A poem by Valentino Zeichen for Leonardo da Vinci's Annunciation.

Literary critics have never been particularly tender with Storia dell’arte italiana in poesia, the anthology that, in 1990, Plinio Perilli assembled in an attempt to compile a history of art in verse, either with poems taken from already published collections, or with unpublished works requested for the occasion from contemporary poets. The idea of certain critics is that the lyric, if overly indebted to the painting or sculpture, somehow lives in their shadow, shines only by reflected light, fails and rises to the rank of masterpiece. It suffers from “structural vicariousness,” Giorgio Manacorda had written, and runs the risk of turning into “poetry for the blind,” of resulting in a mere description of the work of art. In short: the “cultural transfusion” that Perilli intended to operate between art and poetry sometimes fails, and it is undeniable that certain poems can come across as sluggish, tired, forced. However, the exact opposite is also true: there are poems that are like gems set between the pages of the anthology, precious comments in verse that add, help to understand, take the reader by the hand. So take the poem Valentino Zeichen dedicates to Leonardo da Vinci’sAnnunciation , the early masterpiece preserved in the Uffizi, where it arrived in 1867 from the sacristy of the church of San Bartolomeo in Monteoliveto, just outside the center of Florence.

Seemingly, the aesthetic planes of Zeichen and Leonardo could not be more offset: the amiability of Leonardo’s sfumato, the brush lingering in decorativism when he offers us the Virgin’s lectern, the subtle, lenticular finesse of the turf that is cloaked in flowers and little flowers one by one delineated. In contrast, Zeichen’s sharp, sparse, rough and almost lashing verses, his irony that does not spare even Leonardo’s masterpiece, the unruliness of his witty, baroque, earthy poetry. In their antiliricism and prosastic attitude, however, the two find a common level. Prosastic are Zeichen’s verses, prosastic is Leonardo’s sacred epiphany, described by the artist in his early twenties according to the canons of reason that returns to us an angel with wings of rapture, full, earthly, corporeal, just arrived and bowed in reverence before the Madonna posed in classical composure.

Zeichen’s poem, published first in Perilli’s anthology and then again, with slight modifications, in Pocket Metaphysics, begins with the angel’s arrival, travels a also rather usual route through the painting, and finally returns to where it all began: “The divine aeronautics sends / a superb flying specimen: / perhaps an archangel, / technical marvel of wings / with high lift, / portrayed in braking trim. / Visible at the attachment / would be said to be prostheses drawn / from a heraldic bestiary. / But in spite of the apparition, / the Virgin’s announcement / must run within / an invisible thread that / contains the prodigy, / hidden in a further / and protected secret / put under false track. / One flies over the event / immersed in the half-light / beyond the row of trees, / the fleeing landscape invites / to compete with the / transparent distance. / The gaze pursues it but / vainly pierces the air; / then, now blind, it desists / to turn elsewhere and / reveals to us a second nostalgia, / so-called from ’estrangement’.”

Leonardo da Vinci, Annunciation (c. 1472; oil on panel, 90 x 222 cm; Florence, Uffizi Gallery, inv. 1890 no. 1618)

From the very first image, Leonardo and Zeichen’s interests merge into a single, strongly evocative word: “aeronautics.” Airplanes return often in the compositions of the Rijeka poet: they are the means that transport lost poets lacking real inspiration, it is similar to the flight of an air formation his approach to a woman, planes fly over the skies of Rijeka during the war, in what is perhaps the most moving (and above all most lyrical!) of his poems, a childhood memory that takes us back to when Zeichen was only five years old and walked holding his mother’s hand, with tied to his wrist a blue balloon that he always carried with him, and yet one day it escapes from him, flying through the air, heedless of the bombs of the Americans’ B-17s. And of course, aeronautics is one of the main fields of interest of the scientist Leonardo, who has been studying the flight of birds with fervent passion since his adolescence. A bird is also God’s messenger: “perhaps an archangel,” wonders Zeichen, who reports on its arrival with supreme irony, imagining it now as a machine and describing it with the phrasing proper to technical journals (the wings “with high lift,” “portrayed in braking trim”), now as an animal, a “superb flying specimen,” with those wings seemingly taken from a “heraldic bestiary.” Zeichen’s almost playful approach transfigures the solidity, the presence, the corporeity of Leonardo’s angel: Roberto Salvini, longtime director of the Uffizi, wrote after all that here the angel’s wings are not “inert and decorative as they usually are,” but are “presented in the evidence of their function.” And the great art historian could not help but note how Leonardo was already studying the evolutions of birds at the time.

However, the divine bird must bear his revelation to Our Lady, the “prodigy” that runs along an “invisible thread.” and the communication of the prodigy, in Leonardo, takes place through that “orchestration of looks, gestures and space,” as Martin Kemp has called it, which from the complex simplicity of theAnnunciation would later rise to levels of laboriousness even higher, as in the John the Baptist or theAngel of the Annunciation, the design in which the recipient of the news brought by the angel is the relative, as if "we had taken the place of the Virgin in a tableau vivant," Kemp suggests. The history of humanity that will change after the announcement of the archangel Gabriel is concentrated in the space defined by Leonardo da Vinci in his tableau (according to certain golden rules, according to certain studies): Mary is from this moment the new ark of the Covenant, the woman covered by the shadow of the Most High. A double secret then: that revealed by the angel with his coming to earth, and that revealed by Leonardo with his composition.

Now, however, having fulfilled the duties of office, our gaze can rest elsewhere: “beyond the row of trees,” where “the fleeing landscape invites / to compete with the / transparent distance.” Zeichen, here, follows us as we peer through Leonardo’s aerial perspective, traversing the landscape that opens beyond thehortus conclusus, beyond the twelve trees that serrate the Virgin’s garden (and the thirteenth near her house), the first instance in the iconography of the Annunciation in which, moreover, the Madonna is not under a loggia. Beyond the parapet, a river ploughed by a few boats, a turreted village inferred from Flemish painting, sharp mountains blurring in the distance, in the delicate luminosity of twilight that makes the trees stand out against the light, hardens the two figures and blurs everything else. The landscape is, along with the angel, the only element in the painting on whose autography all critics have always agreed. “Leonardo’s touch,” wrote one of his greatest scholars, Frank Zöllner, “is evident in the masterful way he treats the elements, water, air, light,” and recalls what the artist himself wrote in The Book of Painting: “true it is that some side mountains are to be made with diminished degrees of colors, as the order of diminishing colors in long distances requires.”

The landscape is covered by a light mist: we try to look through the mist, but fail, and turn back. From where we had begun to look at theAnnunciation. Zeichen, in a few verses, tells us the most typical way in which the vast majority of people look at this painting, describing with his wit the journey that the eye undertakes when approaching Leonardo’s text: it should not have been difficult for him, so accustomed, as a free, sincere and self-mocking flâneur , to going to museums, so much so that he has dedicated several poems to works of art. All the more so that, with Leonardo, one can almost sense a commonality of intent. Especially when the great Da Vinci wrote that nature is “teacher of the masters.” For Zeichen, more simply, “Nature is already a picture gallery / of every generation.” Full of living pictures and beauty. “To prove that it is wasted time / to drag oneself through museums.”

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