5 Women in Milan
October 2019
5 encounters in Milan.
GetyourGuide, Piazza di Santa Maria delle Grazie
‘Let’s do a trial. Let’s see if you can hear my voice’, says the tour group leader, as she hands out little radio sets from her handbag, along with ear pieces in small plastic bags outside the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie at eight o’clock on a muggy October morning.
‘OK, so you can hear me, yes? Ok, I must tell you that photo is allowed but no flash. OK? No selfie stick. Anyone have a food or a drink? OK you do, right, you must put it over there - put it in the locker in that place’.
Words tumble through the time waiting.
‘I go here everyday. I have great emotion every day. I see the painting everyday. It is amazing, yes really, amazing’.
Her voice is flat from too much repetition of the same words, day after day. Her script is memorised and timed, but sometimes the wait outside is longer than her speech.
‘OK, yes, we still have time. So you can ask me question of course. You must ask questions. So we still have some minutes of course, so I tell you a bit more’.
She struggles to find the lines stored in her head and language stumbles with facts. A man comes out of a door and leans into her ear.
‘OK so now we go in. We are ready. Yes, you show your ticket to that man. Ok so now we go’.
The Caretaker. The Refectory, Santa Maria delle Grazie
For 15 minutes, she had stood beneath Jesus, her back towards him, still and unnoticed. Then she raises her arms, mirroring those above her, palms upwards. Her eyes, like his, are downcast and sorrowful.
‘Dovete uscire’. (You must leave), she says quietly.
We continue to marvel at the painting on the refectory, now 500 years old. No one hears her. She is very short with long greying hair curled in the ancient Roman manner. She dances a step or two forwards in line with the cameras pointing to the wall behind her. Her arms open wider, her grey nylon frock rising above her knees.
’Dovete Uscire’, she says, her voice rising more urgently.
She moves forward again, a little hop and a dance in her soft, flat, black shoes on the stone floor. She pushes the air, like waves push pebbles on a beach. She is gaining confidence now and walks slowly and purposely forwards, ushering her flock towards the exit.
‘Dovete uscire'. ‘Dovete uscire’, she repeats every few seconds.
I turn to look at the masterpiece a final time and raise my camera and see not Jesus, but her heavy eyes imploring through the lens.
‘Dovete uscire’ she says through the camera’s eye.
It is the final picture I have of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper.
Roccabianca’s Griselda in Il Castello Sforzesco
A naked peasant girl stands outside her humble house with a hand over her genitals. She looks down at her feet, ashamed. She has been crying. She is surrounded by men whose lascivious eyes play upon her virgin skin. The rich marquis in tight fitting hose stands before her about to give her mother the money in exchange for her elevation to noble status, as his wife. A woman’s virtue for a few coins. The monochromatic panels silently tell of her humiliation and torment. Outside a pigeon coos softly and school children giggle shrilly in the castle-palace of that cruel prince, Federico Sforza.
Andrea Mantegna’s Mary - The ‘Lamentation over the dead Christ’, Pinacoteca di Brera
A mother weeps silently for her dead son, her hands holding a cloth to dab her tears. She is stricken with grief. Her boy is stretched out on a mortuary trolley, his body cleaned and partially covered with a loose sheet, his skin torn and jagged around the holes in his feet and hands. The voyeur feels that he has stumbled inadvertently upon a family tragedy where a mother is distraught at her young son’s violent and sudden death. The room he sees, is small, fuggy with the beginnings of decay. Soaked in sorrow, the mother’s face is haggard, her lines deep with age contrasting with the smooth features of her divine young son.
The woman on top of the Duomo’s roof
She walks with nervous precision in front of us, her feet hesitant to leave the leaded roof to step over the ribs of marble. She ducks under the buttresses holding her husband’s hand, fearful of looking up from where her feet will tread. The saints and heroes watch her with stoney impassivity and the beasts hold their tails in their mouths as she passes. She reaches the sunshine and sits breathing heavily upon the warm pink marble slabs where she adjusts her hair and reaches for her phone to take a picture of herself. Her husband peers past the marbled flowers that have been carved into the white church walls, to the crowds 60 metres below feeding the pigeons in the square.
Shall we go?’ he asks;
‘Yes’, she says and 600 years of the stonemason’s art is passed, unseen.