The Madonna and Child surrounded with saints and angels is claimed by students of the thorny chronology of Piero’s works to be his last painting. Though its authorship was long the subject of controversy, it was finally attributed to Piero and now hangs in Milan’s Brera Gallery. Ten figures surround the Madonna in a half-circle, ten columns of flesh and blood, with the rhythm repeated in the background architecture. The scene is situated in an apse with a full arch and a shell-shaped vault opening overhead. From the top of the shell an egg hangs on a thin line. This may seem a trivial description but the unexpected, formal element is amazingly logical and apt. The painting is Piero’s testament. And an egg, as we know, used to be a symbol for the secret of life. Under the mature vault of its architecture, this unmoving pendulum on a straight line will strike for Piero della Francesca the hour of immortality.
Was the greatness of his art as obvious to his contemporaries and descendants as it is clear to us? Piero was certainly a valued and much-invited artist. However, he worked very slowly and did not have the dazzling career of his colleagues in Florence. And he was praised mainly for his two theoretical works, written toward the end of his life. It comes as no surprise that he was quoted more frequently by architects than by painters or poets. Cillenio13 does devote one sonnet to Piero; Giovanni Santi, Raphael’s father, mentions him in his rhymed chronicle; another poet alludes to the portrait of Federigo da Montefeltro in a long poem. There’s not much.
Vasari, born nineteen years after Piero’s death, adds only a few biographical details. He stresses his expression, realism, and passion for detail, which is a clear misunderstanding. Later, chroniclers and art historians issue a dispassionate drone of quotations from his work.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Piero’s fame subsided. His name was buried in the sand of oblivion, no doubt because the itinerary of art pilgrimages proceeded from Florence to Rome leaving aside Arezzo, not to mention tiny Borgo San Sepolcro. No one knows whether the large quantity of wine consumed or the taste of the epoch was responsible for the unfavorable mention in Italienische Forschungen by the philologist and aesthete von Rumohr, who says that it was not worth concerning oneself with the painter called Piero della Francesca. The rehabilitation of Piero, erased from the register of the greats by blind history, did not come until the middle of the nineteenth century. Stendhal (not the first case in which a writer precedes the discoveries of art historians) saved him from oblivion. He compared him to Uccello and stressed his masterful perspective, his synthesis of architecture and painting; but as if swayed by Vasari’s judgment, he says: “Toute la beauté est dans l’expression.” Piero’s place amongst the greatest European painters was restored by Crowe and Cavalcaselle in their History of Painting in Italy, published in England in the years 1864–66. Later, the studies start to flow, from Berenson to Roberto Longhi, Piero’s exquisite monographist. Malraux says that the present century has rendered justice to four artists: Georges de la Tour, Vermeer, El Greco, and Piero.
What do we know about his life? Nothing or almost nothing. Even the date of his birth is uncertain (1410–1420?). He was the son of the artisan Benedetto di Franceschi and Romana di Perino of Monterchi. His art academy was Domenico Veneziano’s studio in Florence though he did not remain there long. He probably felt most at home in his little Borgo San Sepolcro. He worked consecutively in Ferrara, Rimini, Rome, Arezzo, and Urbino. In 1450 he fled from the plague to Bastia; in Rimini he bought a house with a garden; in 1486 he made up a will which bears his signature. He passed on his experience not only to his disciples, for he left two theoretical treatises: De Quinque Corporibus Regularibus and De Prospettiva Pingendi, in which he discussed optics and perspective in a precise, scientific manner. He died on October 12, 1492.
It is impossible to place him in a romance. He is so thoroughly hidden behind his paintings and frescoes that it seems wrong to guess at his private life, his loves and friendships, ambitions, anger and sorrow. He has received the greatest act of mercy by absent-minded history, which mislays documents and blurs all traces of life. If he endures, it is not through anecdotes of the miseries of his life, his madness, his successes and failures. His entire being is in his oeuvre.
I imagine him walking along a narrow San Sepolcro street towards the town gate, with only the cemetery and the Umbrian hills beyond. He wears a gray robe thrown over his broad shoulders. He is short, stocky, strolling with a peasant’s assurance. He silently returns salutations.
Tradition holds that he went blind towards the end of his life. One Marco di Longara told Berto degli Alberti that as a young boy he walked the streets of Borgo San Sepolcro with an old, blind painter called Piero della Francesca.
Little Marco could not have known that his hand was leading light.
MEMORIES OF VALOIS
Adieu Paris1. Nous cherchons l’amour, le bonheur, l’innocence.
Nous ne serons jamais assez loin de toi.
I DO NOT KNOW why Poles, a naturally mobile nation and one already encouraged by history to excessive dislocation, come to Paris and fall into a kind of trance. The city is unquestionably beautiful, but one is inclined to agree with those who say the true France is moving more and more beyond its gates.
After the traditional excursions to Chartres and Versailles, it is therefore worth visiting the lesser known charming towns and villages scattered within a hundred kilometers of the capital—M. Hulot’s auto can reach them in an hour and a half. The chain of the finest Gothic cathedrals: Morienval or St. Loup-du-Naud for those who want to know what the Romanesque is without traveling to Burgundy or Provence; the ruins of Les Andelys; the palaces of Compiègne, Fontainebleau, Rambouillet; and the forests, the wonderful forests where one can still hear the bugle of history.
North of Paris—Valois—the oldest France. The heritage of Clovis2, the little king of the Franks. With time it became the country’s most prized domain. Twice ruled by the king’s brothers; twice by princes of Valois. The land where, as a poet said, the heart of France has been beating for more than a thousand years.
Chantilly
CHANTILLY LIES AMONG FORESTS near the Nonette, a river named like a girl from a fairy-tale. A well-fed town with a palace, upper-class villas, and a famous race-course. I am here for the third time. This time to visit Sassetta. One must cross the entire town to see him.
The houses are clean and rich. They glitter like a copper nameplate, the token of a notary’s affluence. The hour is early. The shutters are closed, the wicket-gates shut, the gardens divided neatly and jealously by fences, like feudal duchies. Over a low wall, I catch sight of a vassal in blue trousers mowing the lawn of a local worthy.
The most frequently met word here is the adjective “private”: a private road, private property, private wells, private passage, private meadow. On a carefully mown meadow protected by a fence, a scene from Dégas: four couples on horseback, practicing complicated figures in the rhythm of a waltz. No, they are not a circus troupe: Their performance is more dignified and thus quite dull: in pairs, then single file, a lady to the right, a man to the left, then a circle. But what can I know of these pleasures, when my only pitiful contact with a horse’s back lasted a few minutes and that, God help me, at a folk festival. In any event, it seemed that I had brushed up against a distant epoch before reaching the palace of Chantilly.
On the way one must pass the Great Stables, a masterpiece of eighteenth-century architecture in the style of Louis XV. A huge, hoof-shaped building which in the good old days held two hundred and forty horses and four hundred and twenty hunting hounds, not counting the army of stable boys, equerries, dog-keepers, and veterinary surgeons. After the stables, the palace is much less impressive. Erected in the “Renaissance style” it has an added “Gothic” chapel whose fakeness can be felt from a distance.
Two thousand years ago Chantilly was the site of Cantilius, a Gallo-Roman stronghold. In the Middle Ages, it was the home of the bouteiller de France who went from master of the royal ce
llars to advisor to the king. In the fourteenth century, Chancellor Orgemont built a castle here, which through marriages fell to the barons of Montmorency, who were warlords and councilors related to the royal family. One member, Anne de Montmorency3, thrust his way into history—a magnificent figure of a knight, diplomat, and councilor to five consecutive French kings, from Louis XII to Charles IX. He possessed more than a hundred castles, an astronomical fortune, immense political influence, and an indestructible body; at the age of seventy-five in battle against the Protestants at Saint-Denis, it took five sword wounds, two blows on the head from a battle-axe, and a harquebus shot to bring him down, and falling, he broke the pommel of his sword with his jaw.
Chantilly occupies an important niche in France’s sentimental history as the scene of the last great love of Vert-Galant, that is to say Henry IV. He fell in love with Caroline de Montmorency, the daughter of his friend and host. The beautiful girl was Lolita’s age, His Grace was fifty-four. Being a shrewd politician, he matched Caroline with Henry II Bourbon-Condé, who was timid, clumsy, and dim-witted. In a word, the antithesis of Vert-Galant. Though the intrigue was transparent. However, fate was capricious, the young couple escaped from Chantilly to hide in Brussels, under the protection of the King of Spain. Henry IV raged, to the point of asking the Pope’s assistance in this rather worldly matter. Not long after that, Ravaillac’s4 stiletto pacified the royal heart.
Though the present palace is a poor imitation, its surroundings compensate for its architectural faults: the park, the wood, the wide, green moat filled with voracious carp whose eternally open mouths would whet even an ascetic’s appetite. France cannot boast an abundance of gastronomic ascetics, it is true, and Chantilly is associated with Vatel who entered the hagiography of gluttons and gourmands. It all began on April 23, 1671, when King Louis XIV and his court visited the great Condé’s residence at Chantilly. The immense retinue—five thousand people—required an army of servants and cooks. They were commanded by a “contrôleur général de la Bouche de Monsieur le Prince” named Vatel. After a smooth start, one day two of the sixty tables ran short of roast meats. Vatel could not bear the humiliation and stabbed himself with his sword. Madame de Sévigné tells the story with taste and emotion.
The Chantilly Gallery can match the Louvre, though the schools and epochs are so mixed up that it is hard to make sense of them at first glance. To add to that, the collector-princes (out of sheer distraction, one presumes) inserted unbelievable nineteenth-century duds among the masterpieces. However, without this collection our knowledge of French painting, especially the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, would be incomplete. Let us only mention the portraits of Corneille de Lyon5, a rich collection of drawings and paintings by Jean and Francois Clouet6, Étienne Chevalier’s Book of Hours illustrated by Jean Fouquet7, and one of the world’s most magnificent illustrated manuscripts, Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry.
To view and really take in miniature paintings requires a special disposition and ability. One must enter a world hermetically sealed like a glass sphere. Our situation resembles Alice’s in Wonderland, who opens a door with a golden key and sees the most beautiful garden, though it is too small to enter. “Oh, if one could fold oneself up like a telescope.” Looking at miniatures is for those who can fold themselves up.
History preserved only the first names of the manuscript’s illuminators: Pol, Jean and Herman. We know that they came from Limbourg, that is from Flanders, which in the fifteenth century belonged to the powerful, art-loving Burgundy princes.
We have said that Les très riches heures are miniatures, which is accurate in the way of a cataloguer’s phrase, but in artistic respects matters are quite different. We touch upon the point at which painting leaves the pages of manuscripts, and gives birth to canvases. For this to happen it is not enough to tear a page from a book and hang it on the wall. The gesture must be preceded by the miniature’s inner evolution. Color must acquire the intensity to express the material mutability of the world. The image must radiate its own light independent of surroundings and finally, attain definite boundaries and depth. In a word, it must grow into an ontological body, leave the level of simple beings and reach the level of complex structures. The Limbourg brothers’ miniatures foreshadow the breakthrough. The linear perspective is naive and awkward in a charming way, but the space built with color is so convincing that our sight steps into the depths of the image without stumbling.
July. Sheep-shearing in a lush green foreground. Our gaze travels over a yellow oblong of grain; a jump across the river and we hit the hard, pearly wall of a castle with its deep-blue roof. Beyond the cone-shaped mountains and golden hills—the blue eye of infinity.
The landscape is a partner, a character in a genre scene, not a decoration. The Limbourg brothers’ love of detail is striking. Tillage under the signs of Scorpio and Libra. Neatly divided ridges woven like little braids. In the furrows, crows pecking for seeds. Yet the picture is no larger than a hand and a castle and its towers had to be fitted in, the seeds and worms have not been represented, which undoubtedly troubled the painter’s, as his hunger for truth was truly Flemish.
But Sassetta, where is Sassetta, I came here for Sassetta. What a pleasure to find one’s “own” painting in the right place. It is small, almost totally smothered by the surrounding canvases. It is titled The Betrothal of St. Francis to Poverty. Two monks (St. Francis can be recognized by his aureole) face three slender girls: in gray, green, and purple. There is a subtle movement like the spinning of a delicate thread between the hands of the saint and the middle figure. Above left, the three mystical maidens calmly fly away with only the backward bend of their feet, like bird’s legs, conveying their flight. A white stone castle to the right is so light that a butterfly could capture it. The Tuscan landscape—gray and green, as evening approaches. Tree-tops are placed separately in the landscape, like notes. The sky falls in streaks, as in oriental paintings—cool blue at the top with a weightless, limitless luminescence hovering above the gently modulated hills.
If a work is to be judged by the extent to which it “moves art forward,” Sassetta’s painting is scandalously anachronistic and a proof of his blindness to what is “new.” He lives in the middle of the Quattrocento, yet he paints as if it were the thirteenth century. He builds a human body of vegetable fibre, not flesh and bones, as behooves the age of Masaccio and Donatello. His contempt for the laws of gravitation is complete; and his tender, linear composition places him closer to the Byzantines than any Florentine or Venetian painter. Yet it is difficult to tear oneself away from Sassetta, whose paintings radiate an irresistable charm, without redefining our vision. Fortunately, art history differs from a geometry textbook and can accommodate artists of charm: Sano di Pietro from Siena, Baldovinetti from Florence or the Venetian Carpaccio.
Huge stairs descend from the palace to a logical French garden encircled by the Avenue of Philosophers where the prince’s guests once walked: Bossuet (his speech at the great Condé’s funeral is still a student’s nightmare, but what magnificent oratory!), Fénelon, Bourdaloue8, La Bruyère (teacher of the prince’s grandson), Molière (he owed the production of Tartuffe to the prince’s patronage), Boileau, Racine, La Fontaine, and the ladies, de La Fayette and de Sévigné—in a word, an anthology of seventeenth-century French literature. Beyond the Avenue of Philosophers, an exuberant English garden with winding paths, thick bushes—a distinct lack of veneration for the classical rules—with delightful cascades, islands of love, and miniature villages with mills and cottages in which the elegant company disguised as peasants ate sumptuous meals.
As the Senlis bus enters the forest, one may glimpse the palace in the green frame of the water’s reflection. It appears suddenly, as though lit by lightning.
Senlis
Who invented that abyss and cast it upwards?
JULIAN PRZYBO9
Tomorrow, the archers of Senlis must give back the bouquet to those of Loisy.
&n
bsp; SYLVIE10, GERARDDE NERVAL
HISTORY HAS PASSED THROUGH Senlis. It lived within its walls for a few centuries, then departed. What remains is an arena overgrown with grass, a broken circle of Gallo-Roman walls besieged by vine, bits of a royal palace, the Abbey of St. Victor converted to a noisy dormitory, and a cathedral, one of the oldest cathedrals in the great Île-de-France Gothic chain.
Yet Senlis is not a sad town, not a desperately sad town like a crown excavated from a tomb. It is an old, silver coin with the image of a once harsh emperor, which you can now safely turn in your fingers like a nut. It stands on a small hill in the company of eternal forests encircled by the Nonette.
We have said that Senlis Cathedral is one of the oldest Gothic cathedrals. This requires further explanation since in this area chronologies are misleading. The initiator of the Gothic—if one may call him that—was Suger, a minister and royal regent of France. When appointed abbot of the coronation cathedral of Saint-Denis (now in a working class Paris suburb and blackened by factory smoke), he began reconstruction of the old Carolingian church by widening its portals and organ-loft and raising the vault. This was the first use of ogive and cross-ribbed vaulting, which for some scholars is the essence of the Gothic style. On January 19, 1143, a powerful hurricane passed over the town, ripping up trees and toppling houses. Though still under construction, the cathedral remained intact. The pious considered it a miracle; the architects, proof of the sturdiness of the new type of vault. A new epoch in the history of architecture commenced.
The Collected Prose Page 23