Source: Piero della Francesca’s “Nativity” has been carefully restored | The Economist
Dec 6th 2022
The painting, beloved by Christmas-card manufacturers, is a vision of the miraculous and the mundane
ACCORDING TO THEOLOGIANS, angels have no gender. This bunch, though, resemble a well-fed, big-haired teenage boy band. In their harmonising robes of blue and cream, two strum lutes and one bows the viol, alongside a pair of earnest-looking vocalists. Wingless, barefoot, the celestial quintet have graced a million Christmas cards. They appear within a much loved, but much disputed, Renaissance oil painting that is now singing a new song thanks to a three-year restoration.\n
Piero della Francesca painted his “Nativity” in the late 1470s or early 1480s. The elderly artist probably intended it to hang in a bedchamber in his family palazzo in Borgo San Sepolcro (now known as Sansepolcro), near Arezzo in eastern Tuscany. In 1874 Benjamin Disraeli, the prime minister at the time, defended its purchase for Britain’s national collection in the House of Commons, describing it as “a picture of the most rare and interesting character”. Its home has been the National Gallery in London ever since. (The sum, £2,415, would be the equivalent of £323,000, or $396,000, today; an MP was concerned about the condition of the artwork.)\n
Throngs of visitors, not to mention greetings-card publishers, have delighted in the image of this heavenly group serenading the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus. The holy infant rests on his mother’s deep-blue robe as he is greeted by the nonchalant Joseph, a pair of rugged shepherds and assorted creatures (ox, ass, magpie, finches). Behind, on either side of a ramshackle shed, meticulous landscapes depict a city, a river and a crag. \n
Piero’s modern reputation rests on somewhat chilly virtues: a cool mastery of form, volume and geometry as a backdrop to sculptural, otherworldly figures. “He is like a visitor to the Earth,” wrote Philip Guston, a Canadian-American painter. The English writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley was a superfan of Piero’s, and thought him “majestic without being at all strained, theatrical or hysterical”, and “everywhere intellectual”. “He is not a romantic,” warned Kenneth Clark, an art historian. Still, lay viewers have always loved the clear morning light of this festive scene, where a braying ass joins mop-top minstrels to herald the birth of a new world.\n
But the vision has seemed flawed or incomplete. Much paint had faded. The shadowless figures and bald, sandy foreground made many scholars consider the “Nativity” unfinished. Now an intensive restoration project led by the National Gallery’s senior restorer, Jill Dunkerton, has healed its wounds. It has confirmed that the painting is a complete work, too. “You see everything that Piero wanted us to see,” says Gabriele Finaldi, the gallery’s director. \n
Ms Dunkerton, who has made good the damage done by clumsy, overzealous cleaning in the 19th century, aimed “to recover some of Piero’s original unity of design”. After restoration, she explains, “we’ve got a better understanding of Piero’s fabulous use of light”, and his “perfectly judged sense of balance in the composition”.\n
Piero envisaged that earthy Tuscan hilltop, with its scattered tufts of grass, as bare and brightly lit: a humble stage to offset the divine brilliance of Jesus’s birth and a scruffy match for the dilapidated stable. “Take the bus from Arezzo to Sansepolcro and you can still see sheds just like that,” says Ms Dunkerton. Now it is clear that one shepherd is pointing upwards, not at some invisible star, but to the patch of heavenly light—previously obscured—that shines through a gap in the straw roof. Piero’s take on Christ’s birth draws on the light-filled visions of St Bridget of Sweden, a 14th-century mystic whose writings gave a cue to many artists in Quattrocento Italy. In the repaired “Nativity”, heavenly radiance descends on a workaday scene filled with farmyard beasts. Even the magpie, that notorious chatterer, has fallen silent for once. \n
Restoration cannot work magic by itself. The malachite green of the grass has dimmed irrevocably to brown. The angelic musicians benefitted from underpainting with white and green pigments, which preserved their bold colours. But the rustic shepherds had no such foundation and so—even after their rescue from a Victorian scrubber—still look darker and faded. Piero, Ms Dunkerton notes, “distinguished between the very holy figures in the painting and the men who represent us mortals”. \n
Yet the work’s refreshment renews its blend of the miraculous and the mundane. Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, an eminent Piero scholar, argued that in the “Nativity” the aged artist expressed not just “his profound respect for all of God’s creation” but his “good humour and sense of divine joy”. The painting glows with that joyous light again. ■
Published”:”2022-12-06T10:00:54Z”