Reviews for A Childhood Memory by Piero della Francesca

The average rating for A Childhood Memory by Piero della Francesca based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-01-20 00:00:00 Gina Vild On a recent trip to Italy, Vasari's master narrative was in full play-- we could not escape from the "Venetian colors" versus "Florentine drawing" dichotomy. It was everywhere in play--especially in Venice this trope is trotted out everywhere. Not to say it is false-- but only that it really does "color" the way we see Venetian art. For Vasari not only created the field of European Art history, but he wrote the dominate (domineering) narrative on the Italian Renaissance. Another of his great tropes is concerning Leonardo and Piero--two boys, suggested Vasari, who were not raised by their fathers and who because of this male-absent childhood, were incapable of completing work. Freud famously took this trope and ran with it with his "Leonardo's Dream." Leonardo recounted in his notebook that as a small child he dreamt in his crib of a vulture. And in the dream the bird put its beak in his mouth. Freud takes this to imply the dream was about breastfeeding and then he leaps to homosexuality and then thereby makes the biggest leap of all to see his repressed/thwarted sexuality as explaining Leonardo's inability to stick with his work. It is annoying least of all because it was based on a mistranslation--the bird was more like a tiny kite. Freud was harshly criticized for his faulty theory. In this book, French philosopher Damisch, playfully turns the tables on Freud to look at Piero. What he is intending is to call attention to the way tropes function in constructing our understanding of a picture and to try and deconstruct the way that supposed memories (almost always apocryphal) are used to construct and determine our understanding of the artist and the meaning of their work. In Piero's Madonna del Parto, Damisch proposes aa childhood memory of wondering where babies come from. We have before us a very pregnant Madonna--rare in art history-- who appears to be about to give birth any second. In what he repeats is an unprecedented hand gesture, the Madonna opens her outer garment to create an opening that hints at the coming birth. In fact the entire fresco is itself an opening. We have no frame --just the parting curtains for the birth of God. I loved the chapter on the Virgin as a tabernacle. It was a new image for me. I was fascinated by the images of the Ark as sheltered in the pavilion (Latin Butterfly). This pointed movable tent is also seen in his True Cross Fresco in the Constantine dream fragment. Here though, the Virgin stands on a dais underneath what can only be called a tabernacle created the Virgin as Ark-- as a cult object. Art historians have paid so much attention to the painter's Flagellation. But the madonna del Parto is probably the most loved, the most popular of his works. Even now, you can see the prayers that women leave at her feet --they put them in a basket right in the museum. It is one of my favorite pictures in the world and I loved Damisch's book-- challenging but worth the effort to read three times so far...

Review # 2 was written on 2008-11-23 00:00:00 Robert Roselli Stunning account of Matisse's representations of women. Elderfield overthrows over-academic dualisms and shows Matisse's work with all of the beautiful ambiguity it deserves.