Resurrection

Mr. P’s favorite painting.

Aldous Huxley called it the best picture in the world, which inadvertently led to its salvation by British artillery officer Anthony Clarke during the Second World War.

Ok, it was the summer of the year of the assissination attempt aginst John Paul the Great…so it was the summer between my junior and senior years of college…so it was the summer of 1981?

Anyway, I wasn’t Catholic. I was just studying art history in Italy with a University of Michigan program. We were taken by bus, as I remember, out to a small town in the country (we were staying outside Florence, on the same hill where Fiesole is located). We went just to see this one fresco. I could be wrong. It mmight have been another work we took that trip to see. Remember, this is a quarter of a century ago. Anyway, this image has stuck with me ever since. Elements of it appeared in etchings I made the next year at school. The dead tree and the living tree. The figure of Christ, unlike all the other Ressirections I had seen in Italy that showed Christ bursting from the tomb or floating over the tomb. Here he just matter-of-factly steps out, with one foot resting, so physically, on the edge. As I put it at the time, as a non-Catholic, non-religious guy, “He seems to be saying, ‘Here I am. Deal with me’.”

You made my day with that magnificent fresco by my favorite painter. I have journeyed far and wide to see Piero’s works, and have been fortunate enough to have seen just about all of them. I hope everyone can travel the Piero della Francesca Trail, because he is truly a great Early Renaissance painter. My thanks.

Why did Aldous think that? He never did come the whole way back to Rome?

Huxley was, for lack of a better word, a mystic. And, of course, an artist himself. Many non-Catholics have praised Piero’s works, citing the almost “Buddhist” serenity of the figures.