Piero's Frescoes
Piero della Francesca: Frescoes. Introduction by Roberto Longhi. Iris Colour Books. (Batsford. 2 Is.)
THE history of the classic principle in European art and, incidentally, the relative reputations of its exponents has been much bound up with the fact that one of them, as great as any, happened to be a loyal native of Borgo San Sepolcro. One series of Piero's decorations was painted in Ferrara, where, after inspiring a succession of artists who would in any other country be sufficient to constitute a whole national school, it disappeared. The rest are in Umbria, and only there, if anywhere, can he be understood. Thus it has come about that Piero's contribution to the European tradition has been largely indirect. His successors, in central Italy at all events, admired his style better than they understood it ; only in Venice did a philosophy of colour of a comparable profundity take root.
Something of his humane imagery, of the "mighty saga of secular life," as Longhi calls it, at Arezzo, became part of the common stock. His Eve, for example, is the ancestress, by way of Michel- angelo's Cumaean Sybil, of half the aged women of northern art. For a fuller use the great monument has waited, through centuries of neglect, until our own time. At the end of the last century Charles Blanc installed copies of the frescoes in the Ecole des Beaux Arts ; we have still to measure how much of Saila% and even of Gauguin, we owe to him. The force of Piero's example is by no means expended. At present none of the masters attracts more devotion, even from those who go no nearer to Borgo than Trafalgar Square.
Here is a case if ever there was one, for reproduction. Yet until now we have been miserably served. Even the monochrome plates available have been uniformly poor. Of the colour of the frescoes, the incomparably lucid and positive patterns which the panel paint- ings cannot give us, there has been nothing at all. However it may be criticised, and its failings are obvious, the collection of plates which has now at last appeared does yield a distant reminder of the feeling of standing in the choir of S. Francesco at Arezzo. And it includes an essay by Roberto Longhi, a summary of his studies which is naturally the best introduction to the artist that exists. When this is said it will be clear that this has claims to be as important and as indispensable a book about painting as we have been offered for a good many years. Indeed I can think of only one of its kind whose publication was so thoroughly justified, the sumptuous Vienna edition of Brueghel ; these two books, with one or two of the reprOductions of inaccessible glass, are together worth to painters and lovers of painting as much as all the rest, the whole rubbishy mountain, of the coloured books that are to be had.
The book is very far from perfect, as the recollection of the impeccable Brueghel, an easier technical proposition, will perhaps unkindly demonstrate. The tone is inconsistent, and on more than one page a jarring note is struck. Moreover, several details have evidently been redrawn on the plates, and in the case of the " Resurrection " as evidently misdrawn ; although the difficulty of printing and proving a picture on a wall at Borgo can be imagined, the effect remains grotesque. Yet something of Piero's irreplaceable achievement emerges. Colour embodies and fulfils these forms, not only in the broad play of mass and atmosphere, but in the smallest detail. Here, looking at the perfect heraldic counterchange of the two grooms, a pattern never to be forgotten, we can recall as well the meaning which it confers on the fluted edge of the red tunic. And then discover again the same beauty in the blue-lined garment of the sleeping emperor's attendant. (Never were hems of drapery, the perennial vessels of Italian design, so lovely.) Or we can recover from the plates something of the balance in which the powdery blue, lilac, and green, olive or mossy, are weighed against an area of yellow-brown. The effect was not to be seen again until the appearance of the ginger dog in Seurat's " Baignade." I imagine that most of those who look at pictures will find themselves, in reminiscent
piety or hope, seeking this book. LAWRENCE GOWING.
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