The Collected Prose

by Zbigniew Herbert

  Brother Bernard from Albi:

  “I was tortured so much, so long was I interrogated and held in the fire, that my feet are burned, and I felt my bones breaking inside me.”

  Brother Aimery de Villiers-le-Duc, May 13, 1310:

  The protocol says that the accused was pale and terrified. He had sworn with his hand on the altar that the crimes of which the Order was accused were an invention. “If I lie, let my body and soul be consumed by Hell right here on the spot.” When his previous testimonies were read to him, he answered: “Yes, I confessed many misdeeds, but that was because of the torment inflicted upon me by royal knights, Guillaume de Marcilly and Hugues de la Celle during my interrogation. Yesterday I saw fifty-four of my brothers taken on carts to be burned alive…Ah, if I am going to die at the stake, I shall confess that I am very afraid of death, that I cannot endure it, I shall yield…I shall confess under oath, in front of you, in front of any one, to any crime you charge the Order with; I shall admit I have killed God if they so demand.”

  I would like to stress, High Jury, the psychological aspect of death at the stake. The animal fear of fire rests on the knowledge that it will inflict the most acute pain. What spiritual strength is needed to keep faith that we will carry even the smallest part of our being away from this most destructive element. For medieval society the taste of ash was not, as for us, the taste of nothingness. Death at the stake was the vestibule of Hell, a never--ending stake where bodies suffer inextinguishable pain. The physical fire merged with the spiritual. Present torment foreshadows eternal torment. Heaven—the seat of the chosen, the cool, silent masses of air—was in the eyes of the dying remote and unattainable.

  At the beginning of 1309, the investigation is renewed. This new phase is characterized by tightening of the screws of the machine for extracting testimonies (in Paris alone, thirty-six Templars died during interrogation). On the other hand, a seemingly inexplicable thing happens: the unprecedented resistance of the prisoners, who abandon all tricks and politics. Jacques de Molay states that he will defend the Order, but only in front of the Pope. Other brothers make similar declarations. By May 2, the number of Templars ready to defend the Order has grown to five hundred and sixty-three. The answer to this mass resistance is a stake at which fifty-four Templars perish. The old Roman method of decimation triumphs again.

  In June 1311 the proceedings are closed and the dossier of the investigation is sent to the Pope. The Council of Vienne did not bring the expected relief for the Order. These were the years of the Avignon captivity, and the Pope considered the case as lost. The Bull dissolved the Order, yet it did not contain a condemnation of the Templars. Their property was to be handed over to the Hospitallers. The blood of the brothers of the Temple did not turn into Philip’s gold.

  But the prisons of France were full; and something had to be done with the dignitaries of the Order, who wanted to defend themselves before the tribunal, “since we do not even have four pennies to pay for another defence.” They ceaselessly demand to be brought before a papal tribunal.

  The investigation was over, however, and the envoys of Clement V were passive presences at the sentencing. The leaders of the Templars faced life imprisonment. The sentence of Jacques de Molay and Geoffroi de Charney was read in Notre-Dame Cathedral. A great crowd listened in silence; but before the reading of the sentence could be completed, both men—perhaps the exalted Gothic of Notre-Dame exercised its influence—faced the people and shouted down the charges of crime and heresy leveled against the Templars whose rule “was always sacred, right and Catholic.” A sentry’s heavy hand fell on the mouth of the Master to muffle the last words of the condemned. The cardinals handed over the recalcitrant to the court of Paris. Philip the Fair commanded burning at the stake on the same day. To appease his anger, he gave to the flames another thirty-six uncompromising brothers.

  High Jury, that appears to be the end of the drama of the Templar Order. Experts rummage the tombs for a clue to the mystery. Sometimes they succeeded in finding the chain of ages, sometimes they are fascinated by the smile of the alleged Baphomet found on a portal. The defense set itself a more modest task: examination of the instruments.

  In history nothing is definitively closed. The methods used against the Templars enriched the repertoire of power. That is why we cannot leave this distant affair to the pale fingers of archivists.

  PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA

  For Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz

  FRIENDS SAY: WELL, so you were there and saw a lot; you liked Duccio, and the Dorian columns, and the stained glass at Chartres, and the Lascaux bulls—but tell us what you chose for yourself, who is the painter closest to your heart, the one you’d never give up for any other. A reasonable question since every love, if true, should destroy the previous one, should enter, overwhelm your whole being, and demand exclusiveness. So I pause to think and reply: Piero della Francesca.

  The first meeting: in London at the National Gallery. A cloudy day. A choking fog descends upon the city. Though I did not intend to visit sights that day, I was forced to find shelter against the stifling damp. The impression came completely unexpectedly. From the first room it was apparent: the London museum collection surpasses the Louvre. Never had I seen so many masterpieces at once. Perhaps this is not the best way to become acquainted with art. In a concert programme, apart from Scarlatti, Bach, Mozart, it is good to include, say, a second rate composer—for instruction rather than out of perversity.

  I stayed longest with a painter whose name I had only known from books. The painting was The Nativity, an unusual composition full of light and grave joy that leaps out at you. The impression was similar to my first encounter with Van Eyck. It is difficult to define such an aesthetic shock. The picture roots you to one spot. You cannot step back or move closer or (as with modern painting) smell the paint and examine the facture treatment. The background of The Nativity is a humble shed, or rather a crumbling brick wall with a light, slanted roof. In the foreground the Christ child rests on a patch of grass worn like an old rug. Behind the child and facing the spectator, stands a choir of five angels, barefoot, earthy, strong as columns. Their peasant faces contrast with the luminous countenance of the Madonna (as in Baldovinetti1) who kneels to the right in mute adoration. The fragile candles of her beautiful hands are alight. In the background we see the massive torso of a bull, a donkey, two Flemish-looking shepherds, and St. Joseph turning his profile to the viewer. At the sides are two landscapes like windows through which sparkling light pours. Despite some damage, the colors are as clear and resonant as stained glass. Painted in the last years of the artist’s career, it is as someone eloquently said “Piero’s evening prayer to childhood and dawn.”

  On the opposite wall, The Baptism of Christ. One of the first surviving canvases of Piero. It has the same solemn architectural serenity as The Nativity, though painted earlier. The solid flesh of the figures contrasts with the light, melodious, pure landscape. There is a finality in the leaves cast like cards upon the sky—a moment transformed into eternity.

  Goethe’s wise dictum: “Wer den Dichter2 will verstehen, muss in Dichters Lande gehen.” In the sphere of painting, this translates as follows: as the fruits of light, paintings should be viewed under the artist’s native sun. Sassetta seems out of place in the most attractive American museum. I therefore decided to make the pilgrimage to Piero della Francesca. Since my means were modest, I surrendered to chance and adventure. My story does not follow a chronology so relished by historians.

  I got to Perugia first. This sombre town, probably the darkest in Italy, dwells in the green-golden Umbrian landscape, imprisoned in walls to this day. Suspended on a high cliff above the Tiber, it has been compared to a giant’s hand—marked by its cruel and violent history as an Etruscan, Roman, and Gothic town. It is symbolized by the Palazzo dei Priori, a powerful edifice with metal ornaments and a wall bent like molten iron. A fantastic labyrinth of streets, stairs, passages, and cellars—an architectural repl
ica of the inhabitants’ anxious spirit—lies behind the square which was once the site of the ruined Palazzo Baglioni, but is now occupied by elegant hotels.

  “I Perugini sono angeli o demoni,” said Aretino3. The town’s coat of arms: a griffin with open jaw and ferocious talons. At the height of its power, the Perugian republic ruled over Umbria, a territory defended by one hundred and twenty castles. The temperament of its citizens was best exemplified by the Baglioni family, whose members seldom died a natural death. They were vengeful and cruel, artistically refined enough to slaughter their enemies on beautiful summer evenings. The first “pictures” of the Perugian school were military banners. Churches here have the character of bastions, and the lovely fountain of Giovanni Pisano4 served as a water reservoir during numerous sieges, rather than as an object of aesthetic contemplation. After prolonged internal struggles the town fell to the papacy, which to bring it definitely under the yoke constructed a citadel ad coercendam Perusinorum audaciam.

  In the morning I had breakfast in a small bistro, cool as a cellar. Opposite sat a gray-haired man with a shaggy face, narrow eyes, and the posture of a retired boxer. He reminded me of a picture of Hemingway I’d seen. But it turned out (as the proprietor proudly pointed out) it was Ezra Pound. The right man in the right place—an impetuous man who would feel at home in the company of the Baglionis.

  In the middle of the fifteenth century Piero della Francesca—then a mature artist and, like his colleagues, a “wandering craftsmen”—traveled to Rome to paint frescoes in the chambers of Pope Pius II which were sadly destroyed. On his way he stopped in Perugia.

  His polyptych, Madonna and Child with Four Saints, remains in the Perugia Pinacoteca. It has an astonishing background. A gold background at the height of the Quattrocento! The riddle is explained by his contract with the monastery of S. Antonio delle Monache. Piero painted the saints in abstract heavenly glory, rather than against a landscape, to suit the conservative, eternal taste of the brethren. Though it is not Piero’s best work, it displays a characteristic bluntness in his treatment of human form, with solid heads and shoulders like treetops.

  Most astonishing is the polyptych’s predella portraying St. Francis receiving the stigmata—here the Renaissance master makes a direct reference to the tradition of Giotto. The figures of two monks in a desert landscape on cracked earth brushed with ashes, with a Byzantine bird overhead—Christ.

  Arezzo lies halfway between Perugia and Florence. A town that clings to a hill capped by a citadel. Here Petrarch was born—the son of a Florentine exile—who later discovered the homeland of exiles: philosophy, and also Aretino, “whose tongue wounded the living and the dead and who spared only God, explaining that he did not know him.”

  St. Francis’s church is dark and austere. You have to walk the length of an immense, unlit vestibule of darkness to reach the organ-loft and one of painting’s greatest wonders of all time: The Legend of the True Cross, a sequence of fourteen frescoes painted by Piero in his full maturity, between 1452 and 1466. The subject is derived from the apocryphal gospel of Nicodemus and Jacobus de Voragine’s5 Golden Legend. Let us try to describe the fresco (a hopeless undertaking).

  The Death of Adam. According to legend, the tree of the Cross grew from the seed placed under the tongue of the dying Father of Humankind. A naked Adam expires in the arms of aged Eve. Piero’s elders are unlike those ruins of men Rembrandt liked to paint. They possess the pathos and wisdom of dying animals. Eve asks Seth to return to the Garden of Eden to bring an olive which will cure Adam. On the left, Seth talks with an angel in front of the Gate of Paradise. Adam lies in the center—stiffly laid out under a desperately bare tree as Seth places the seed in his mouth. A few figures bend their heads over the dead man. A woman with outspread arms cries voicelessly. Her cry carries not terror but prophesy. The entire scene is exalted, simple, and Hellenic, like verses of the Old Testament written by Aeschylus.

  The Queen of Sheba Visits Solomon. A medieval tale relates that the tree of the Cross survived until Solomon. The King ordered that it be felled and used for a bridge over the river Siloam. Here the Queen of Sheba had a vision and fell to her knees, surrounded by her astonished maids. Piero depicted human form as only a supreme master can. The features of his figures are unmistakable and unforgettable, just as it is impossible to mistake Botticelli’s women with those of any other master. Piero’s models have oval-shaped heads set on long, blushing necks and full, strongly delineated shoulders. The shape of their heads are accentuated by hair closely molded to the skull. Their faces are naked—all life concentrated in the eyes, features tensed and concentrated. Eyes with almond-shaped lids almost never return a viewer’s glance. Piero’s art avoids the cheap psychology that makes painting a theater of gestures and grimaces. When he wishes to stage a drama (as here, for the Queen of Sheba is lonely in her mystical vision), he surrounds his heroine with a group of surprised girls. For greater contrast, he adds horses under a tree and two henchmen, simple, shapely boys who prefer hooves and hide to miracles. The time of day is as in other works by Piero: indeterminate, a pink-blue dawn or perhaps noon.

  The scene continues, and Piero holds the story in a unified perspective similar to the conventional unity of place in classical theater. Under a Corinthian portico, drawn with an architect’s precision, the Queen of Sheba meets Solomon. Two worlds: the feminine court of the Queen, colorful and histrionic; and Solomon’s officers, a study of severe political wisdom and gravity. There is the Renaissance variety of dress, but without Pisanello’s ornament and detail. Solomon’s men stand firmly on the stone floor; their long feet, seen in profile, recall Egyptian painting.

  The bridge is dismantled in the next scene. Three workers carry a heavy log as though anticipating Christ’s path to Golgotha. Yet this fragment (with the exception of the central figure) is weighted and painted in a naive manner so that art historians detect the hand of Piero’s disciples in it.

  The Annunciation is composed with an Albertian architecture of perfect balance and perspective. The austerity of marble accords with the grave tone of the story. A massive God the Father in a cloud with an angel on his left side; and Mary, a calm, sculpted Renaissance figure.

  The Dream of Constantine. Piero now leaves the stone porticoes and paints the golden-brown interior of Constantine’s tent, one of the first conscious chiaroscuro nocturnes in Italian art. The torches’ glow gently models the forms of two guardsmen, with a seated courtier and the sleeping Emperor in the foreground.

  Constantine’s Victory Over Maxentius evokes both Uccello and Velázquez, though Piero builds his theme with a classical simplicity and loftiness. Even the chaos of the cavalcade is organized. Knowing very well the principle of foreshortening, he never uses it for exclamation, never disturbs the harmony of planes. Raised lances support the morning sky, the landscape rains light.

  The Torture of Judas portrays Judas, who was thrown into a dry well by order of Helena, the Emperor’s mother, for not divulging the hiding place of the tree of the Cross. The scene depicts two servants lifting a repentant Judas from the well with a pulley attached to triangular scaffolding. Seneschal Boniface holds him tightly by the hair. Though the subject suggests a study of cruelty, Piero speaks in a sober, objective voice. The faces of the dramatis personae are unmoved and void of emotion. If anything appears ominous in the scene, it is the apparatus which binds the convict. Once more geometry has absorbed passion.

  The Discovery and Proof of the Cross. The fresco is divided into two sections which form an inseparable thematic and compositional unity. The first shows the excavation of the three crosses by workers, watched by Constantine’s mother. A medieval town of spires, slanted roofs, pink and yellow walls sits in the distant valley. In the second section a half-naked man touched by the Cross rises from the dead. The Emperor’s mother and her maids-of-honor worship the scene. The architectural background is like a commentary on the event. It is not the phantom medieval town of the previous scene, but a harmony
of marble triangles, squares, and circles: the mature wisdom of the Renaissance. The architecture here has the role of a final, rational verification of the miracle.

  Three hundred years after the discovery of the True Cross, the Persian King Chosroes6 captured Jerusalem and Christianity’s most precious relic. In turn, the Persians were defeated by Emperor Heraclius7. Piero unfolds the raging battle in a confused knot of men, horses, and war implements which only superficially resembles the famous battles of Uccello. One is struck by the great serenity emanating from Piero’s frescoes. Uccello’s conflicts are noisy. His copper horses pound with their haunches, the massacre’s roar and trampling rises to the sheet-iron sky and falls heavily to earth. In Piero the gestures are slow, solemn. His narration has an epic impassiveness, both sides conduct their bloody rites with the earnestness of lumbermen felling a forest. The sky above the contestants is transparent. In the wind the unfolded banners “bow with their wings lowered, like dragons, lizards, and birds pierced with spears.”

  Finally, the victorious, barefoot Heraclius carries the Cross to Jerusalem, leading a ceremonial procession of Greek and Armenian priests with their colorful, bizarrely shaped head-dresses. Art historians wonder where Piero could have observed such fantastic costumes. Perhaps they were introduced purely for the sake of composition. With his taste for the monumental, Piero crowns the heads of his heroes like an architect capitalizing columns. Heraclius’ procession, the finale of the golden legend, resounds with a pure, dignified note.

  Piero’s masterpiece has been severely damaged by damp and restorers’ incompetence. The colors are faded as though rubbed with flour, and the poor lighting of the organ-loft hinders full contemplation of the frescoes. Yet, if only one legendary figure remained, one tree, one splinter of sky, we could reconstruct the whole from these scraps, like the fragments of a Greek temple.