Nothing could be more enigmatic than the end of Piero’s career: he seems to have stopped painting. Vasari writes that he went blind, but five years before his death he was able to draft his own will. Consensus identifies his last work as the London Nativity. It doesn’t look finished, though the conservators at the National Gallery assert that it was. What seems un-Piero-like is the Flemish delicacy with which he’s depicted Mary. His women, even more spherical and cylindrical and ovoid than his men, all have the same stern maternal quarter-smile (the Mona Lisa would be a half-), as if he had used the same model — his mother? The St. Mary Magdalene in Arezzo’s hilltop cathedral is no less exalted than the Virgin in the Annunciation down in San Francesco. The Madonna del parto, framed as the Ark of the Covenant, puts a hand to the opening in her dress, eternally on the verge of disclosing what’s undisclosable. Sheba’s attendants in The Meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba talk among themselves; what they have to say is also undisclosed, though the frequency with which they’re reproduced on Piero book jackets suggests we’re all desperate to know. We won’t: as Camus, writing of The Resurrection in Noces, reminds us, “The wise one, like the idiot, expresses little.

ADVERTISEMENT