Every Day in Tuscany by Frances Mayes

Author:Frances Mayes [Mayes, Frances]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9780767929820
Publisher: Broadway
Published: 2010-03-08T08:00:00+00:00

IN HIS Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, Vasari tells a revealing and moving story. When a plague swept through Cortona in 1502, Signorelli's son, already training to be a painter, died. Signorelli undressed him and drew his naked body "so that, by the work of his own hand, he would always be able to have before his eyes that which nature had given him and which adverse destiny had snatched away." Signorelli is said to have made anatomical studies in the local cemetery. Did he have a body exhumed, or did he appear with his sharpened lapis before burial? Of all the Renaissance painters, Luca's forms are the most alive. He loved distracting you from the main subject with a well-placed male buttock, tightly clad, a servant's copious thighs through her skirt, or the quite buff chest of a minor figure off to the side of a martyrdom in progress. Weird to think his dynamic bodies originated here among the dead. I always look at his paintings and recognize people I see in the piazza. I trace the cast-down eyes of the pizza server to an exalted Annunciation Mary, and the rippled curls and short legs of a local antiques dealer to the flagellated Christ. He must have crouched there, against the wall, with his pens. I like Vasari's story of his dual life as an artist and as a family man, active in government as a Cortona magistrate. His death at eighty-two catapulted him into a new and eternal relationship with his chosen place. Where do your bones lie, Luca?

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