Out in the little square we sit on the fountain and eat ice creams. After an hour has passed we go back into the church. We show our tickets and are permitted to go inside. It is much larger than it looks from the outside, and so dark that the walls lie in deep tents of shadow. They are covered with dim forms. Are these our frescoes? We go closer: they are so strange and faded and damaged that they can barely be seen. It is disappointing. An official approaches us: we are not meant to stop here. We are to go there, down toward the altar at the far end of the church. There is a roped-off enclosure there and a large curtain and another official who studies our tickets and looks at his watch. At the appointed moment he lets us in.
The Dream of Constantine, from The Legend of the True Cross cycle, completed 1464 (fresco), by Piero della Francesca
The fresco cycle of the Capella Maggiore took Piero ten years to complete. It seems that he worked with extraordinary slowness, though the technique itself is immediate and quick-setting. I think of his sympathetic image of Hercules and wonder whether painting was in truth a terrible labor for Piero, an agonizing process of atonement, of putting right. He would apply wet cloths to the plaster at night so that he could work two days on a single section. His preparatory drawings and calculations took even longer than the painting itself, for he was always the mathematician. He would seem to want to persuade you that these two callings are one, to show you only what is eternal. Not what is explanatory or circumstantial or even real, but what is always and forever true.
He did not, I think, trouble himself over their subject matter, which is the Legend of the True Cross. This saga, which purports to tell of how the tree that grew from Adam’s body became the cross upon which Christ was crucified, is without doubt the religious story that makes its way most tortuously through human affairs. It features everyone from Cain and Abel to the Queen of Sheba. It features crusades and visions, evangelism and politics and unsavory forms of Christian heroism. Yet entering the rectangular bay of the Capella for the first time is like passing from darkness into light; like looking out from a wintry room to a garden in summer, to blue sky and sunlight and trees. It is like emerging from imprisonment or blindness, and remembering what the world is really like.
I dream that my husband returns from town with armfuls of clothes that he has bought, fitted clothes in beautiful colors like the clothes Piero’s women wear, with intricate sleeves and pearl buttons. I presume they are for me and I see his surprise: clearly they are meant for our daughters, though he doesn’t say it and allows me to try them. One after another I try to put them on. They are all too small. The little pearl buttons won’t do up. My arms strain and tear the delicate sleeves.
In the Capella Maggiore there is a painting of the Emperor Constantine dreaming. How can such a thing be painted? Piero shows Constantine asleep, in a tent. The folds are parted to reveal him there, his eyes closed. The tent is so clear and firm, so tall and shapely and richly colored, with the dim figure of Constantine inside. Though it is night, there is a strong light falling on its folds. The tent is the dream, more substantial than the dreamer. I wonder whether it is when we sleep that we are truly awake. As a child I entertained this fear: how beloved the concrete world seemed then, how horrible the lawlessness of dreams. There is an angel above Constantine’s tent: it is telling him that he must fight his enemy Maxentius in the name of the cross if he wishes to defeat him. This battle is waged across the adjacent wall, on horseback amid a bristling forest of lances. Above is the limpid, duck-egg-blue Sansepolcro sky, and in the background a little river meanders eternally through the green Tuscan fields like a ribbon of light, three tiny white birds afloat on its glassy surface.
It is only by craning my neck that I notice the image in the Capella that afterward I think of most. It is in the top right-hand lunette, a portrait of Eve as an old woman, attending Adam at his death. It is another mathematical truth, but of a different kind. She stoops in a dreary gray dress. Her wrinkled breasts sag. Her face wears that look so characteristic of the elderly, an expression of preoccupation with inalterable things. Her hand rests on her husband’s shoulder.
The Death of Adam, from The Legend of the True Cross cycle, completed 1464 (fresco), by Piero della Francesca
In the garden of the house the green geckos speed along cracks in the walls; the ants fulminate in their patches, carrying shreds of leaf like little sails that tilt and curve, winding through the dirt and grass. The days are warm now. Around the wisteria the bees steadily drone and sketch their vague sweeping lines through the air. Caterpillars inch their way across vast expanses of paving stone, workmanlike, determined, and once I see a gecko dart out from a rock and, at the end of its long journey, snatch the furry body in its jaws and carry it away.
Madonna of Senigallia with Child and Two Angels, c. 1470 (tempera on panel), by Piero della Francesca
One day we go to Urbino, the last stop on the Piero della Francesca Trail. There are no queues in Urbino: the road is too winding, the location too remote. In the empty Galleria Nazionale we find Piero’s Madonna di Senigallia, austere, gray, full of a cold northern light. It is a painting whose subject is purity, but it also seems to me to be some kind of statement. It is as if the artist is notifying us that he is withdrawing from the things of this world. In the background the light slants forever through the slatted window. The Madonna and her companions are silent, abstracted. The baby holds a white flower. The plain, pewter-colored room contains them in its unadorned eternity. Yet they seem, somehow, to be taking their leave.
There is a meeting in the village in protest at the government’s plans to build a motorway east through the valley. The intricate, ancient vista, Piero’s vista, will be destroyed. An English lady is tearful at the prospect. Jim consoles her. Ach, it’ll take them years, he says. By the time they do it we’ll all be old and gray. It won’t make any difference to us.
I have understood, I think, Piero’s message, though its tidings are not of joy. It is at once more rational than joy and more beautiful. It is that you must seek a truth that lies beyond human concerns. I keep this with me as the days pass. The white birds on the water; the light slanting through the window. The man rising from his tomb, full of a terrible knowledge.
THE CASTLE
The children look at the castle across the valley. In the mornings we sit with them on the terrace doing schoolwork. We do maths, long pages of sums which they complete in their spidery handwriting. We do painting. We read aloud. The castle stands there, mystical and golden, its crenellations etched in shadow, and every so often they glance up at it. By now its romance is more real to them than their maths. They spring up from the table and run off to climb the cherry tree in the garden.