There was an antidote for this poisonous melancholia, one he had first learned as a young apprentice from his master Cosimo Rosselli. His master was always much fascinated with the hermetic process of making gold from base matter. Indeed, it sometimes seemed to Piero that hunting out obscure secrets of alchemy meant more to Cosimo Rosselli than did the art of his fescoes, even those on which they had laboured for Pope Sixtus IV in the Sistine Chapel in Rome. His master early instructed him in the most essential paradox of the arcane science. The nigredo, the spirit’s most pitch-black state, Rosselli told him, was necessary precondition for the lustrous gold. So Piero struggled to remind himself each time he felt the smothering coils of melancholia grip his soul, and its deadly torpor numb his limbs. He had learned he must suffer these states, groping through blackness like a blind man confined in a room not his own, until at last he perceived a sliver of light.
This light came sometimes in the form of a fleeting mental visitation, a face or figure or scene that by its particular refinement, purity and calm, restored him to himself. Once, it was a vision of the young Saint John the Baptist. The saint he saw was barely more than a boy, with rounded cheeks and lips and a tousled mass of curls covering all but the very tip of his ear. Later that day, Piero took up his brush and strove to replicate the profile of this boy he had seen. He wanted most especially to capture his mild and steadfast gaze that radiated outward, Piero was sure, to embrace the Lamb of God. In the finished painting, he had shown the whiteness of the lamb reflected in a crescent gleam upon the boy’s throat.
Sometimes the light that penetrated and roused him from his melancholy was as close as his own window shutter where the sun gilded a slat. This lustre called to him and stirred his blood. He would fling open the shutters and stare amazed at the tumultuous greenery of his garden: the leaves of the grape vines and of the fig trees profuse and shining and wild. Here, at his very doorstep, nature followed her own course freely, for he refused to let anyone prune his fruit trees or cut back the vines. What right had he to make sap bleed or blight the forms that nature made? He would settle himself outside upon a three-legged stool and take up again the study that was the root of his being and his art, breathing in the emerald air and the pungent mint that grew thick at his feet. Within the compass of the following hour, he would be attentive to every species of vegetable or creature life he saw inside the boundary of his garden, no matter how minute. And thus he would find himself healed, the murk of his despondency shed like a filthy garment, his mind lifted up by the sight of an ant’s forefoot or the filigreed fretwork of a cricket’s wing.
Yes, he thought, it was always in the secular kingdom of animals, birds and insects that he found his sure salvation. No human touch or voice could cure him as these creatures did, or cause him such unselfish joy. This was why he would continue to lament sorely the senseless death of the Medici giraffe. A glimpse of that dear creature’s rare form would be more welcome to him than a vision of God’s angels. Piero did not consider this a sacrilege. Nor did he think it wrong that, in the portrait he imagined, the giraffe would cast his glow of goodness upon every other creature and, by his gentle nature, bind element to element. His unspotted soul would generate a light to pour forth and bless every object in the world of the canvas: the tiny horse that accompanies him and mimics his gait; the birds of the air; and the turbaned man and his wife in a red cloak, who sit together on the ground adoring their new baby. The light from the giraffe’s eye will also touch a gracious youth upon a white horse who watches bemusedly as the two full-fleshed, aged gods demonstrate how metal is made.
The cricket on its hearth-stone watches in his turn a young man who sleeps in the foreground of the painting. This youth is utterly naked, and he sleeps the untroubled sleep of a child, his arms folded easily about his midriff, and his knees drawn up so that he presents himself in all modesty, but also in utter trust. Piero sees that it is this naked, sleeping youth, his face and body turned toward the viewer, who most eloquently declares the innocence of this time and place, this world that flows out of the pure gaze of the Medici giraffe.
It is a world where fire, the terrible transforming element whose extremes Piero dreads above all else, is mastered and confined in the shell-shaped hearth of the gods to warm and hearten humankind. That confinement of the yearning flames is a sign to him that this place will keep its holiness.
As a boy, Piero had been fated to witness the worst that fire can do. Out of a leaden sky the bolt struck, so fast and furious he felt its heat upon his lips and the fine hair stand up on his wrists. He was walking in the woods outside the city, hoping he might spy a boar or a bear. What he saw instead was the death throes of a great ox, felled where it stood by a second bolt of lightning. He would never forget the sound of the animal’s piteous bellowing as it sank to its knees. There was a moment when he saw what no human being should see: the organs and the bones of the beast lit up as if for some ghastly spectacle designed by devils who delight in pain. The animal’s skin began to burn and to peel away from its frame in long bubbling strips. Yet still it bellowed and still the boy Piero cursed himself that he could do nothing to abate its agony.
That was why, even as a grown man, he shuddered violently and shrank into himself whenever he heard the doleful rumble of thunder. He knew there were those in the city who mocked and reviled him for this fear and for other of his habits they considered strange. The truth was he did not care what they thought of him. They did not see the things he saw: whether of the dark or the light. They did not wake in the night, with the sweat pooling on their chests and in the palms of their hands, because they have had a vision of all the forests of the world burning. They did not see men and women and animals fleeing a world on fire, all of them labouring to speak aloud the heavy grief upon their hearts. Or was it something else they tried to tell him? His own tongue was swollen in his mouth when he woke from these dreams of The Great Burning. He too laboured to speak, and could not. And so he would take up his red chalk and paper from beside the bed and begin to sketch shapes fantastic and majestic: forms that had beguiled him on days previous in the massed and drifting clouds of dawn — persons and creatures and creature-persons that other men might think monstrous, but that he found glorious. As he saw the images in his mind take shape upon the paper, he knew himself, despite his fits of despondency and his solitary nature, to be greatly blessed.
Through work and an abiding humility, he might yet help to prevent the mighty conflagration he witnessed in the thick forests of his dreams.
THREE
Out with the Toads
AT FIRST LIGHT, THE CROWS swooped over the gabled roofs of the town. Sometimes, as she stood watching from the tall window of her college dorm, Agnes would imagine that the birds had just been shaken loose from the cradling hand of God. That was why they looked joyous as they poured out of the east and over the houses.
She recognized the shape and surge of her own happiness when she looked at the birds. She still could not quite believe she was here; that she had won a scholarship for a full four years at one of the finest liberal arts colleges in North America. Everything was new. It was as if she had stepped through one of the magical doors in the children’s stories her mother used to read to her and Phoebe. She had always assumed, even then, that it was only lovely, golden Phoebe who would be able to pass through the doors into the dewy lands of fairies and talking animals.
Yet she had found the latch. She had passed through into this dear place where the trees were burnished and every book she touched brought the thrill of imminent discovery. Burckhardt. Ovid. Pico della Mirandola. Panofsky. And, of course, every scholarly article she could find on Piero di Cosimo. It was to him she owed her scholarship and her new life. She had written a paper on the painter that her art teacher had passed on to an academic board she hadn’t known existed. Then, with her teacher’s help, she had reworked the paper into a full-blown thesis, most of which she could still recite by heart:
“Th
e Piero di Cosimo known to most Renaissance art scholars is an eccentric misanthrope who cannot stand the sound of church bells or of crying babies, and who eats nothing but hard-boiled eggs, which he cooks fifty at a time. He deliberately leaves the vines and fruit trees of his garden straggling and unkempt. He is best known for his fantasia, an imagination that spawned the monsters, satyrs, centaurs and other unreal creatures that sport, love, laugh and fight inside the confines of his canvases and decorative panels. Had Piero striven to keep the wilder excesses of his imagination in check, had he been less ‘brutish’ (bestiale) in his personal conduct and domestic arrangements, he would have been a far greater painter, a master who could have rivalled the stature of Leonardo da Vinci himself.”
This is the judgement on Piero di Cosimo’s work and character that has been passed down through the centuries by Giorgio Vasari in his influential Lives of the Artists. But Vasari, a highly mannered and largely passionless painter of the Late Renaissance, had a particular agenda to promote in his essays on the Italian masters of the generation prior to his own. What Vasari desired above all else was the “professionalization” of the artist in his society. He wanted his noble and wealthy patrons to relate to him as a social equal, and he sought to be as courtly, well-mannered, well-spoken and well-dressed as they were.
On all these scores, Piero di Cosimo fell vastly short according to Vasari, and he therefore makes Piero his scapegoat. By emphasizing di Cosimo’s alleged eccentricity and brutish behaviour, and his flaunting of patrons’ specifications, Vasari conjures up an image of all that an artist ought not to be. It is this propagandistic word portrait of an unkempt and ill-mannered eccentric with a penchant for bizarre grotesquerie that has infected perceptions of this remarkable artist up to the present.
In her historical novel Romola, for example, George Eliot introduces Piero di Cosimo as a minor character, drawing heavily on Vasari’s characterization. Eliot’s Piero is curmudgeonly. He lives in squalor, and co-habits not just with rabbits and doves, but also with a trio of corpulent toads. In the twentieth century, W. H. Auden likewise seizes on Vasari’s notion of di Cosimo as bestial, and implies that the painter was also sadistic and blood-thirsty. His poem “Woods” opens with a description of “those primal woods that Piero di Cosimo loved to draw, where nudes, bears, lions, sows with women’s heads / Mounted and murdered and ate each other raw . . . :”
My thesis is that Auden, Eliot, and most certainly Vasari, all misconstrue and misrepresent an artist who believed in, and delighted in depicting, the power, beauty and moral superiority of the animal kingdom. In the painting to which Auden refers (The Hunt, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), it is in fact men who are the murderers. As if in response to their brutality, the forest setting of The Hunt has begun to blaze. Masses of yellow-black smoke blight the far horizon. There is an ominous red glow between the trees just behind the male hunters, who carry on their grim business, oblivious to the threat of conflagration.
Piero di Cosimo pursues this trope in The Forest Fire (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), which some astute scholars now recognize as one of the great masterpieces of the Florentine Renaissance for its drama, sfumato, vivid coloration and disturbingly memorable images of the threatened wildlife. Of the scores of animals and birds who flee the flames, or who stand rooted in the foreground uncertain where to run, two have human faces. One of these is a roe deer, whose profile is that of a bearded Florentine youth. The other is a wild boar, whose grey shoulders and flanks glimmer as if lit from within. The human face the wild boar shows us, framed by luxuriantly flowing hair, could be either male or female. The gentle eyes look out at us from a countenance that is consummately serene and philosophical in the midst of duress and danger.
Is this the face of Piero di Cosimo himself? If so, what truths does he have to impart about the mystery of fire, and the conjoining of human and animal forms and souls? These questions remain, for now, tantalizing ambiguities at the heart of this extraordinary painter’s finest work.”
Agnes would never forget how all three of her examiners nodded as she came to this conclusion.
“Indeed,” said the slim, elegant man who sat in the middle of the three renowned scholars who had listened to her so attentively. “Tantalizing ambiguity. Quite so. You obviously have your subject, Ms. Vane, and your work ahead cut out for you.”
All three had smiled at her graciously when Agnes left the room. At that moment, she’d been happier than ever before in her life, even more so perhaps than when the letter arrived three weeks later informing her she had won the scholarship.
“You obviously have your subject, Ms. Vane, and your work ahead cut out for you.”
She recited these words to herself often, and each time she would see the wild boar with the gentle human face she believed to be Piero di Cosimo’s. He looked out at her with benevolence and a sorrowful wisdom, while behind him the fleet deer ran to the east and to the west, and the trees put forth their long ruby tongues of flame.
FOUR
Pinto
FOR MANY YEARS, PINTO HAD been at war with his own rage. He had come to think of it as a firestorm he must always be damping down as fast as he could. If ever he were to let his fury escape and flare outside the confines of his body, he knew he could do great harm. He was a large man, and strong. He was terrified of the damage he might do. Sometimes, when he was walking, he would picture his interior glowing like the dull black-red of a coiled stove burner turned on high. This thought made him wince, and unconsciously all his muscles contracted, right down to his sphincter.
Yet no one seeing this ambling big-bodied young man would have guessed at the battle he waged within himself for hours every day. In fact, it was words like “pacific”, “benign”, and “beatific” that came to his professors and fellow students when they wanted to describe Peter (Pinto) Dervaig. This was because his broad face with its heavy-lidded eyes and sweet mouth seemed always to be smiling. Some people thought he resembled storybook drawings of the Man in the Moon. Others looked at him and saw a huge stone Buddha come to life. Wasn’t it wonderful, many people at the college remarked, that such a big man emanated such gentleness, and despite his affliction? Pinto suffered from abnormal skin pigmentation. Large patches of his flesh, particularly on his face, were markedly different colours: pale rose, mocha, and a light green shade almost identical to pistachio. He looked piebald, and that meant it was impossible for any sighted person not to stare on first encountering him.
These days, Pinto often comforted himself that the worst years of his affliction were behind him. Not that his condition had improved, or any of his various patches of colour faded. The pink, the mocha and the green were, if anything, more vivid and clearly demarked than ever. When he was younger, and of course much smaller, people had scrutinized his face long, hard and unfeelingly, as if he were a bizarre object on display in a museum, but now, at the age of twenty, he had the protective advantages of his great height and obvious strength. And he had discovered, too, a wondrous fact, that in the academic setting of a small liberal arts college of sterling reputation, even strangers were inclined to give him the respectful treatment he had yearned for as a small boy when he used to pray ardently each night that the following day would be overcast because on dull days, and most especially on rainy ones, passersby were far less likely to notice his strange complexion.
At school, he had learned to endure. “Yuck!” “Ugh!” “Are you for real?” were the least offensive of the comments he heard each day. The most barbaric remarks he had trained himself to block out altogether. Because his peers feared his condition might be contagious, they would not touch him. Indeed, he was always surrounded by his own ring of space. He taught himself to go deep within, to retreat to an inner world of dream and reflective thought. He became a voracious reader. Among the books inherited from his grandfather were ancient paperback Westerns by a man with the wonderful name of Zane Grey. It was in these books that Peter came across the pinto horse, recognized his
own image and renamed himself.
Because what he most yearned for was simple kindness and the respect one creature willingly gives another, he also read all he could about the world’s religions. He took on the perplexing study of ethics when he was just eleven. He decided he wanted to be a “good man,” by which he meant never deliberately to make another living being suffer, and to help others where he could and they were open to his doing so. He believed he could be content if he could just learn to be as decent and guileless as his beloved dog, Yangtze. She was a red chow crossed with a Labrador so that instead of having a squashed pug face, her nose was long. Yangtze had the indigo tongue of the chow and exotic, black-rimmed eyes. She never learned to bark. Instead, she howled, often at things invisible and at inconvenient hours. She also had a low and thrilling growl that she turned on nearly all other dogs, and most people. She was not at all vicious, only superbly defensive — of herself and of Pinto. She liked to show off for him, becoming a red blur as she ran around the outside of the house. Then she would stop abruptly and dance toward him, her curved fan-like tail and thick skirts of fur swaying. He would bury his face in her thick, dry, briny fur. He felt safe there. He loved her unstintingly and in the depths of her lovely eyes he saw his affection returned. He believed no other creature would ever love him with such intensity and loyalty.
He sometimes wondered if his mother loved him at all, or if she saw him largely as a burden with which she had been unfairly inflicted, but that she shouldered out of an ingrained duty. When he was very young, and his mother brought friends home, she would ask him to stay in his room and not show himself at all. She would even provide him with a plastic bucket so that he did not have to come out to use the toilet. She had tried hard to make these occasions pleasurable, getting him little treats, like big bars of chocolate and rented movies. He must watch these very quietly, she told him. He was an obedient child and eager to please her. Yet he sensed the truth of the matter: that she was ashamed of his appearance and did not want to have to explain his disfigurement to her friends.
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