THE TUSCAN MASTER
All excerpts below from the book by Peter Adamson
Autographed copies of The Tuscan Master are available through this website.
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THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST - Sansepolcro
"
After the crucifixion the authorities suspect that Christ's followers might steal the body and tell the crowd he's risen from the dead. So they send soldiers to guard the tomb. But the guards fall asleep. And as they sleep, Christ rises. It's a familiar episode in art, in painting, though in fact there's no mention of it anywhere in the New Testament…….
All artists at this time worked to commission. They painted to order. And the order here was for a conventional resurrection scene. A tomb. Christ rising with the flag. Four soldiers who have fallen asleep. It was probably chosen because the town's name, Sansepolcro, means holy sepulchre….
But like all great artists, Piero rises above the commission. Look first at the soldiers below the tomb, at their sleeping faces and bodies. Imagine falling asleep yourself, unintentionally. Eventually you wake up, a little bit confused, a little bit embarrassed. Because of the way you probably looked when you were asleep. The muscles of the face slack, the head lolled to one side like the soldier on the left, mouth dropping open like the soldier with the helmut. And there's also that uneasy, primeval feeling that while you were asleep you were vulnerable, defenceless; that anyone could do anything to you, cut your throat maybe, especially if it was exposed by your head falling backwards, like the soldier on the right….
Piero has brought in all of these things, all of these conscious and subconscious feelings about falling asleep. And he's used them to create an image of human vulnerability, a portrait of human weakness, a study in lack of control……
Now let your eyes rise up to the figure of Christ.
For almost the first time we see Christ not as some refined unearthly figure, but as a man, as a Tuscan peasant. If you sit for a few minutes outside the bar in the Via XX Settembre this lunchtime you'll see him walk by. Piero didn't want a refined, ethereal Christ here. What he wanted was strength. Strength of body and strength of feature. Strength of mind and strength of purpose. An image of Christ that would contrast totally with the image of human weakness below. So he created this Christ of uprights, of strong verticals to set against the slackness of line in the soldiers. Look at the verticles of the flagstaff, the long straight nose, the tendons and shadows in the neck continuing the line of the beard, running into the strong vertical down the very centre of the body, through the middle of the breast and between the ribs. Look at the leg, upright and powerful, poised to push out of the tomb. See how firmly the foreshortened foot rests on the stone edge. These straights, these lengths, this unwavering and absolute control of composition are what create the inevitability, the invincibility of this rising, the irrestibility of this advance into the world ... "
THE PREGNANT MADONNA - Monterchi
"
The building had no history, had only ever been a schoolroom, a municipal store, a council office; yet all who entered responded in the same way, as if it were a holy of holies, an inner sanctum, almost as if they were in the presence, not of a painting, but of the pregnant Madonna herself in her swollen gown. A quiet, a stillness with only the faint tireless hum from the current that controlled temperature and humidity. He looked up at the fresco, paying it the unstinted respect that was its due, certain again of the invisible thread that ran through time, linking them all, the artists and sculptors, the writers and musicians, the ones who sculptors, the writers and musicians, the ones who had felt the fineness of life upon the pulse, the ones who had stood on the edge and not been afraid, the ones who had remained poised there long enough to share the incomplete everlasting moment.
The angels of course are wonderfully done. The pose, the modelling of the heads, the unwanting expressions, the satisfying fall of the robes. The same drawing reversed as you can see. The same colours reversed as well. The soft reds and greens of the robes. Not to save effort but for symmetry. And not symmetry for its own sake, but symmetry because differences, individuality, would have drawn attention away, pulling the eye to the sides.
When we come to the Madonna…………But the face, the face. Piero's Madonna catches in a few square centimetres of painted plaster all that the Virgin stood for, all that she has meant to all those millions over all those centuries, all that she still means for millions even today. How on earth was it done? How in those few square centimetres of pigment could he create acceptance, humility, reticence, resignation, meekness. How could he touch so surely the essence of responsibility, create this portrait of selflessness, of ultimate modesty, ultimate humanity. "
THE DUCAL PALACE - Urbino
"
At the Ducal Palace Tullio allowed himself a few moments alone in the centre of the courtyard, reaching out to the refinement around him, the harmony of sunlit brick and marble that elicited an inner sense. His eyes cut off the two later storeys and followed the cornices of the original skyline. A stone frame holding on to a square of Italian sky that had awaited only this marble, this brick to come into its blue perfection, living on the edge of its colour, the subliminal variations in its flatness that grew in depth and excitement, like a Rothko. He stopped them for a last look at the courtyard.
Close your eyes for a second and imagine all those heavy, oppressive medieval buildings. Dark, brutal, overpowering. Designed to make human beings feel crushed, intimidated, unimportant. And then open them to what the Duke created here; an architecture that is open and light and graceful, that appeals to the finer senses, treats you on equal terms; an architecture thatís human in its proportions, and makes you feel that to be a human being is to be something worthwhile, to be capable of being noble.
...The Palace itself touches all that Duke Federico and his court valued. It's not pompous, it's not grandiose. It doesn't shout. It's not forever attracting attention to itself. It watches. It waits. It sets a quiet example. It articulates the life of proportion and balance, of reason and refinement. "