SHEBA’S WOMEN: What do they know that we don’t?
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In a century that would stamp painting for the next 500 years, among Uccello and Masaccio and Fra Angelico and Leonardo and Botticelli in Italy and Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden and Hans Memling in Flanders, it’s Piero who’s peculiarly modern. In part that’s because he’s a mathematician as well as an artist, the author of the Libellus de quinque corporibus regularibus and the De prospectiva pingendi, in which he expands on Euclid and Archimedes (notably the “Archimedean polyhedra”) and follows Leon Battista Alberti in investigating perspective. His men and women are Platonic solids incarnated by the Great Geometer from spheres and cylinders and ovoids and radiating authority and mystery; “What do they know that we don’t?” is the question they keep prompting. One thing they seem to know is that reality is digital, not analog, the binary union of flesh and spirit held in perfect balance. That’s why Huxley writes of the battle scenes at Arezzo, “It is as though Bach had written the 1812 Overture.”
Piero’s figures would also know what we often don’t: what he, as opposed to his workshop or another artist, painted, and when, and what the subject is. Of the Nativity that’s in the National Gallery Clark writes, “One eminent historian of Italian art has published it twice (in the same book) as both the earliest and latest of Piero’s works, whereas another has denied that it is by him at all.” Some think the Annunciation in The History of the True Cross is really the Announcement of the Death of the Virgin, or even the Announcement of the Death of Helena (Constantine’s mother, who in another panel discovers the Cross). In the first panel, The Death of Adam, the second figure from the left has been identified as both a beautiful young man and a beautiful young woman; one theory has it that she’s Alcestis standing next to Hercules and prefiguring the Resurrection.
Of course, in Piero everything prefigures the Resurrection, and most of all his trees. In Saint Jerome Penitent they take center stage, crowding the anchorite to the side. In The Baptism of Christ a walnut tree stands ramrod-straight next to Jesus, the Cross as his ineluctable companion, its leafy crown overspreading not just his head but also the dove of the Holy Spirit, as if it were God the Father. In The Death of Adam a towering tree fills the lunette, the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Mercy and the Tree of the Cross all in one, and Piero draws your eye straight down to Sheba’s discovery of the wood of the Cross in a bridge and then Constantine’s holding up of the Cross to defeat Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge. The Cross is where two trees meet; in Piero everything meets. The God in the Annunciation has the exact same face as the blasphemer Chosroes, who in the Battle of Heraclius and Chosroes panel is about to be executed for refusing to acknowledge God.
MADONNA DEL PARTO: Eternally on the verge of disclosing what’s undisclosable.
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There’s no meeting of minds at The Flagellation of Christ, about which the only thing we know for certain is that Piero painted it. (He says so on the base of the throne.) In the left half of the panel a Christ-like figure standing against a column surmounted by a golden statue of a classical hero (Hercules again?) is flogged before two spectators, one seated on a throne; the scene recedes in deep perspective, as if it were ancient history or a dream. On the right, in the foreground, three contemporary figures, two men and a golden-haired barefoot youth, converse, unmindful of the suffering behind them. John Pope-Hennessy proposed that it’s not The Flagellation of Christ at all but The Dream of Jerome; the evidence of prior Flagellations by Pietro Lorenzetti and Niccolò di Segna (Segna’s in Sansepolcro Cathedral, where Piero must have seen it) and a subsequent one by Luca Signorelli (complete with identical statue) says he’s wrong. Are the men two fathers receiving consolation — in the apparition of the youth, his head crowned by a distant laurel tree — for the sons they’ve just lost? Are they lamenting the fall of Constantinople in 1453? The size of the painting — too big for a predella, too small for an altarpiece — suggests that it was a private work and that its meaning was no mystery to the persons for whom it was made. But to posterity it’s as unsettling as Pieter Bruegel’s The Fall of Icarus. What did Piero, a likely flagellant, mean by this scene of flagellation ignored? What did he expect us to make of it?
And what of the Christ of The Resurrection, who stares at us with shell-shocked eyes, as if this were the “Report of the Dead Christ from the Beyond That There Is No God” from Jean Paul’s Siebenkäs? Andrea del Castagno’s 1447 Resurrection, a work Piero likely saw, trumpets a numinous, untroubled Christ standing on the tomb and proclaiming a victory that was never in doubt. Piero’s Christ, as impassively muscular as his Hercules, wearing his primrose-pink shroud as a makeshift toga and hoisting one foot atop the tomb, tells us that being born again is more painful and involuntary than he’d expected. The perspective is half flesh, half spirit: we see the tomb from underneath, a soldier’s-eye view, but Christ straight on, as if we’d been reborn with him. Behind him stretches the landscape of the Upper Tiber, its trees not converging in the distance but receding into the edges of the picture, leaving him as the only focal point. They’re slim and leafy on his left, stout and barren on his right. Is stout and barren the way of the Resurrection?
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