I, too, recall every inch of the unadorned Central Methodist Church in Fitzgerald, Georgia. I can still see the worn-down claret carpet, a glassy white light, still feel my fascination with the wooden holders for tiny cups of Welch's grape juice, which would magically and creepily turn into the blood of Jesus as it passed through my mouth.
Sitting under the grand Mediterranean sun, poised at the solstice, I say inadequately, “Life would be different if you grew up bouncing your ball against the wall of the Orvieto cathedral.” But Ed is trying to parse some La Repubblica article on the latest political imbroglio and so I spoon the foamy milk from my cup. What if the resurrection of the flesh had been painted above the heads of our white-robed choir belting out “I come to the garden alone while the dew is still on the roses. . . .” I would be seven, thirty-seven, seventy-seven—all stages of life, staring at that vision. If I turn my mind's eye around the interior of my hometown church, I see no art at all.
When I was growing up, a college textbook of my mother's from Georgia State College for Women stood in the living room bookshelf: Art in Everyday Life. I remember grainy photos of bowls of fruit on tables. They must have been suggested arrangements for still-life paintings. As a seven-year-old, I had no consciousness that included an act such as painting. I thought the pictures had to do with table settings because I did see my mother endlessly lavishing her attention on tablecloths and polished silver and flower arrangements.
Art meant the English hunting scene over the sofa, the pink ballet dancers in my bedroom, and the oil portrait of me that scared me with its likeness and crude vivacity. There I sat, caught in the hated blue dress with scalloped collar, my thin lips parted to show teeny teeth, the two incisors pointed like an animal's. A woman in town held after-school art classes on her front porch on Wednesday. I dutifully cast plaster-of-Paris shepherdesses and clowns. The next week, after they hardened, and if the teacher's children and dogs had not knocked off the lamb or the big nose, I painted them with brilliant enamel colors that somehow soaked in and mottled disappointingly.
When I went to college in Virginia, many of my classmates were incredibly sophisticated compared to my backwoods upbringing. They chatted knowledgeably about Cubism and Expressionism and the New York School. Soon I was soaking in the pleasures of the National Gallery with them and making further forays to the Museum of Modern Art. I ran up bookstore bills for art books, which enraged my grandfather, who believed in the Public Library, at most. Lautrec, Dufy, Nolde, Manet—it was exactly like falling in love. My connection with art became intense. So it has stayed.
Watching the downshifting of light on the facade at Orvieto, I begin to breath slowly, taking in the shouts of the boys, the man at the next table completing a crossword puzzle, two nuns in long white habits, the angled shadow of the cathedral crossing the piazza like the blade of a sundial. I feel a grinding shift occurring in the tectonic plates in my brain. In Italy, it would be curious not to be intimate with art. You grow up here surrounded by beauty, thinking beauty is natural.
Art always has been outside, something I appreciated, loved, sought, but something not exactly natural. American towns often are void of art and are often actively ugly. In schools, art is usually a luxury which falls with no thud when the budget ax swings. Art, music, poetry—natural pleasures we were born to love—are expendables, fancy extras, so very non-binary. The unnaturalness comes, too, from the hushed atmosphere of museums, where most of us experience art. In Italy, so much art is in churches. Italians are only slightly less sociable in church than they are in the piazza. Art and the mass come not from on high, but with a familial attitude.
Cortona has an art gallery with its door opening onto Piazza Signorelli—his bust, perched high, overlooks the scene. The show changes every week, with the work ranging from excellent to ludicrous. But there it is, integral, right along with clothing and tobacco and flower shops. The artist sits with the show, thereby meeting directly with those who stop to look. In summer, the nearby Bar Signorelli serves at outdoor tables, and the artist can take a caffè when no one is about. Down the street, changing exhibitions of photographs are shown in a palazzo, which is also open to anyone interested who walks in off the street. Caffè degli Artisti's walls provide a casual exhibition place for young artists.
These galleries are light-years from the closed, cool exhibition spaces of Soho, Chelsea, and San Francisco, where just looking often makes you feel like an intruder. Country/city difference, of course, but in small country towns at home I don't ever see a vibrant art gallery as a vigorous part of the main street. A forbidding atmosphere is sad. Such a generalization—and isn't it true?
Cortona's signs say Città d'Arte, city of art, and it always has been. Cortona was one of the twelve original Etruscan cities and, since the seventeenth century, the town has had an active Etruscan museum. Their showpiece was found in a ditch in the nineteenth century—a heavy bronze chandelier intricately molded into shapes of crouching, erotically depicted figures. A few years ago, archeologists discovered important new tombs, and the museum now has a large recumbent animal figure and an ever-expanding exhibit of exquisite gold jewelry, carvings, and pots. A stone worker last year found a bronze tablet incised with Etruscan writing.
I have acquired, not by discovery but by gift, a piece of ancient art, an Etruscan foot. The touch of the maker is solidly in the folded-over slab of clay at the heel. I feel the indentations for the toenails, the long bone of the big toe, the knob of anklebone. Broken off before mid-calf, the ankle is hollow except for some ancient dirt caked inside. The foot reminds me of all the centuries of people who have walked over our land. Many, many people have these bits. In our neighbors' houses I have seen a Roman votive and an Etruscan glass vial, a marble head, a carved medieval door. The Italians take such ancient objects casually. Many a garage is a former house chapel, painted with frescoes which the owner keeps quiet about, not wanting the Belle Arti committee to make them give up their precious garage, home of that most precious macchina.
Even in Italian museums, most guards are dying to talk. I remember the guard in Siracusa giving a spontaneous talk on Caravaggio's Burial of Santa Lucia. In dank stone corridors in winter they're usually huddled with other guards around the pitiful space heaters, but, even then, a question will break one of them from the circle of warmth into a conversation about the restorations in progress or a disputed attribution.
Cimabue, it is said, discovered the young Giotto drawing a sheep on a stone at Vicchio, where Giotto tended flocks. Surely this is apocryphal but it points to an amazing moment in history when shepherds—and apprentices and clerks and noblemen's boys—took up the brush or the chisel all over Italy. The middle class was on the rise. The Tuscan vernacular began to be used in literary works. The painters' subjects were mainly religious; commissions for churches were pouring like vino da tavola. And while the subject might be assigned—the Annunciation, for sure, or the life of a saint—the painters began to bring to their “sermons” in the art of fresco a sweet domestic air and a sense of campanilismo, a word that has to do with the sense of community of those who live within the sound of the local parish bell, the campanile.
One senses this new feel of the familiar starting in the thirteenth century when Duccio (1278–1318), allowed the flicker of emotion to haunt the face of the Madonna as Christ is removed from the cross, thereby cracking into the static, iconographic, and formalized painting style dominated by the influence of Byzantine mosaics. One probably could trace this new, more expressive, approach month by month. Imagine hanging around those workshops, when new techniques passed from mouth to mouth, village to village. From here, it's hard to gauge the surprise of Duccio's contemporaries. Giotto (1267–1337) codified the new approach in painting and Nicola Pisano (1258?–1284), and later his son, Giovanni (1265–1314) in sculpture. Then the names unroll: Masaccio (1401–1428?), Fra Filippo Lippi (1406–1469), Fra Angelico (14??–1455), Andrea Mantegna (1430–1506), Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449�
�1494), etc., etc.
When art historians discuss this spreading realism in Italian art, they often speak in terms of the new emotion and perspective, but those are only a part of what happened: When the silly little dog wandered into the foreground of a painting, the imagined wag of its tail caused painting and sculpture to enter the imagination of the viewer at a more direct level. In 1430, when Donatello's David in a jaunty hat jutted out his bronze hip, the fluid sensuality of his pubescent body was lost on no one.
Artists were commissioned to paint churches, chapels, grain markets, banks, cloisters, city halls, lay confraternity halls, bedrooms, cemetery memorials, and standards borne through the streets. Sculptors glorified the rich with statues and local piazze with playful and joyous fountains. The people began to breathe the art every day. Art in Everyday Life. Not only a superhuman act to worship. Not only a bowl of fruit on the table.
There must be 10,000 Annunciations. The angel is witnessing the laser beam of the Holy Ghost angling toward a startled (who wouldn't be?) Mary. There's no mistaking the message. But the local resident—her basket of vegetables wedged next to her while she prays for her son off at war against the Guelphs—stares at the lake in the background where her husband fishes, the line of hills as familiar to her as the curves of her own hips.
In Crivelli's (1435?–1495) version of the Annunciation, the Virgin herself is the main focus. The impregnating light beam from heaven, so much like an airplane's contrails, illuminates her crossed hands and wide forehead. But our visitor with the basket of vegetables looks for a long time. What is that outside the Virgin's door? An apple and a squash, plain as day. And over her head on a shelf, her six white pasta dishes. A cheese box. A bottle of oil—extra virgin, no doubt—and a candlestick. From her window upstairs, hangs a wooden cage with a songbird. An Oriental rug drapes over a stone railing, with a house plant airing on top of it. We are suddenly at home.
All over Italy, they are kneeling or cooling their feet on the church tiles. In a side panel, a horse has skidded into a ravine, a man falls from a ladder, a stone wall collapses on a monk. The baby Jesus looks just like the neighbor's baby, born with no sign of a father. Ugly little bambino with a stranglehold on a bird. Or there, Saint Jerome, major man, in his study with the shadowy figure of his companion, a lion. And there's his bath towel dangling from a nail, a note tacked to his desk, a small cat. My house is your house.
A grand Cortona palazzo has been divided into thirteen apartments. Behind the Renaissance facade, the medieval house remains. Cutting and pasting those winding corridors and rooms, joined without hallways, into apartments must have been an architect's nightmare. We're having dinner in Celia and Vittorio's kitchen. Formerly, it must have been a sitting room. Vittorio and Celia have found beneath the whitewash a two-hundred-year old garden scene on all four walls. The tromp l'oeil iron fence separates the viewer from the flowers and distant hills. We admire the view as we are dipping fennel slices into Vittorio's parents' olive oil. “Oh, all the flats in this building have frescoes in every room,” he tells us, “but most people never have bothered to uncover them.” He shows us the other rooms, the tantalizing glimpses of melon and aquamarine colors where they have not yet restored the frescoes. How can they bear not to see? I think I'd be up all night, sponging water and rubbing a toothbrush over the powdery whitewash. When we uncovered a fresco in our dining room we thought it was close to a miracle. A fresco! Since then we've learned that almost anytime you start scrubbing in Cortona, you discover a fresco.
Antonio, who also lives in this palazzo, stops in for a glass of wine. He takes us to the mysterious apartment where he grew up. We enter a large room, then another. His dead mother's paintings—portraits and landscapes—cover the walls. Her piano, her furniture, her photographs on the mantel, remain. There is a photo of four-year-old Antonio on Santa's knee. Someone years ago has made a few swipes low on the wall, enough to reveal that something chestnut brown and green lies underneath, but what? I think I see the quick curve of a horse's haunch. This room obviously is unused. We go down a squirrely, low corridor into a vast room under the eaves, with a painterly view of the piazza far below. Antonio takes me into a side room stuffed with his paintings. The main room has a long table covered with sketches and squeezed tubes of paint. Two cats fly around the room and then curl together in a mammoth fireplace, where people have warmed themselves since the 1500s. Along the way, who took the brush to these walls and what was painted? And who grew weary of them, decided white was better, and simply wiped them out? Antonio sits by the drafty fireplace with his wild cats, sipping coffee and drawing, walking to the windows to look down at the piazza.
He has other rooms we do not see, rooms he has closed. Under paint and smoke, I imagine other garden scenes, Annunciations, mythological trysts, Europas, distant castles, scenes from the lives of saints. But Antonio is showing me the decorative border he has designed for someone's house, a restored house with newly plastered walls, where he will stencil acanthus leaves in gold bounded by lines of Pompeian red. In a hundred years, a woman will wake up one morning, her eye traveling along the top of her bedroom wall, and she will think no, she will think flowers, I would like to see flowers and Antonio's work will be covered by a border of roses.
I ask Antonio if he and his friend Flavia will paint a border in the bathroom we are about to remodel. I love the stylized, running Etruscan wave. He sketches a few. We decide on milky blue, bordered with two lines in apricot.
The next day, I find myself in the art supply store staring at the pristine watercolor paper, tubes with delicious names, thick sketch pads and trays of colored pencils. When my daughter was small, she and I used to set up a table in the back yard and paint all morning. She had a vigorous sense of color and, even then, thought big. She painted huge purple elephants with backgrounds of wildly splotched colors and princesses in swirling pink. Her boxy houses, with the spoked sun above, always had people in the yard and cats in the windows. And what's that off to the side? A yellow convertible. My watercolors were rolled up and hidden under the bed. The still life of a blue bowl of oranges was born dead. The fragile coral bells against a stone wall conveyed no sense of textural contrast. The immense pleasure of sitting in the sun watching my daughter, thinning carmine to pale pink and dipping in the fine tip, creating something where there was nothing—she had the flow of freedom. I was not spontaneously good enough.
In the art shop, I reach for the chalk pastels, the stack of handmade paper. The inkling I began to have in Orvieto slips into consciousness. I'm going to draw the pleasure of wild purple orchids springing up every day, the outrageous upupa, hoopoe, who lands in my hazelnut tree every morning, and the lines of the hills I can see from my study, how they lap into each other like pleats in a green velvet skirt. I've been breathing these images. And if I could deeply breathe art, I would try to paint the feeling of all the birds singing every morning splurging all their megahertz on the dawn.
I have always loved that collision point of nature with the desire to create art. For me the form is words. How to pull the scent of wet mock orange through the walls of the house? Through the ink in the pen, through the keys of the computer? The dark when the birds begin—their songs so tangled together that no one can be separated—so impurely accessible to music, art, words. Song like a riffle, a sandbar just under water, sunlight pushed by the tide. How do they know and why do they sing? How to say that although everything is at stake when experiencing or making art, that it is at the same time a birthright joy. How to paint or write the everyday rising green burst of birdsong? The levitation, the silverpoint thread drawn along the black hills, slow melting of rose, opalescent blue, and the pulse of the birds still rising?
I am lying half-awake, wondering if I've died and this is what was promised. The ache in my hind end from digging out stones from the flower beds yesterday reminds me that I am still mortal and that the earth simply has returned to aurous colors; to diffusion, then to the birds scattering from t
heir conjoined song and into their own jactations from tree to tree. I long for the creation.
This is every day, how art slips in and out.
Mad July:
The Humming Urn
THIRTY-ONE STRAIGHT DAYS OF HOUSE GUESTS. A seventh set threatens to arrive. When Primo Bianchi stops by and announces that he is ready to begin work, we call these acquaintances, having earlier warned them that we might not be able to put them up because of the restoration project. “We'd love to see the work-in-progress,” my former colleague says. “We'll stay out of the way.” I rarely see him in San Francisco and can't remember whatever conversation we had at the book signing of a mutual friend, which has now led to him and his girlfriend visiting us.
“I'm afraid it's really not going to work. They're ripping out two bathrooms. I think you'd be more comfortable at a hotel.”
Silence from across the Atlantic. Then, “Don't you have three bathrooms?”
“Yes—but you'd have to go through our bedroom to get to the other one.” Momentarily nonplussed, he agrees that I can arrange a hotel for them.
When I was in college, I used to imagine a yellow house on a shady street. The indefinite location could have been Princeton, Gainesville, Palo Alto, Evanston, San Luis Obispo, Boulder, Chapel Hill—some college town where bicycles were preferred, tomatoes were grown in the back yard, and one's friends dropped in without calling. My writing desk would face a window upstairs where I could keep watch over the children playing, could run down to check on the roast. I imagined extra rooms with blue toile wallpaper, a dormer room with spool beds for children, and a dining room with a wall of French doors. Friends could stay as long as they liked, their children blending with mine at the great round table. This fantasy alternated with another of living alone in a fabulous city, Paris, San Francisco, or Rome, where I would wear a tight black knit dress, sandals, and sunglasses, smoke thin cigars in a café, while writing poems in a leather book.
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