Restoring Pontormo's Veronica His phantom breathed down my neck – I smelled his pungent manhood, grimy crusts on his pant thighs he was no faint knight – his fortitude held a madman in artists clothing. I could see it in the swipes eroding at his angel’s feet - a brush thick as the Fire-eater’s brow – and swift with a dab of his thumb’s bravado he created Veronica’s smallest toe. I felt the energy of his prime, a storm conjuring Veronica’s purest form - womanhood enticing him, betrothed under her spell when holding the cloth of Christ’s Imprint, or perhaps his own. I hesitated then to be up there alone with the rumble of traffic below stripping us bare of time. I let go my brush so as not to touch the Veronica he guarded so much. His stormy emotions blew me down numb on the cusp of the scaffold board – my legs dangling as his breath pushed through his love’s stare and his own glare – My Veronica is not to be touched. But his lunatic ghost had no powerful stand over time’s clutch. I finally stood and began my fearful cleaning of centuries’ dust and history’s grime holding on to the last stroke of his hard caressing brush. Fruit of Thy Womb (tribute to the model in Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin) You were born virgin, woman of a voracious nature where men had wet your legs and molded your nipples hard without the caress of a baby’s breath. Your pose in eternal succumbing spreads Virgin arms on the artist’s bed with the fruit of thy womb worn as a cross by many of those men crying who died for their own sins – mortal wants and crude departures thrown into a heavenly white release. If you had put them under your cloak with a mystical gift of having no scent you could have wrapped them into an immaculate ejaculation and freed their spirit in guiltless lust. Class Visit to Watch the Brancacci Video On the wall of the Carmine's refractory Adam and Eve appear in animated motion the way Lippi had painted them centuries before in the Brancacci next door - our headphones as pathways to merge pigments into light. The deep voice of an omnipotent narrator tells us how the story went: the flames of the pillars billowed and crackled densely through our ears, the church caved in, the walls heated, then melted into a violent condensed version of history. We, protected behind the Voice, control the volume of destruction's noise. We take the next step into the artist’s vision and watch the miracle revealed to Us: the reincarnation of Masaccio’s Christ. He walks with His shadow to heal the man – the one that stood with the concave leg – healed before our eyes there in the refractory where We, unknowingly, become visionaries. In virtual frescoed colors Masaccio eyes us, and through the deep majestic god-voice of time, he returns in transparent intonaco revived in a way that only We, Pharaohs of our own century, could bring movement to Adam and Eve. Then there is light upon us, in our solid world squinting from the light of day as we walk away from the refractory, the boy chewing his apple, the girl removing the Voice from her ears, each step weighing a hundred years. A Restorer's Spill Love has tainted everything, like that day Giò knocked over the bowl on the scaffolding when he grabbed your waist, spilling gold on Vasari’s knight, spreading dazzle on a hardened face – love’s warrior blinded by the sight of Giò dripping onto you, trusting the thrust of his original intent – then you removed the lustre with a rag of love’s lament. Restoration of a 13th Century Icon I may fill the lacuna with the exact colour between child and crown there on her throne and think to be part of that eternal art, I may write a poem because of her stare alone in the musty solvent smells of work leaving me to ponder what it’s worth – her glance may juggle time with eternity making light the intricacies of death because she survived the centuries – but the space between her eyes and mine holds humanity’s enduring struggle with art and will never depict the lacuna of life. Lily Prigioniero These poems were inspired "by working face-to-face with ancient masters and living in the cradle of the Renaissance." "Restoration of a 13th Century Icon" was first published in "Full of Grace" (Judith Dupre, Random House). Lily Prigioniero graduated from University of Michigan and moved to Florence, Italy, where she was hired by the Pitti fresco restoration team to work on some of Tuscany's greatest masters. She has taught writing and art conservation in study abroad programs for NYU, Brandeis, and Florence University of the Arts. She lives with her family in the hills outside Florence.
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November 2024
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