Free The Last Supper by Rachel Cusk Page B

in the Renaissance ocean of Christian iconography. It is said to be a self-portrait. The lion’s paws are neatly tied over Hercules’ groin. His face is full of solitude and separation. In his hand he holds a thick stick, his weapon against the world, against its irrationality, its dangers both real and imaginary.
    Hercules , c. 1475 (fresco) by Piero della Francesca

    I can see the Resurrection over the heads of the art lovers. Even from this distance it is surprising: it is startling as the violation of spatial laws by a human body is always startling. When a person stands too close to you, you can feel fear, intimacy, oppression, deep forms of love. This is what Piero’s Christ does. The painting can barely hold him in. He is barefoot, emerging from his tomb. The art lovers move away a little and the lower half of the painting is disclosed. I see that he is not quite as peremptory as I thought. There are people in front of him, men, lolling against the tomb. They are asleep: he is awake. He is fenced in behind them. He is the victim, after all. He looks straight ahead. He wears a disquieting expression of terrible knowledge. The art lovers murmur and move next door. The rain falls outside the windows of the Museo Civico.
    *
    Along the road to Arezzo, prostitutes stand in the lay-bys and wait for the lorries to pull over. There is no motorway crossing Tuscany from east to west and so all the freight traffic comes along the single-carriage road that winds down from the hills towards Siena and the plain. At the Arezzo turnoff we pass the Hotel Piero della Francesca, a forlornly hideous roadside edifice, and a little later, towards the centre of town, the multi-storey concrete Parking Piero della Francesca.
    The sky is bright and clear and blue. The sun is strong: it makes sharp, dark wedges of shadow in the narrow streets. In the parks the trees cast their filigree shapes on the grass. The stone piazzas and the churches bask in light. We make our way through busy avenues of smart shops and restaurants. We do not linger: we are on the Piero della Francesca Trail, which does not cross the portals of boutiques andpizzerias and souvenir shops. Up a narrow little alleyway there is a small quiet square with a small plain church in it. This church is nothing like as grand as others we’ve passed along the way. It is hard to believe that we are in the right place. We open the door and go into its cold and gloom-filled interior. A man immediately asks us for our tickets. We have no tickets: we must go and purchase them at the office next door. At the office it seems that we must make an appointment. The frescoes are not to be approached casually: it has to be arranged. Fortunately there is a space an hour hence. We buy our tickets and leave.
    Out in the little square we sit on the fountain and eat ice creams. After an hour has passed we go back into the church. We show our tickets and are permitted to go inside. It is much larger than it looks from the outside, and so dark that the walls lie in deep tents of shadow. They are covered with dim forms. Are these our frescoes? We go closer: they are so strange and faded and damaged that they can barely be seen. It is disappointing. An official approaches us: we are not meant to stop here. We are to go there, down towards the altar at the far end of the church. There is a roped-off enclosure there and a large curtain and another official who studies our tickets and looks at his watch. At the appointed moment he lets us in.
    The fresco cycle of the Capella Maggiore took Piero ten years to complete. It seems that he worked with extraordinary slowness, though the technique itself is immediate and quick-setting. I think of his sympathetic image of Hercules and wonder whether painting was in truth a terrible labour for Piero, an agonising process of atonement, of putting right. He would apply wet cloths to the plaster at night so that he could work two days on a single section. His