Every Day in Tuscany by Frances Mayes Read Free Book Online Page B

sacristy. The cabinets’ fine intarsia represent the robes, censors, and prayer books stored within. Signorelli worked on the Sacrestia di San Giovanni in 1479, covering the ceiling with panels of the apostles, each one of whom is busy writing his gospel; I relish thinking of the apostles not as veteran missionaries but as writers . From the dome, luminous musical angels—their muses?—accompany the process. This is a sweet room where nothing dramatic happens except when the incredulous St. Thomas pokes Jesus in his wound. Literalists like him are always crass.
    I wonder what Luca thought of the “translation” of the Virgin’s house into the Loreto shrine and if he ever considered painting the famous flight. The subject later caught the imagination of Saturnino Gatti, who painted a decorous version in 1510, and later, Tiepolo, who covered the ceiling of a church in Venice (bombed in World War I) with a big passel of angels swimming through the sky holding the house aloft. 2 A house flying through the sky. Outrageous and magnificent! If I leap, will I grow wings? I once tried to fly off a barn with wings made of an old sheet and balsa wood. Lucky, lucky, I only had the wind knocked clean out of me.
    I love the idea of a house transported. I buy a metal medallion of the house from one of the souvenir stands. After all, the Apollo astronauts, in their own unlikely flying house, took one of these to the moon.

    I AM ALWAYS energized by the synergy of a writing project. Mysteriously, what you need seems to come to you like a hummingbird to a red hibiscus. As I browsed in the bookstore at the Palazzo Ducale, I picked up a card announcing a Signorelli exhibit opening today in the village of Arcevia, not far out of our way home. To reach Arcevia, you wind up and up, arriving at a long narrow street lined with low row houses and widening to a piazza. It seems like a town in Spain: closed and secret. Closed to neighbors, closed to its stupendous view, except for one opening at the back of the piazza.
    Three major Signorellis hang in the church of San Medardo, and who is he? The interior, so unlike most Italian churches, has walls, pale as lemon juice, which cast a glaze of transparent light on the paintings. Here’s my proof that Cortona’s finest, my amico Signorelli, is scandalously underestimated. These three paintings command the whole church, rendering my initial disappointment—only three works on exhibit?—absurd. Two paintings remained here forever, where they were meant to be. The regal and munificent Madonna in Trono col Bambino, Madonna Enthroned with Child , from 1508, has been brought home to Arcevia from the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan. The grand Madonna, with saints, has long since lost her panels, predella, and side columns to Germany, England, and, mamma mia , San Diego, so far from home. Nevertheless, the remaining painting stops even the severely mentally handicapped boy, whose parents lunge around the church, guiding him, and attempting to enjoy the exhibit though he shouts and farts, creating echoes. He has trouble holding up his head but gazes in wonder at the sublime face of the young Virgin. A veil of peace seems to fall over him from the young Virgin’s downcast gaze.
    Signorelli often placed a commanding focal point in front of his main subject. In this painting, a cardinal’s red hat lies on the floor in the center of the foreground. Maybe Signorelli intended a subliminal association with the future crucifixion of the adorable baby held so gently by his heavenly teen mama. Or maybe he just loved the shape and color and wanted to paint red hat along with his umpteenth Madonna.
    Opposite a della Robbia confection in a side chapel, we find Signorelli’s Baptism of Christ by John the Baptist . This painting compels attention. Not entirely by the master’s brush, the painting showcases one of Signorelli’s preoccupations: the male body shown in prime form—and never more so than here, where Jesus