Diptych

DIPTYCH

1

All that morning, as they drove the serpentine road from Arezzo to Urbino, Wemmick felt that the ghost of a car was pacing them. It was a little open 1920 Citroen, buzzing along like a sewing machine on wire wheels. In the driving seat was a small, thin young woman, her face concealed behind a dusty motoring veil. The passenger, a man of thirty or so, wore thick round green spectacles, also filmed with dust, and a leather cap. He was immensely tall and thin: though his seat was right back, his legs were folded before him like a grasshopper’s.

“A lifetime ago,” said Wemmick, a trifle portentously, “—well, sixty-three years ago, to be exact—Aldous and Maria Huxley drove this route. He was already famous, with two novels under his belt and a third on the way, but for the moment he was working on a book of travel essays.”

Marion Wemmick grunted but made no other response. She tolerated her husband’s literary reflections; indeed, at certain times, though not now, she mildly enjoyed them; but she did not believe in encouraging them.

“They were going,” continued Wemmick, unfazed, “as we are going, to Urbino. On the way they stopped, as I fear we ought to stop, at a little place called Sansepolcro. They looked at a picture there. Just one picture. Later that year, back at home, Huxley wrote an essay about it. Apparently he spoke of it as ‘The Greatest Picture in the World’.”

His wife glanced sharply sideways at him. “The Greatest . . .” she murmured. Then: “That’s a ridiculous title. How can you call any picture that? What was this greatest picture?”

“Well, I haven’t read the essay and Sansepolcro isn’t even mentioned in this guidebook. But the picture’s a Piero della Francesca. Apparently it’s a Resurrection, a fresco on a palace wall. There’s some more stuff by him in Arezzo, remember? In a church. When we looked for it, the chiesa was chiuso. As usual.”

Marion grunted again, a little more appreciatively this time. The joke was a long-running one which had stood them in good stead over several Italian holidays. In that country of perennially closed museums and permanently invisible custodians, you needed a sense of humour.

Meanwhile Wemmick was reflecting that the disappointment at Arezzo had not exactly been too poignant to bear. He sighed a little, letting his book fall open across his knees and his head fall back against the headrest. For some days now he had been in atrabilious mood. He let his memory range back over their current trip: the busy days in Rome, the trip north, the too many cities of Tuscany and Umbria which conscience dictated must not be bypassed. Two weeks’ forced feeding of art and architecture had thoroughly jaded him.

What did it all matter, really? he thought rebelliously. Several generations of painters and architects, harnessed to the task by their patrons and the Church, had laboured to bring beauty into the world. The remnants of their enterprise lay around. All the wormy wood and mottled plaster, chipped marble and fading paint, quietly mouldering away. And the tourists scurrying in and out of it all, like mites in a Gorgonzola cheese.

And cui bono? reflected Wemmick. He had a weakness for a good orotund Latin tag. To whom had been the good? All that artistic fervour: what had been its fruits? Today’s Italians were just like anyone else; most of their country just like anywhere else. He stared mutinously out of the side window. A January drizzle spattered against it and rivulets ran lazily down until blotted up by the felt at the base of the glass. The fungoid strip development which disfigures every Italian main road wound by: outsize furniture stores, scruffy houses of cement blocks, a straggle of wires, signs speaking urgently of the modern world: Supermercato, Arredamenti, Fotocamere.

Wemmick recalled an anonymous fifteenth-century painting of an ideal city which he had seen somewhere. No matter where the observer stood before it, by some miracle of perspective avenues ran away deep into the picture down either side of a superb rotunda. They were lined with harmonious temples, apartments and shops. The whole was a slice of renaissance Utopia in blue-grey tones. And what of the inhabitants of such a dream of order? Could one doubt that there lived men like gods?...

Do me a favour, thought Wemmick, sourly. It never existed. It never could have existed. There’s the real Italy, 1987 version, right outside. What on earth are we after on these trips? What do we expect to take away? The Italians have the right idea: they spend their holidays on a Rimini beach, not whoring after the strange gods of Art. The Art is for the birds—birds of passage, like us, titillated by essays with provocative titles. What does ‘artistic heritage’ mean to a man fitting pumps into dishwashers on a Turin assembly line? Nothing. Less than nothing.

His wife’s voice cut across his thoughts. “Should we stop in this town, the one with the painting? Probably you don’t realise it, leaving the driving to me like you do, but there’s a tallish mountain between here and Urbino. I suspect the road goes right over the top of it. In the rain. It’s noon already, and you know how you hate arriving late in a place, having to look for a hotel.”

Her solicitude was half-mocking; but the real triumph for her lay, as he well knew, in his spurning it and then suffering for it later. So he said appeasingly, “Just a quick look. I’m sure it’ll be easy to find. One painting can’t take long. How about you and Alex having a stroll while I nip in? He’s been cooped up in here for hours. Get him one of his Algida things.”

She acquiesced at once, somewhat to Wemmick’s surprise. Usually Marion was the most indefatigable of sightseers. Nor, as she was entitled to do, had she said anything pointed about the rain, although she had just been forced to turn the wipers on to full speed. Perhaps the prospect of yet another Resurrection, even at Huxley’s absurd valuation, bored her.

His thoughts reverted to his imaginary assembly-line worker. Dishwashers or Madonnas? Were they so different? The previous year, in Ravenna, he’d taken his small son into the museum next door to the tomb of Galla Placidia. Alex never minded entering a place of culture. Once inside, though, his sole ambition was to see everything at breakneck speed; to see everything, and then condemn it all as boring. This time he’d dragged his father to the remotest corner of the building, where they had stumbled on an astonishing sight. Small old paintings, perhaps altar-pieces, ranged in glass cabinets. Dozens of them, in several large connecting rooms; more than dozens, hundreds. And every one the same subject: a Virgin and Child. They receded into the distance, like some commercial for a new full-colour photocopier. So confining was the tradition that had produced them that you had to look quite closely to see that the faces of the Marys, and the plumpness of the infant Christs, varied slightly. These clones, these infinite replications of sickly piety, made Wemmick queasy. What shackles on the imagination, generation after generation, they represented! They were like those horrible little slippers that Chinese women used to wear on their bound and distorted feet.

Wemmick shifted irritably against the dead-hand clutch of his seatbelt. “You know, Marion,” he said conversationally, “I reckon more balls is talked about painting than any other art. Especially Christian art. Most of it is just sentimentality. We look at a Nativity, an Annunciation, a Crucifixion—never mind who it’s by—and what do we get out of it, really, except a fuzzy feeling? Most of it is just historical reverence.”

“You don’t have to share the belief to feel the emotion the artist expressed,” objected Marion.

“Yes, you do,” he insisted. “Because if you don’t, the subject gets in the way. Remember that American professor we saw in Assisi, leading a gaggle of college students around the church on some art history tour? The one with a voice like a chainsaw? He had lots to say about the Giotto frescoes. Do you know, when he got to the one showing St Francis preaching to the birds, he started rasping on about tonal values and receding diagonals. As though the thing was a bloody Picasso. Not a word about the subject. The funny thing was, no one asked any questions about it. As though there was a silent conspiracy to ignore the sheer silliness of what was up there on the wall.”

“Like the Emperor’s new clothes, you mean?”

“More like house-guests ignoring a body stretched out on the carpet. Because that’s what religious art is for most of us: a corpse. All the lifeblood’s been drained out. As a substitute, we try to pump some aesthetic emotion back in, but that’s no good. It’s just embalming fluid.

“Anyway,” he added gloomily, “the American wasn’t doing his students much damage. They were mostly immune to the humbug. Half of them were feeling each other up behind the choir stalls.”

After this sally Marion, who preserved a measure of natural piety left over from her adolescence of religious storm, relapsed into an indignant silence.

Not that it wasn’t a pity, meandered on Wemmick’s interior monologue. “What is Religion? A string of uncheckable statements. And Art? Another string of uncheckable statements.” Who had said that? A positivist, no doubt; Ayer or one of his tribe. Well, you might not like it, but after a strenuous tour of cultural Italy. . . . The trouble was, if God were an unverifiable statement, you were stuck with humanism. All too human humanism, in the century of Buchenwald.

As a child, Wemmick’s mother had taught him a homely prayer; he had had to lie on his stomach, face in his hands, and say it to himself while she watched him fondly. He could still recite it. “Please God make me a good boy,” it had ended. Had God made him a good boy? On the whole, he rather doubted it. Perhaps it was because at the age of ten he had started, greatly daring, to mime the action without saying the prayer. At fifteen he had read some of Bertrand Russell’s simpler essays. Russell’s skeptical, lambent wit had enchanted him. Russell had inoculated him for life against creeds and doctrines. But no one needed a Russell-jab today, apparently. Today your atheism came pure from the mouths of babes and sucklings. “God’s not true, is it, daddy?” His son’s first gift from primary school.

“Are we there yet?” came plaintively from the back seat. They weren’t, quite, and soon Wemmick was trying to explain for the second time that day exactly why the columns at the front of some temples are fatter in the middle than at the ends.

2

Sansepolcro turned out to be an ordinary little town, sustained by the giant Buitoni pasta factory just outside. It paid adequate homage to its greatest son: there was a della Francesca park, a statue, an old house with a plaque, and, on the same ancient thoroughfare, the Civic Museum, which had once been the Palazzo Pubblico. Here, five centuries before, Piero, local boy made good, had been hired to do a nice fresco. A later generation had admired the result so much that they had whitewashed it over.

The Greatest Picture was squeezed rather uncomfortably between two pilasters, on a wall opposite a great entrance door; probably in the original palace this room had been a vestibule. When he came to it, Wemmick gasped as though punched in the midriff.

The colouring was soberly harmonious pastels, and you knew instinctively that the composition was a subtle miracle of geometry. The hour is first light on the third day. The reborn Man is seen standing tall and full-face, and the expression on that face is adamant, with an uncompromising and an icy regard. He is about to emerge from the sarcophagus which has housed so lately his tortured corpse. His left foot is already planted on the rim of the tomb; in a second he will shift his weight on to the pole of the long standard in his right hand, will vault easily over the heads of the sleeping guards below him and come striding out into the present. His right hand holds the shroud about him like a toga, but so loosely that it does not conceal the wound of the lance. It looks about as life-threatening as a shaving nick. The nail-holes in the hands and feet are mosquito bites.

The most admirable quality of this risen Christ, thought Wemmick, was that it had no breath of religiosity. The biblical Christ was no more than a distant allusion, an excuse. This was not God born in the guise of a weakly suffering man. This was the face of ennobled mankind; man who is, despite everything, potentially a god. Somehow Piero, stern artist-mathematician, had outflanked the squalor and casual brutality of the fifteenth century; somehow he had managed to encompass, and absorb, the century of Savonarola and the Borgia popes.

Wemmick stood a long time entranced; so long that eventually his family came to reclaim him. The three of them climbed back cheerfully into the Uno. “You know what I like most about Piero’s Christ?” said Wemmick ruminatively. “It’s the certain sense you get that he would have dealt with St Francis as he did with the moneychangers in the temple. One word would be enough to pitch that good, kind, silly man out of the universe. Licking lepers, indeed!”

They were quickly out of town, climbing high now into the east. They stopped briefly and stood by the wet highway, looking back on Sansepolchro, whose rust-red roofs were weakly glowing in the low sun of a winter afternoon. Black and glistening, the hairpin bends of the road ahead lay empty before them; innocent now of the ghostly Citroen. They got in again and attacked the flank of the mountain. Before night the tall walls of the Ducal Palace at Urbino held them close.