CDC Laval

In another way, though, the essay harks us back to an enviable moment. It was
a time when you could be a renaissance art lover, and not yet know this
picture. Of course, that gives Huxley’s pronouncement some snob cachet,
which is slightly annoying (as he’s aware). But it also means that, inspired
by it, people would now be trekking out to Sansepolcro to see Piero’s
Resurrection, see it for the first time. “The best picture in the world is painted in fresco on the wall of a room in
the town hall.” It’s still there, and still surprising in the directness of
its presence, just painted on the wall at the end of a plain room, with no
build up, waiting to meet you – waiting for you to meet the force of its
full-frontal encounter: the resurrecting figure, that’s standing up, and
rising upwards, and heading towards you. But once you take a
long and detached view of taste and criticism, it begins to look a bit
Pavlovian. Huxley’s high praise for Piero – it’s another manifestation of
the modernist/neoclassical tendency, with its delight in the impersonal, its
attraction to the severe, rigid, ritual aspects of art.

In 1925 Picas – so
had just emerged from a serious flirtation with Poussin. The following year,
Stravinsky wrote his hieratic, statuesque oratorio, Oedipus Rex Huxley was
punctually of his time. And even given the
limited power of words to evoke unseen pictures, Huxley’s own description of
it is fairly skimpy. His general account of Piero della Francesca is good, sensitive, standard. He
says what any half-decent critic of the time would have said (or today, come
to that): hard, smooth, rounded surfaces’ geometrical forms and
compositions’ stiff and solid bodies’ severe moral tone’ contained passion’
dignified, grand, classical, intellectual. The only word in the Piero
phrase-book that Huxley omits is “mathematical”, though there’s lots of talk
of triangles, rectangles, cylinders, cones, perpendiculars, concaves and
convexes

There’s a good deal of evocative name-dropping too Piero recalls Egyptian
sculpture He is majestic like Handel, but not like Wagner His vision of
man is Plutarch’s, not Christianity’s He is to Botticelli as Alberti is to
Brunelleschi. The battle scene in the Arezzo frescos is “as though Bach had
written the 1812 Overture” In fact, you might expect to hear more about
Bach.

He’s another Christian artist who wins over the secular with his grand
humanity, his mathematical passion – and he was getting big in the 1920s
too

As critical comments go, most of those are fair enough. Many of its first readers would have had no
inkling what this supreme masterpiece looked like. Colour-plate coffee-table art-books of Piero weren’t readily available. The little volume in which Huxley’s essay originally appeared, Along the
Road, was unil-lustrated. So “the best picture” was not an image that would spring to everyone’s mind’s
eye. Piero himself, though benefiting from a recent revival,
wasn’t as appreciated as (say) Botticelli, and no doubt for the reason
Huxley gives: the big Botticellis were in the Uffizi, and Florence was on
the main railway The Piero towns were approached up mountain roads.

Such a high and defiantly confident judgement from such a
prominent pen was asking to be noticed and remembered. It was all the more
dramatic because, as Huxley notes several times, the picture wasn’t well
known. Sansepolcro is now on the “Piero trail” taken by many cultural tourists:
Arezzo – Monterchi – Borgo Sansepolcro – Urbino In the 1920s, it was quite
hard to get to. But Piero della Francesca’s The Resurrection is simply “the best
picture”

Aldous Huxley wrote an essay with that title in 1925 The phrase was making a
bid for posterity. Waiting for Godot is the play where
“nothing happens -twice” Or it may just be a single word Mona Lisa:
“smile”. Jackson Pollock’s drip
painting is “apocalyptic wallpaper”.