Peter Schjeldahl's article about the Piero della Francesca exhibition at the Frick makes me want to dash to New York to see what he calls Heaven on Earth
The supreme early-Renaissance master Piero della Francesca is like no other artist in my experience: not better, exactly, but loftily apart, defying comparison
Writing of Piero’s “Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Angels” (circa 1460-70)
The work is only three and a half feet high, but it feels monumental and, at the same time, intimate, as if it were addressing you alone. It’s a kind of art that may change lives
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One hot August, when I was twenty-three, I traversed Tuscany on the back of a Vespa driven by a painter friend, George Schneeman….Then we stopped at a tiny cemetery chapel, in the hill town of Monterchi, to see Piero’s highly unusual “Madonna del Parto.” An immensely pregnant but delicately elegant young Mary stands pensively in a bell-shaped tent, as two mirror-image angels sweep aside the flaps to reveal her. One angel wears green, the other purple. Here was the circumstantial drama of a ripeness with life in a place of death…
In another age, the experience might have made me consider entering a monastery. Instead, I became an art critic.
The Blessed Virgin Mary as the New Ark of the CovenantPosted by Jill Fallon at February 28, 2013 12:20 AM | Permalink