The last poem I read is, again, based on a painting
by Luca Signorelli.
The painting is in the cathedral in Orvieto.
And it's the painting of The Resurrection of the Body.
And in it, the spirits, the souls
are coming down like little angels,
I guess, from the upper regions.
And the bones are making their way up back through the soil.
And on the line where the two merge,
they're sort of fleshing again into people.
And then the people, there's crowds of people.
And they're doing things.
Luca Signorelli wasn't a great painter.
This is probably his only really interesting painting.
But he was technically the first really proficient master
at depicting the human body.
And that's because he was one of those people who
was one of the very first practitioners
of human vivisection or studied the anatomy very literally.
And Michelangelo learnt a great deal from him, but, of course,
brought passion to the enterprise,
and so his work is a different order.
But I'm standing in the cathedral
here quite helplessly looking at this painting
and trying to make some sense of it.
"At Luca Signorelli's Resurrection of the Body,
see how they hurry to enter their bodies, these spirits.
Is it better flesh that they should hurry so?
From above, the green-winged angels
blare down trumpets and light.
But they don't care.
They hurry to congregate.
They hurry into speech until it's a marketplace.
It is humanity.
But still, we wonder in the chancel of the dark cathedral,
is it better back?
The artist has tried to make it so.
Each tendon they press to re-enter is perfect.
But is it perfection thereafter pulling themselves up
through the soil into the weightedness, the color,
into the eye of the painter?
Outside it is 1500.
All around the cathedral, streets
hurry to open through the wild silver grasses.
The men and women on the cathedral wall
do not know how having come this far to stop their hurrying.
They amble off in groups and couples.
Soon some are clothed.
There is distance.
There is perspective.
Standing below them in the church in Orvieto,
how can we tell them to be stern and brazen and slow, that there
is no entrance, only entering?
They keep on arriving, wanting names, wanting happiness.
In his studio, Luca Signorelli in the name of God
and science and the believable, broke
into the body studying arrival.
But the wall of the flesh opens endlessly.
Its vanishing point so deep and receding we
have yet to find it.
To have it stop us.
So he cut deeper.
Graduating slowly from the symbolic to the beautiful.
How far is true?
When his one son died violently, he had the body brought to him
and laid it on the drawing table and stood at a certain distance
awaiting the best possible light, the best depth of day.
Then with beauty and care and technique and judgment
cut into shadow, cut into bone and sinew, and every pocket
in which the cold light pulled.
It took him days, that deep caress,
cutting, unfastening until his mind could
climb into the open flesh and mend itself."
[APPLAUSE]