He had taken her hand and traced with his forefinger the outline of the doorknob burned into her palm.
“You did well,” he said.
Agnes bit her lip, just hard enough to stop herself demurring or denying. With his hand still in hers, she looked straight ahead at Piero’s pacific, prelapsarian world, forever receding, yet ever present in its blazoned power to keep their striving constant.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to the poet, Robert Duncan, whose “Pasages 13: The Fire” introduced me to the work of Piero di Cosimo. Duncan’s vivid description of the animals in di Cosimo’s A Forest Fire inhabited my imagination from my first reading of this poem. The vision of the “Angel Doctor” who helps Paul Otterly is based on a story Robert Duncan told me; in his case, the Angel Doctor said: “Robert, you don’t have to smoke,” and he stopped thereafter.
Three works in particular gave me invaluable material on the painter’s life and works: Piero di Cosimo: Fiction, invention and fantasia by Sharon Fermor, Piero di Cosimo by Dennis Geronimus and David Franklin’s chapter, “Piero di Cosimo: A Renaissance Eccentric?” in his Painting in Renaissance Florence 1500–1550. I also drew inspiration from The Forest Fire by Piero di Cosimo by Catherine Whistler and David Bomford.
I learned about the concept of darshan from Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi.
Through the process of writing this book, I was helped immeasurably by the interest and encouragement of my family and friends.
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