RENAISSANCE MAN
Works by the 15th-century artist Piero della Francesca are scattered around the world, but many of his masterpieces remain exactly where he painted them. JOHN IRVING follows his trail through some of central Italy’s most romantic landscapes.
John Irving follows the works of 15th-century artist Piero della Francesca through some of central
Italy’s most romantic landscapes.
The sun is rising and the sky is pale blue, flecked with a few sparse clouds. The land is empty save for a hilltop village, a crenellated watchtower and a scattering of trees, some leafy, some bare – a reference to the advent of spring and to the renewal of mankind, embodied in the haloed figure of Christ in the foreground.
He stares fixedly at us as he steps from a sarcophagus. His left foot is resting on the marble balustrade, and in his right hand he’s holding a Guelph banner, a red cross on a white background. A pink cloak is draped over his left shoulder and the right side of his torso is bare. The stigmata are visible on his ribcage, left hand and foot. Four Roman soldiers lie asleep beside the tomb. After guarding it all night, they’ve dozed off in the early morning.
The soldier without a helmet is commonly believed to be a self portrait of the artist who painted the scene, Piero della Francesca.
I’m in the trim little Museo Civico in the town of Sansepolcro, in the Upper Tiber Valley in south-east Tuscany. This is where della Francesca was born in about 1415, and in front of me is The Resurrection, which he completed in the 1460s. The fresco has undergone three years of restoration – partly funded by a former manager at the Buitoni pasta factory, another of the town’s claims to fame – and was officially unveiled the day before I arrive, Palm Sunday. Francesca, the girl at the ticket office, tells me it was bedlam. “How many people came?” I ask. “Tutto il mondo [the whole world],” she replies. Apart from the attendants, there’s not a soul about today, so here I am alone in a room with what Aldous Huxley described as “the greatest picture in the world”.
The singularity of della Francesca’s work has only come to be fully appreciated during the past century or so. An unabashed provincial loner, he ploughed his own furrow, keeping his distance from the prevailing Florentine School. He anticipated Leonardo da Vinci in applying mathematical principles to his art, yet his vision is deeply spiritual; his landscapes are dreamlike, yet you can still see them as you travel between regions. Perhaps the deceptive simplicity with which della Francesca achieves the apparently complex task of reconciling unreality with reality is what captures our imagination today.
There are other paintings by della Francesca in Sansepolcro’s museum: fragments of frescoes with figures of saints, and the Polyptych of the Misericordia, very different from The Resurrection but, to my mind, equally impressive. It has a gold-leaf background after the manner of the Trecento Sienese primitives, but the figures aren’t flat and two-dimensional; they’re painted in perspective. The work is like a bridge between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
Della Francesca travelled to cities as far-flung as Florence and Rome, but he kept returning to his birthplace, where he was a town councillor for much of his life. His works are now scattered across the world,
but many are still exactly where he painted them – in Sansepolcro and close by within a small triangle, the points of which are the cities of Arezzo in Tuscany, Perugia in Umbria, and Urbino in Marche. They call the tour of these works the Piero della Francesca trail, and I’m about to follow it.
The centre of Sansepolcro is a rectangular grid of narrow streets lined with elegant palazzi with red-tiled roofs, all within fortified walls. It’s like an open-air museum, preserved intact since della Francesca’s time. Near the Museo Civico is the house where the artist lived and worked and, in his later years as his eyesight failed, spent much of his time writing treatises on geometry and perspective. In his influential 16th-century text The Lives of the Artists,
Giorgio Vasari describes it as “a very fine property”, and the imposing white townhouse occupying a whole block is worth visiting. The most revealing feature of the building is the altana, a covered terrace looking over the rooftops to the mountains beyond. Della Francesca would have been able to draw inspiration for his paintings simply by taking in the view from his own home.
The young della Francesca worked as an apprentice to the painter Antonio di Giovanni in Anghiari, a hilltop town with a stern grey castle. It’s a stone’s throw away, on the other side of the Tiber, and it’s where I’m headed next. Leaving behind the suburban sprawl, a characteristic of even the prettiest Italian art towns, the road crosses the plain that in 1440 was the site of the Battle of Anghiari, in which a Florentine army sent the invading Milanese packing. You can learn all you need to know about the battle and da Vinci’s botched attempt to immortalise it in a fresco at the Museo della Battaglia in Anghiari.
From the top of the stradone, the town’s main street, the bird’s-eye view over the Tiber Valley is stunning (and for those daunted by the steep walk, there’s a free lift). Along the winding lanes of the centro storico are dozens of antiques shops and furniture restorers’ workshops, and an open-air arts and crafts fair is held every year in April, when, they tell me, tutto il mondo comes here, too.
From here it takes only minutes to reach the village of Monterchi, where della Francesca’s mother, Romana, was born. Fittingly, it was here that he painted his homage to maternity, the
Madonna del Parto. The full-length portrait of a pregnant Virgin Mary is among his most famous works. When I first saw her, statuesque in her royal blue dress, the Madonna was hanging over the altar in the church in the village cemetery. She’s since been shifted to the dedicated Musei del Parto, housed in an unprepossessing schoolhouse behind the castle. The trattoria next door is aptly named Senza Tempo, meaning timeless, like the surrounding landscape of sunflower and lavender fields. The painting is curtained off in a small room, and again I enjoy the privilege of a moment of intimacy with a sublime Renaissance masterpiece.
At a grocer’s shop under the castle walls, I treat myself to a souvenir: a bottle of red wine called Gusto di Piero della Francesca, with a label featuring details from his paintings. The grocer, a thickset man with white hair and an apron, says it’s made from local sangiovese grapes, but bottled in Arezzo, the next stop on the trail. The journey passes through pleasant wooded hills and takes half an hour by car.
The old part of Arezzo, built on a hill encircled by modern boulevards, may not attract the tourist hordes of Florence and Siena but here, too, history and art are waiting at every corner. I make a beeline for the 14th-century Basilica of San Francesco, halfway between the train station and the cathedral. Behind its plain brick façade the church houses della Francesca’s so-called Arezzo cycle, a series of frescoes of The Legend of the True Cross. The narrative sequence is baffling, but the colour and composition of the scenes of war and peace are compelling. One of them, The Dream of Constantine, is a technical tour de force in which della Francesca depicts a nocturnal scene brightened by artificial light. No other Italian artist had attempted this before him.
One indicator of the enduring impact of della Francesca’s art is the influence it has exerted over other genres. In Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1964 film The Gospel According to St. Matthew, costumes, art direction and photography are all inspired by the Arezzo cycle, while Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu’s triptych
The Frescoes of Piero della Francesca seeks to capture in music the wonder it evokes. You can glimpse the frescoes in the cycle from the church portal, but to observe them at close quarters you have to buy a ticket. Visitors are organised into groups of 25 and the full tour takes half an hour. There’s no chance of savouring these works on my own. But the cathedral at the top of the hill – where I go later to see another of della Francesca’s frescoes, Saint Mary Magdalen – is virtually empty.
Della Francesca’s landscapes are dreamlike, yet you can still see them as you travel along the trail.
The sensational centrepiece of old Arezzo is the canted Piazza Grande, surrounded by buildings from different periods and lanes filled with goldsmiths’ workshops. The first time I came here it was winter, the piazza was white with snow and the monthly antiques fair was being held under the porticoes. The second time it was late summer and the city’s popular annual event, La Giostra del Saracino – the Joust of the Saracen, a colourful affair in which mounted knights tilt at the effigy of a Saracen – was being contested in sweltering heat. Today it’s early spring and, though the sun’s shining, the air is still chilly.
After a long morning on the trail, I have lunch at a tiny osteria just off the piazza. All bottles and boiseries, it takes its name, La Torre di Gnicche, from a notorious 19th-century Aretine brigand. From the very Tuscan menu, I choose a dish I’ve never eaten before: i grifi, bits of calf’s head and cheek stewed with tomatoes, chilli and red wine – pure cucina povera. Scarlet red in colour and unctuously gelatinous in consistency, it’s offal lovers’ heaven.
Owner Lucia Fioroni says an Australian tourist once walked in and asked for the house speciality. She served him i grifi, though not without qualms since it’s an acquired taste, not for the squeamish. The man polished it off with relish. “I’ve lived for 65 years in vain,” he exclaimed, and promptly ordered seconds. Fioroni says i grifi is made only within a 15-kilometre radius of Arezzo, and that evening in Sansepolcro I improvise a quick survey to check. Fioroni is right; no one here knows what the dish is, not even a cook I speak to, though its name gives her a clue. The word “grifo”, she explains, means muzzle or snout in dialect.
Another pretty walled town, Città di Castello, is just 10 kilometres from Sansepolcro, but it’s already in Umbria. This is truffle country, as you can tell from the menu at Trattoria Lea, the busy restaurant
I visit the next day. Here they shave truffles over virtually everything, from tagliatelle to gnocchi, from frittata to veal. I go for something different: mazzafegato, a salty liver sausage, with paltone, a sort of fried rosemary-flavoured potato cake – another couple of dishes that would be unfamiliar to anyone outside the area.
The Pinacoteca, the municipal art gallery, is worth a visit, with paintings by Raphael, born in nearby Urbino, and Signorelli, a pupil of della Francesca’s. Della Francesca himself never worked here, but he would certainly have passed through on his way to Perugia where, according to Vasari, “he did many works that can still be seen”. Today only one remains: the dazzling Polyptych of Perugia in the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria – and it takes only an hour to get there on the E45 highway, which, like the
Tiber, ultimately leads to Rome.
Della Francesca wouldn’t recognise the northern Umbrian landscape today. Now, a common crop is
the Kentucky tobacco that goes into Toscano cigars, which was introduced to Europe long after della Francesca’s death on 12 October 1492, the same day that Columbus reached the New World. There’s a tobacco museum at San Giustino, the hub of the industry near Città di Castello, and in the town itself the former tobacco drying rooms have been converted into a gallery showing the works of contemporary local artist Alberto Burri – though if you admire della Francesca’s pure forms, you’re perhaps unlikely to be a fan of Burri’s burnt plastic bags and ripped jute sacks.
The tobacco industry spilled over into local oenology when, in the late 19th century, producers of vin santo – holy wine, so called as it was once used at Communion – began drying their grapes with tobacco leaves over large wood-fired stoves. The result is the unique vin santo affumicato, a dessert wine with distinct notes of cigar smoke.
Travelling north-east from Città di Castello, cherry blossom gives way to fir trees and patches of snow are still visible on the highest peaks as the road rears steeply from the plain and loops across the Apennines to Urbino. The town’s Ducal Palace appears in the distance like a fairytale castle of fantastic size and charm, the “most beautiful in all Italy” according to Baldassare Castiglione, author of the 16th-century manual of etiquette The Book of the Courtier.
Della Francesca worked at the court, then regarded as the height of civilisation, of Federico da Montefeltro: warrior, patron of the arts and Renaissance man par excellence. Della Francesca’s famous portraits of Federico and his wife Battista Sforza with the rolling Urbino hills in the background are now in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, but another two works from the period are shown in Urbino’s Galleria Nazionale delle Marche: the enigmatic Flagellation of Christ, in which three figures in contemporary dress carry on a conversation even as Christ is being flayed in the background, and the Madonna di Senigallia, an image of imperturbable tranquillity. There’s also a painting, once attributed to della Francesca, called The Ideal City, which is what Urbino was considered to be.
Although it’s a small and secluded town, Urbino has a university of its own, and amid all its history (including Raphael’s house) the students give it a lively, cosmopolitan atmosphere.
I wrote my degree thesis about an Urbino-born novelist, Paolo Volponi, and used to come here often. I strike up a conversation about the changes
I’ve noticed in the town with a woman at a café on the castle walls high above the Borgo Mercatale, once the market square but now a giant car park. “When I was a child,” she says matter-of-factly,
“I used to come into town with my dad to sell our sheep and goats down there.”
Outside the Ducal Palace, I chat with caretaker Denis Morganti, though not about art. I’m curious about his accent, which sounds as if it’s from
Romagna, further north on the Adriatic. But no, he says he’s from near Città di Castello in Umbria. “Here we have a fusion of accents, like we have a fusion of foods.” By way of example, he describes the local flatbreads. “There’s the torta al testo of
Città di Castello, a disc of unleavened dough cooked on a testo, a griddle pan,” says Morganti, warming to the subject. “It’s similar to the piadina of Romagna, though some people add egg to the dough. Elsewhere in Umbria they call it crescia, not to be confused with the ciaccia of Sansepolcro, which is fried bread dough. Then there’s the crostolo del Montefeltro, more like puff pastry. Here in Urbino it’s called crescia sfogliata.” Italians eat in dialect.
My head spinning, I return to the café for a crescia sfogliata filled with Casciotta d’Urbino, a sheep’s cheese that was such a favourite of Michelangelo’s that he used to have it delivered to him in Rome. Passing through Romagna on my way home, I stop off at the cathedral in Rimini on the Adriatic coast to see the portrait della Francesca painted of another of his patrons, the local “signore” Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta. But I end up at a kiosk on the promenade eating a piadina filled with squacquerone, the local creamy cow’s milk cheese. The Piero della Francesca trail is turning into a flatbread trail – from the sublime to the delicious.