing a pyramid. Painting cuts through this visual pyramid.

  The result is a definite chain of operations based upon the logic of sight. One must first locate the object in space and then describe it with a linear contour. Then one perceives an array of object surfaces that must be harmonized, and this is called the art of composition by means of color.

  Differences in color issue from differences in lighting. Before Alberti, painters played with color. (Renaissance theoreticians often sneered at the chromatic chaos of the Middle Ages.) After him, they played with light. The stress placed upon color makes it impossible to delineate form with a sharp contour. Piero understood this lesson very well and he developed it in his own way. He concentrates on an object’s inner space rather than its outline. Seth’s nakedness or the Queen of Sheba’s head are surrounded by luminescent lining like the edges of clouds. This bright contour is Alberti’s theory in practical application.

  Composition is a method that unifies objects and space in a painting. The narration can be reduced to figures, figures dismembered into elements, elements into surfaces adjoining one another like the facets of a diamond. However, this should not lead to a geometrical coldness. Venturi has observed that Piero’s composition, his forms, aspire to geometry without entering Plato’s paradise of cones, spheres, and cubes. He is, if one may use such an anachronism, like a figurative painter who has passed through a cubist phase.

  Alberti devotes a lot of space to narrative painting, but he declares that a painting should act by itself and enchant the spectator regardless of whether he understands the story being told. Emotion should be released through the movements of bodies or forms rather than facial expressions. He warns against excessive tumult, overloading with ornament and detail. From this warning Piero drew the two rules governing his most outstanding compositions: the principle of a harmonizing background and that of tranquility.

  In Piero’s best paintings (the Nativity, the portrait of the Duke of Urbino, the Baptism, Constantine’s Victory) the remote, absorbent background is as significant as the figures. The contrast between the massive human figures (usually seen from below) and the delicate landscape underlines and attenuates the drama of man in space. The landscapes are usually deserted, inhabited only by the elements, water, earth, and light. The quiet chant of the air and the immense planes are like a choir against which Piero’s deanatic personae remain silent.

  The principle of tranquility does not lie merely in architectural balance. It is a principle of inner order. Piero understood that excess movement and expression both destroy the visual painted space and compress the painting’s time to a momentary scene, a flash of existence. His stoic heroes are constrained and impassive. The stilled leaves, the hue of the first earthly dawn, the unstruck hour, give the things Piero created an ontological indestructability.

  Let us return to The Flagellation. It is Piero’s most Albertian work. The compositional threads are cool, tau
t, and balanced. Each person stands in a rationally built space like a block of ice. At first glance it seems the demon of perspective holds absolute sway here.

  The scene is divided into two parts. The main drama occurs on the left side under a marble portico supported by Corinthian columns where pure intelligence could walk. The rectangular floor tiles guide our sight toward the half-naked Christ. He leans against a column on which rests the stone statue of a Greek hero with a raised hand. Two henchmen simultaneously lift their switches. Their strokes will be regular and indifferent like the ticking of a clock. The silence is complete, without the victim’s moans or the executioners’ loathsome panting. There are two more figures of observers: one turned away from the viewer, the other seated in profile on the left. Were only this section to remain, it would be a box scene—a model sealed in glass, tamed reality. Knowing that geometry devours passion, Piero never placed important events in perspective (unlike the ironist Breughel, vide The Death of Icarus). The significant figures in his dramas stand in the foreground as if right in the footlights. So the picture’s symbolic meaning has been associated with the three men standing in the foreground on the right with their backs turned to the martyr.

  Berenson and Malraux were interested only in their compositional function. “In order to make this scene even more severe and cruelly impersonal, the artist introduced three magnificent forms which stand in the foreground like eternal rocks.” But tradition connects this work to a contemporary historical event: the violent death of Duke Oddantonio da Montefeltro12, here flanked by two conspirators. Behind their backs, a murderous intention is realized, symbolized by the scene of flagellation. Suarez gives rein to his imagination and plunges into risky explication: the three mysterious men are the high priest of the Temple of Jerusalem, the Roman proconsul, and a Pharisee. Backs turned to the event so momentous in world history, they nevertheless weigh its significance and consequences. In their encoded faces Suarez sees three different states: the pharisee’s restrained hatred, the Roman bureaucrat’s stubborn righteousness, and the priest’s cynical serenity. But whatever key we may use, The Flagellation will remain one of the world’s most uninterpretable paintings. We view it through a thin pane of ice—chained, fascinated, and helpless as in a dream.