Hockney and Piero: A longer look

As part of the National Gallery 200th anniversary celebrations two David Hockney paintings are currently on in room 46 beside Piero's 'Baptism of Christ' which has been a lifelong inspiration to the artist. Piero's masterpiece is reproduced in 'My Parents', and in 'Looking at Pictures on a Screen', both painted in 1977.

His mother sits with her hands resting reflectively on her lap, radiating warmth and his seated father is engrossed in an art book. They sit either side of a vivid green trolley with a vase of red and yellow tulips and a mirror reflects a copy of Piero's Baptism on the wall.

This is the third version of his parents, Kenneth and Laura Hockney, embracing Piero's perpendicular lines.

Hockney first came to the National Gallery in 1953 aged eighteen. He praised the Gallery for being able to come for free to see his favourite pictures and contemplate them- the longer look. As a student he would frequently visit drawing inspiration from favourites in the collection.

He had postcards and posters of them so he could always have a copy with him and would sometimes change arrangements of them, for example inserting himself in 'Looking at Pictures on a Screen' instead of his close friend, Henry Geldzahler, the Belgian curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Dressed in a white suit, bathed in reflected light, he gazes at four posters of National Gallery favourite paintings depicted on a screen including the Piero.

Letters between Hockney and Michael Levey when he was Director of the National Gallery express Hockney's love and admiration of the National Gallery.

Hockney was fascinated by Piero's Baptism of Christ. He gave his mother, a devout Methodist, a reproduction of it which she placed on her bedroom wall, so he was immersed in it from an early age.

The original is displayed with the two Hockney's on either side providing an opportunity to compare his paintings and Piero's masterpiece. 'Slow looking' is Hockney's term - an activity he considers vital for people to rediscover the beauty of the world about them and revealed in art.

He loves the spatiality in Piero which he imitates in his own pictures.

Hockney has often said that being able to draw is being able to put things in believable space.

His sister told him some years ago, as they walked along Bridlington beach, that she thought space was God. It struck him that this was a very nice and poetic idea.

A lesson for my fellow reviewers who dash around clicking their smart phones without ever lingering to gaze at what they are snapping!

Painting, says Hockney, is like music - you can't talk about it "you've just to listen to music …And you've just to look at paintings.

Piero della Francesca was born in Tuscany, 1415-20 and was the first artist to write about perspective. He used mathematical principles to shape his composition creating a timeless and harmonious image. We know little of his career except that he was working with Veneziano in Florence in1439. Amongst his patrons were Pope Nicholas V. He died in 1492 and is buried in his native Sansepolcro.

A tree separates the figures at the side of the painting from the principal actors in the scene, as the curtain separated the Holy of Holies in the Temple from the people. Christ faces frontwards with the dove of the Holy Spirit static above his head. John the Baptist stands sideways to Jesus and holds a shell with water dripping onto Christ's head at the moment of God's revelation of his divine Son. A moment in Time - a meeting of Heaven and earth. A mountain rises in the background, as in most Piero paintings depicting a backdrop of the Italian countryside, but perhaps symbolic of the holy mountain where God's voice was experienced by the Prophet Elijah, and John the Baptist is the last prophet uniting Old and New Testaments in proclaiming the way of the Lord.They are often linked with each other in iconography.

On the right figures undress ready for their baptism.

Hockney declares the painting truly marvellous in an interview with art critic Martin Gayford, featured in the catalogue. He visits the Gallery regularly -the last time in February this year, to look upon the Baptism. He sees it as "a spatial thrill-seeing fantastic figures in space."

He says that although brought up Christian he is not now religious. However, in commenting on Piero's Italian frescoes after viewing them in a church in Arrezzo he says they are so high up that they are only visible to God!

As Hockney says in wishing Happy Birthday to The National Gallery it is doing a great job in keeping all those pictures safe and on view. "They are images from the past that really live today…."

Catalogue at a special Gallery price of £14.95

Until 27th.October 2024. Free admission.

See: www.nationalgallery.org.uk/