Cimabue couldn’t have cared less what his materials were worth, that much is clear. He could see something beyond himself and he made a path to it out of art. It was he who had to do it, for only he knew where his vision lay. And it had to be right, flawless, for what is the good of a path that doesn’t lead where it is meant to? In the painting of St. Francis, the saint says, “I am nothing”; the artist says, “I am everything.” Cimabue reinvented painting by reinventing the artist as visionary, as individualist, as risk-taker, as criminal and hero. And he restored to the painted human form its softness and mortality, its animal nature and the grandeur of its emotion. This was the old knowledge of the classical world, which the Christian story froze into a thousand-year hibernation. Now it was to be reborn as something new. Humanity had insisted that a link be forged between gods and mortals, but it was a long time before this new situation could be described: there were many rigid Madonnas to be painted, many stiff and gilded Annunciations, many primitive Nativities and stark Crucifixions before the connection could be made. Now the artist-individual could paint the subject-individual, the creature who contains everything — good and evil, truth and illusion, life and death — within himself. Now, at last, he could begin to capture reality.
St. Francis Preaching to Birds, by unknown artist
There is a painting in the lower church by the unknown “Maestro di San Francesco” of St. Francis preaching to the birds. In its own way it is a masterpiece of characterization, according the Franciscan vision the full measure of its eccentricity. It is as tragicomic as its subject, for what could better illustrate the analgesic nature of insanity than the belief that one is understood by birds? Virginia Woolf, in her bouts of madness, experienced this delusion, and there is a photograph by Cartier-Bresson of the painter Matisse in old age, sitting in a room full of empty birdcages. White doves have roosted on top of their open prison: Matisse holds one in his hands. He appears to be addressing it, for like Francis he cleaved to what was innocent and childlike, to the positivism of dumb nature. “I have always tried to hide my own efforts,” he wrote, “and wished my works to have the lightness and joyousness of a springtime which never lets anyone suspect the labours it has cost.”
Francis preaches to the birds and the birds listen respectfully, lined up in neat rows on the grass. Their little heads are attentive: their eyes are bright. Like children they look up, for Francis is much taller than they. Their tiny beaks are lifted and their wings are folded at their sides. And Francis, in his cassock, speaks on, a tutelary finger raised, like a gentle lunatic in a public park. Upstairs there is a frescoed image of the moment he returned his clothes to his father in front of the bishop. It occurs to me that it is not for his godliness alone that the pilgrims come to worship Francis. His story, born as it is out of human psychology, is emblematic of the same consciousness that was simultaneously struggling to express itself in art. I am nothing; I am everything. Perhaps, after all, the pilgrims shush and glare at us for the same reason that we roll our eyes at them. It is the rise of the personal we are reverencing, in its different forms. It is meaning we have come for, of one sort or another. But most of all it is sympathy, sympathy that we want and must have, only sympathy, from bones or from paint.
We go out into the gray, heavy afternoon. The basilica stands at the foot of the town, on a jutting peninsula of land where the earth falls away to all sides. Below it lies the plain, sinking into its own flat eternity like a separate element, so that from above there is the feeling of terminus, of the sea seen from the last cliffs that are the boundary of the habitable world. We walk away from it, up into the cobbled streets that twist and turn uphill. A small, hard rain begins to fall, dashed down in handfuls. Every now and then a monk passes by, impervious to the water. They wear immaculate cassocks and sandals with belts of rope swinging at their waists; they beam at everyone they see. They look like extras on a film set, walking the antique streets beneath the artificial rain in their unblemished costumes. We have lunch in a restaurant, gnocchi made by a chef who stands only a few feet away behind his little hatch and beams at us too while we eat. The children want to buy a souvenir. We stand in a shop and look at nightlights made of molded plastic, which show the Virgin encased in a plastic grotto that lights up pink when it is switched on. There are T-shirts and table mats and baseball caps, aprons and napkin rings and plastic pens, figurines and Frisbees and extravagant embroidered wall hangings, all bearing an image of St. Francis of Assisi. It is not Cimabue’s image: it is a computerized logo, a brand. There are expensive porcelain statues, too, about ten inches high, that depict him among the animals: birds have alighted on his hands, a deer rests at his feet, a lamb lies across his shoulders. The statues are entirely white: his monkish garment looks like a Grecian robe, falling in long milk-white folds to his feet.
I myself had exactly this statue as a child. I was given it on the occasion of my First Communion. It seems strange to me that they should still be producing it, all this time later, so closely did I identify it with a phase of my own life. For years it stood on the mantelpiece of my bedroom, along with a blue china plaque bearing a relief of the Virgin Mary in a wreath of china flowers. The plaque is also for sale in the souvenir shop in Assisi. After I had left home these things remained in my room in my parents’ house, but then several years ago my mother gave them back to me: I was grown up, and had a house of my own to put them in. I didn’t want them, for I never felt that they were actually mine, and their presence in this shop seems to prove it. There was something unsavory about them, something threatening: a sterility or morbidity, like the funerary displays in an undertaker’s window. There they had stood on my childhood mantelpiece and though I never really looked at them their purity was dreadful and frightening to me, for it was clear that these were children’s ornaments and when I glimpsed them out of the corner of my eye I saw children’s graves. This was how the pill of religion was always forced down, with flavors too bitter and too sweet to mask one another. But I took the statue and the plaque back anyway, feeling that I should. When I opened the box again, all those years later, that flavor rose out in all its potency. I remembered how deeply the feeling of sterility had impressed itself on me, the feeling of Sunday, of nuns in their habits, of old bones, of disapproval and shame and of everything that could have no further issue, no continuance, in this world or the next. It all seemed to be paving the way not to heaven, nor even to hell, but to absolute and final nothingness.
Later still I found the statue again and put it in my children’s bedroom. I don’t know why I did: again, I only felt that I should. It looked anomalous and out of place, next to the little glass dolphin from Venice, the shell collection, the glass dome that you shook to make the snow whirl over the miniature Manhattan skyline. But one day I was in their room and I knocked it over by accident and broke it. I put the broken pieces in a shoebox, and hid them at the back of a cupboard.
A GAME OF TENNIS
It is late May and the days are hot now: the blue tent of the sky is stretched taut from horizon to horizon. The corn and maize have thrust themselves out of the earth, eager and unripe. They stand a foot high, stiff and fresh and green in their young sheaths. From the arthritic old wood of the vines that cover the hillside sprays of fringed, delicate, pale green leaves have burst out, and little hard reluctant clusters of tiny green grapes. In the garden there are flowers, not the soft, drowsy blooms of summer but gaudy, extroverted things on simple spearlike stalks that are the first to complete themselves in this race toward fruition, as though they were less innocent than the roses that still remain tightly packed into their pale buds: yellow irises with wagging yellow labia, vampish dark red gladioli, and a strange waxy cone-shaped flower of a volcanic orange color that stands erect on its thick, dark green stem. The bees drone ceaselessly among the purple cascades of wisteria. Sometimes snakes come out of the cornfield and ripple across the dirt track in the sun. Their emerald-green bodies swim through the dust, swift and silent. There are little scorpions too, with delicate pincers and tiny, probing tails. The geckos eat them, snatching them up and crunching through the crisp black shells with their narrow, reptilian jaws.