Free The Last Supper by Rachel Cusk Page A

green shoots. I see a bent old woman on a hillside in a headscarf and apron, furiously digging at the flinty earth with a trowel in her hand. I see old men driving ancient tractors, holding umbrellas over their heads. It is curious to see these sights, so foreign to the English countryside. I grew up in East Anglia, where combine harvesters roll like tanks over denuded fields as vast and flat as oceans, and the elderly watch television in well-heated retirement homes. These activities in the fields bear a distinct cast of ambition. I have already noticed that the Italians are unusually enterprising inthe uses they make of their lot. There’s a metal-worker in the village who Jim tells us has just been given the contract to make the doors for the new Wembley stadium.
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    We go to Sansepulcro in the rain. It lies in the direction of the strange purple hills, across the plain where factories and supermarkets and car showrooms line the road, for Sansepulcro is no longer the one-horse town that Aldous Huxley discovered in its dusty obscurity as an early pilgrim on the Piero della Francesca Trail. Like other places, it has elected to keep its beautiful heart beating with an ersatz modern apparatus of hideous ugliness. We shelter from the rain in the Museo Civico. There are people in here, tourists, though of a superior kind. They pass through the rooms quietly, in groups. They are mostly of late middle-age, and well turned-out: there are no giant khaki shorts and tennis socks here, no baseball caps or long lenses. These people have expensive jewellery and leather handbags and polished shoes. They stand in front of one painting after another while their guide lectures them in dispassionate global English. They like to be lectured, it is clear. Their bright eyes pay attention; their lipsticked mouths do not move. They have a look of health about them, as though they were receiving some rigorous but beneficent cure. They are art lovers: it is culture that is purifying their blood and keeping their spines so straight.

    When Huxley finally made it to Sansepulcro, after ten hours on a potholed dirt road, he found Piero’s Resurrection and announced it to be the world’s greatest painting. Perhaps, after his long and difficult journey, he felt a little as though he had painted it himself. The Resurrection hangs here, in the Museo Civico. I have been reading Vasari’s Lives of the Artists and have learned something of Piero’s obscurity, his lost works and lost reputation, his mathematical theories of perception and the blindness in which he passed the last twenty years of his life. ‘Admittedly,’ Vasari says, ‘time is said to be the father of truth, and sooner or later it reveals the truth; nevertheless, it can happen that for some while the one who has done the work is cheated of the honour due to him.’ That is true enough, in life as well as art; but in life, which in general leaves no trace behind it, no object through which the reassessment can be made and the belated honour granted, the one who has done the work must sometimes be satisfied with the work itself. And that, perhaps, is what Piero did. He did not move to Florence or to Rome, like other artists: he stayed here and was an officer on the town council. His house, apparently, was decorated from floor to ceiling in every room with wondrous frescoes painted by his own hand. But after his death it was destroyed, like so much of his work, for it seems that when people destroy things they do not always know what it is they are destroying. Andperhaps it was Piero’s fault that he lacked the vanity to defend his own creations. There is something in his paintings that is not entirely of this world. He wrote a great many mathematical books, of which the paintings might be said to be the workings-out. A fragment from Piero’s house still survives, an image of Hercules clad in the lion’s skin, the lion’s tail dangling between his legs. It is a little piece of paganism