Started reading
The Last Supper - A Summer in Italy by Rachel Cusk during my stay in Italy in September. In one of the earlier chapters she writes about the work of Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca as she visits the various stops on the Piero della Francesca Trail.
In the final paragraph of that chapter, one sentence in particular grabbed me and it has lingered in my mind ever since: she says she has understood Piero's message, she thinks, which is 'that you must seek a truth that lies beyond human concerns'.
Unfortunately I haven't had the pleasure of seeing any of these works 'in the flesh', but the reproduced images are clear enough to be able to ascertain that almost all the figures that feature in these paintings all have something remarkable in common: they all wear, as Cusk puts it, an abstracted, ambivalent look, full of solitude and separation. I feel it gives these paintings a meditaive quality, solemn and serene, but more importantly in this context, it gives them something 'not entirely of this world'.
Piero della Francesca is actually better known by some as a mathematician; he wrote quite a number of mathematical books. His paintings have a mathematical lucidity about them and this, I believe, is the gateway through which he comes to this 'other-worldliness'.
Mathematics, or to put it in more concrete and universal terms, geometry, 'enables its votary, like a bridge, to pass over the obscurity of material nature, as over some dark sea, to the luminous regions of perfect reality' (Thomas Taylor. [Yes, I've been reading some of Robert Lawlor's
Sacred Geometry. Mind-blowing.]) Geometric diagrams, mathermatical forms, are timeless, universal, and geometry occurs everywhere in nature - take a look at some (enlarged) microscopic images of seeds for instance.
As Lawlor puts it: 'for the human spirit caught within a spinning universe in an ever confusing flow of events, circumstance and inner turmoil, to seek truth has always been to see the invariable... To enter a temple constructed wholly of invariable geometric proportions is to enter an abode of eternal truth.'
That truth 'that lies beyond human concerns'.
And this brings me to what I refer to in the title of this post as the second instalment in my e-mail discussion with DH (the first instalment was Significance, Subject and Aesthetic). The question was this: do you, as an artist, need to look towards achieving a Zen-like approach (cf. the first instalment) to gain a mastery of aesthetic presence without the need for significance, i.e. a narrative, as a vehicle, or does that become possible through a belief in the Spiritual, because, as DH puts it 'the spirit is immaterial and cannot use material things like words or objects to communicate with, you have to become able to formulate and express values, interpretations and intentions without them too'.
It seems to me that the latter applies to Piero della Francesca, although he did use a narrative, which isn't surprising given the artistic environment within which he worked. That abstracted look that the figures in these paintings wear suggests a longing for - perhaps even already a level of presence in - another world. Indeed it seems that Piero della Francesca had little interest for the banalities of earthly existence. He chose not to move to Florence or Rome like the other artists of his time; he remained in Sansepulcro, in his house, which apparently was decorated with his own magnificent frescoes (which, incidently, were all destroyed after his death). It seems he found satisfaction in the work in itself and longed for what was eternal, always and forever true. The image of
Hercules, which is said to be a self-portrait, is very telling of his mind-set, I feel: again that abstracted look, full of a sense of remoteness, of separation (and of 'solitude', but then, in my view, in the postive sense of aloneness), a longing for another world or even a sense of partial belonging to another wold.
We are all part of the universe. It's very easy to become bogged down with the preoccupations of human life; it is very hard to seek out that truth that lies beyond human concerns.
We are all part of the cosmos.
