The Last Pieta,   in Florence   The whole city  Is stone, even  Where stone  Doesn't belong.  What is that old  Man's public face  Doing sorrowing,  Secretly a little,  A little above and  A little back from  What is that stone  Doing sorrowing  Where stone  Doesn't belong?	It's from the site maintained by  Barewalls Interactive Art LLC,   Cambridge, Massachusetts	It's from the site maintained by  Barewalls Interactive Art LLC,   Cambridge, Massachusetts    "Pieta" (detail)  c. 1550   Marble, height: 226 cm  Museo del Opera del Duomo, Florence  It is from Web Gallery of Art
	"Pieta"  c. 1550   Marble, height: 226 cm  Museo del Opera del Duomo, Florence  It is from Web Gallery of Art	It's from Jim's Fine Art Colleciton

Bologna: A Poem about Gold   Give me this time, my first and severe  Italian, a poem about gold,  The left corners of eyes, and the heavy  Night of the locomotives that brought me here,  And the heavy wine in the old green body,  The glass that so many have drunk from.  I have brought my bottle back home every day  To the cool cave, and come forth  Golden on the left corner  of a cathedral's wing:  White wine of Bologna,  And the knowing golden shadows  At the left corners of Mary Magdalene's eyes,  While St. Cecilia stands  Smirking in the center of a blank wall,  The saint letting her silly pipes wilt down,  Adoring  Herself, while the lowly and richest of all women eyes  Me the beholder, with a knowing sympathy, her love  For the golden body of the earth, she knows me,  Her halo faintly askew,  And no despair in her gold  That drags thrones down  And then makes them pay for it.  Oh,  She may look sorry to Cecilia  And  The right-hand saint on the tree,  But  She didn't look sorry to Raphael,  And  I bet she didn't look sorry to Jesus,  And  She doesn't look sorry to me.  (Who would?)  She doesn't look sorry to me.  She looks like only the heavy deep gold  That drags thrones down  All day long on the vine.  Mary in Bologna, sunlight I gathered all morning  And pressed in my hands all afternoon  And drank all day with my golden-breasted  Love in my arms.

"St. Cecilia" by Raphael, in Bologna,   It is from the site "Jim's Fine Art Collection."

"The Lambs on the Boulder" is about these two paintings.

"The Lamentation over the Dead Christ"   by Andreas Mantegna   That painting is from the site "Web Gallery of Art"

Here is a detail showing angels from the fresco  about the Last Judgment done by Giotto and   his assistants for the Scrovegni Chapel.  The painting is from the site "My Studio"

 

The Lambs on the Boulder      I hear that the Commune di Padova has an exhibition of master-  pieces from Giotto to Mantegna.  Giotto is the master of angels, and  Mantegna is the master of the dead Christ, one of the few human  beings who seems to have understood that Christ did indeed come  down from the cross after all, in response to the famous jeering  invitation, and that the Christ who came down was a cadaver.  Man-  tegna's dead Christ looks exactly like a skidroad bum fished by the  cops out of the Mississippi in autumn just before daylight and hurried  off in a tarpaulin-shrouded garbage truck and deposited in another  tangle of suicides and befuddled drunkards at the rear entrance to  the University of Minnesota medical school.  Eternity is a vast space  of distances as well as a curving infinity of time.      No doubt the exhibition in noble Padova will be a glory to behold.  But there is a littler glory that I love best.  It is a story, which so  intensely ought to be real that it is real.      One afternoon the mature medieval master Cimabue was taking  a walk in the countryside and paused in the shade to watch a shep-  herd boy.  The child was trying to scratch sketches of his lambs on  a boulder at the edge of the field.  He used nothing, for he could  find nothing, but a little sharp pebble.      Cimabue took the shepherd boy home with him and gave him  some parchment and a nail or a crayon or something or other, and  began to show him how to draw and form lines into the grandeur  of faces other than the sweet faces of sheep.      The shepherd boy was Giotto, and he learned how to draw and  form lines into the grandeur of faces other than the sweet faces of  sheep.  I don't give a damn whether you believe this story or not.  I  do. I have seen faces of angels drawn by Giotto. if angels do not  look like Giotto's angels, they have been neglecting their health  behind God's back.      One of my idle wishes is to find that field where Cimabue stood  in the shade and watched the boy Giotto scratching his stone with  his pebble.      I would not be so foolish as to prefer the faces of the boy's lambs  to the faces of his angels. one has to act his age sooner or later.      Still, this little planet of rocks and grass is all we have to start  with.  How pretty it would be, the sweet faces of the boy Giotto's  lambs gouged, with infinite and still uncertain and painful care, on  the side of a boulder at the edge of a country field.      I wonder how long Cimabue stood watching before he said any-  thing.  I'll bet he watched for a very long time.  He was Cimabue.      I wonder how long Giotto worked before he noticed that he was  being watched.  I'll bet he worked a very long time.  He was Giotto.      He probably paused every so often to take a drink of water and  tend to the needs of his sheep, and then returned patiently to his  patient boulder, before he heard over his shoulder in the twilight  the courtesy of the Italian good evening from the countryside man  who stood, certainly out of the little daylight left to the shepherd  and his sheep alike.      I wonder where that boulder is.  I wonder if the sweet faces of  the lambs are still scratched on its sunlit side.      By God I know this much.  Worse men than Giotto have lived  longer than Giotto lived.      And uglier things than Giotto's wobbly scratches on a coarse  boulder at the edge of a grassy field are rotting and toppling into  decay at this very moment.  By the time I reach Padova at fifteen  minutes past four this afternoon, I wouldn't be a bit surprised to  hear that Rockefeller's Mall in Albany, New York, had begun to sag  and ooze its grandiose slime all over the surrounding city of the  plain, and it will stink in the nostrils of God Almighty like the incense  burned and offered up as a putrid gift on the altars of the Lord,  while the King Jeroboam the Second imprisoned the righteous for  silver and sold the poor for the buckles on a pair of shoes.      Giotto's boyish hand scratched the sweet faces of lambs on a  coarse stone.      I wonder where the stone is.  I will never live to see it.      I lived to see the Mall in Albany, though.      In one of the mature Giotto's greatest glories, a huge choir of his  unutterably beautiful angels are lifting their faces and are becoming  the sons of the morning, singing out of pure happiness the praises  of God.      Far back in the angelic choir, a slightly smaller angel has folded  his wings.  He has turned slightly away from the light and lifted his  hands.  You cannot even see his face.  I don't know why he is weeping.      But I love him best.      I think he must be wondering how long it will take Giotto to  remember him, give him a drink of water, and take him back home  to the fold before it gets dark and shepherd and sheep alike lose  their way in the darkness of the countryside.                                                                                                    Padua

 

  Back to¡@¡@¡@¡@¡@¡@¡@¡@