June in Tuscany

I’m just back from a break in my home away from home, which is Italy. The first few days were spent with Giuseppe Ghini and family, a professor of Russian literature at the Università d’Urbino, not to mention a blogger in his own right. The highlight of our time together, besides long and relaxed discussions of matters of common interest, was a tour of sites in Tuscany in which the works of Piero della Francesca (15^th century), some of which have only recently been restored, are on display. This “master of the masters” of Renaissance art, and Fra Filippo Lippi and Fra Carnevale before him, deserve to be better known. No less than a visit to Ravenna, Assisi, and Firenze, a visit to Arezzo, Monterchi, and San Sepolcro is an intellectual and spiritual pilgrimage. For a brief introduction to the ongoing Piero della Francesca exhibition, go here.

I'm not that great at manipulating jpegs; my in-house techie (son Giovanni) is currently unavailable (he’s lounging on the Italian riviera with his mamma and sorelle, all the while reading Huck Finn), but I will provide abundant links. If you follow them, you will see what I saw.

My approach to Piero’s art is probably indefensible from the historical point of view. I treat Piero’s paintings as icons. I do not see them as much as see through them. Renaissance art, it should be emphasized, combines the human and divine, the sensual and the spiritual, in ways that step completely outside eastern Orthodox canons. In order to understand Piero’s work, one must nevertheless be familiar with Orthodox precedent.

It is an Orthodox commonplace that Italian renaissance art denatured Orthodox precedent. Yes and no, one might respond. I have in my mind’s eye at the moment the (Arian and Orthodox) mosaics of Ravenna, some examples of Ethiopian Orthodox iconography, and the paintings of Piero (in the link, click on the multi-media slide show). I note continuities as well as discontinuities.

Botticelli and Caravaggio are another matter. There is no depth to their paintings. Everything is on the surface. (And what a surface! But that is another story). 

It is important to contextualize Piero’s paintings in terms of the thought, mores, and spirituality of the time, a sense of which I obtain by reading Dante Alighieri and Joachim of Fiore. Said writers may not be the best available as background to Piero’s paintings. They happen to be the writers of Piero’s epoch I know. The artistic context, which includes Fra Filippo Lippi and Fra Carnevale, has just recently come into focus.

Piero’s Madonna del Parto is extraordinary, the tear-streaked face in particular, the face, that is, of Piero’s mother Francesca, portrayed as the Madonna at full term.

For another example of Piero’s insight, go here.

Piero’s restored affrescos around the narrative of the true cross in the Franciscan church of Arezzo are stunning (go here, under “exempla, “dipinti murali,” second from the left). The sense of history as a narrative of redemption but also of the defeat of contending narratives, that of Judaism on the one hand and of paganism on the other, is acutely in evidence. The vicissitudes of the wood on which Jesus would die, in accordance with Franciscan preaching, has become a powerful vehicle of a polyvalent narrative embracing the personal, familial, local, and universal dimensions of life within a broader canvass that takes in all eternity. For an inadequate introduction to this work in English, go here. An online French introduction is somewhat better. For excellent jpegs, go here (under Piero, 16-26. The others in the christusrex.org/ gallery are splendid, too).

The narrative sweep embraced by Piero’s art, stretching from the implantation of seed from the tree of life in the mouth of a dead Adam by his son Seth, the Queen of Sheba’s identification of wood taken from the tree that grew from Adam’s tomb as that which would one day overthrow Solomon’s kingdom, the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah, the annunciation to Mary, the dream of Constantine, the discovery of the true cross by Helena (a vicious tale describing a vicious history), and its retrieval by Heraclius in the aftermath of his victory over Khosrau II, who had taken it away, forms a vivid contrast to the rootless age in which we live, according to which, as Henry Ford observed, “history is bunk.”

History is worse than bunk. It is an ever-growing heap of wreckage piled up by an implacable wind, as Walter Benjamin all too vividly imagined. Perhaps Piero knew this too. The tear-streaked face of the Madonna del Parto says as much. Here is Benjamin:

My wing is poised to beat,
gladly would I turn back;
were I to stay for endless days,
hapless I would remain. 

-- Gershom Scholem, “Greetings from Angelus" [my translation, indebted to that of Richard Sieburth]

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from  Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

(Thesis IX in “On the Philosophy of History.” I reproduce the translation of Lloyd Spencer (which depends on earlier translations, like that of Harry Zohn, Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 4: 1938-1940 (Cambridge: Harvard University Pres, 2003), 392-93). For Walter Benjamin’s 1940 work, "On the Concept of History," see idem, Gesammelte Schriften I (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974) 691-704. Scholem's poem on the Klee painting was written for Benjamin's twenty-ninth birthday -- July 15, 1921. Sieburth's translation is found in Gershom Scholem, The Fullness of Time: Poems (Jerusalem: Ibis, 2003.))

The New Testament analogue to Benjamin's philosophy of history is found in Paul: “But however much sin abounded, grace abounded even more” (Romans 5:20).

The rest of my vacation was spent with family in the Astigian hills, Olmo Gentile to be precise. The bright Italian sun on vineyards and fields of hay, Piero della Francesca, the gathering storm evidenced in the recent blood-stained events of London and Glasgow, call to mind a poem by Adam Zagajewski, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanaugh:

At the Cathedral's Foot

In June once, in the evening,
returning from a long trip,
with memories of
France's blooming trees
still fresh in our minds,
its yellow fields, green plane trees
sprinting before the car,
we sat on the curb at the cathedral's foot
and spoke softly about disasters,
about what lay ahead, the coming fear,
and someone said this was the best
we could do now-to talk of darkness in that bright shadow.

(c) Adam Zagajewski [and Clare Cavanaugh]. All rights reserved 2007. Published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Via The New Republic Online.

In “that bright shadow” one may talk, not only of darkness, but of love as fierce as death. June in Tuscany. A fine place to see things, and see through things.

Comments

[Kevin P. Edgecomb]

John here are some resources on Eastern/Oriental Orthodox iconography:
Pride of place goes to Leonid Ouspensky, for the two volume Theology of the Icon (St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1992), sadly out of print currently. A close second is Ouspensky's and Vladimir Lossky's The Meaning of Icons (St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1999). The latter was my own first book on the subject, and it's an oversize volume with a number of color and b&w reproductions of the icons under discussion, with the former Ouspensky volumes presenting fewer reproductions, but having more detailed text, with the books in a smaller, more easily managed format. The Meaning of Icons has become something of a classic, and is probably the most commonly recommended reference for introduction to the theology of icons, since the two-volume set has gone out of print.

Two separate works by Mahmoud Zibawi are exemplary for the large reproductions of icons of various national traditions in various formats. Eastern Christian Worlds (Liturgical Press, 1995) [This volume is on sale for 1/4 its usual price as of this posting] covers the iconography of the Oriental Orthodox communion, often overlooked in favor of the more familiar Greek and Russian styles. His earlier volume, The Icon: Its Meaning and History (Liturgical Press, 1993) appears to be out of print, sadly. Zibawi, as an artist, provides sensitive commentary.

Konrad Onasch and Annemarie Schnieper have produced a volume of extraordinary reporoductions with an extensive catalog of styles with concise descriptions in Icons: The Fascination and the Reality (Riverside Book Company, 1995). The commentary is rather short, and more from an art history than theological perspective, but the reproductions in this oversize book are stunning.

An interesting study on the intersection of hagiography and iconography is by Henry Maguire, The Icons of Their Bodies: Saints and Their Images in Byzantium (Princeton University Press, 1996).

Just this week I received a copy of the catalog of the recent Getty Museum exhibition of icons from Sinai: Holy Image, Hallowed Ground: Icons from Sinai (J. Paul Getty Museum, 2006), eds. Robert S. Nelson and Kristen M. Collins. I've yet to read it, but have flipped through. The reproductions ("236 color, 36 b/w and 1 map" as conveniently noted on the front inner flap!) are absolutely stunning, better than in any of the volumes above. The oversize paperback is sturdily bound, and the paper is thick and not too glossy. It's a perfect presentation.

Two other catalogues deserving mention are Mother of God: Representations of the Virgin in Byzantine Art (Skira, 2000), ed. Maria Vassilaki, covering an exhibition at the Benaki Museum in Athens of 2000/2001. It's an extraordinary volume in that so much detail is afforded one subject, and still nowhere near completely, of course. This is an excellent introduction to iconography of the Theotokos. Another catalog is Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261-1557) (Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004), for the NY Met's exhibition of 2004. Also oversize, this catalog is limited to the later Byzantine styles that are perhaps most familiar to the general public. All of the above-mentioned catalogs are more than just pictures and descriptions of the exhibition of course, as catalogs have become these days. More than half of their pages are given over to introductory essays on history, style, theology, and so on, so they work as exceedingly well-illustrated introductions to iconography.

An interesting little historical study is by Fr Steven Bigham, Early Christian Attitudes toward Images (Orthodox Research Institute, 2004). In it, he presents material countering the claim that the earliest Christians were aniconic. I was quite surprised by this book in that I expected it to be simply apologetic, but it's actually a good piece of history, though with an admittedly theological bent.

I hope these help!

[JohnFH]

Thanks, Kevin. You are very helpful.

I would encourage you to work this up into a post of your own on Biblicalia. The bibliographical summary deserves to be easily reachable via search engines online.