Larry Witham
Preface
Prologue: Discovering Piero
CHAPTER 1 The Renaissance’s Apprentice
CHAPTER 2 Florentine Crossroads
CHAPTER 3 A Platonic Painter of Light
CHAPTER 4 Strange Legends in Fresco
CHAPTER 5 Piero Goes to Rome
CHAPTER 6 The Aging Geometer
CHAPTER 7 After the Renaissance
CHAPTER 8 Piero Rediscovered
CHAPTER 9 Piero and Modernity
CHAPTER 10 The Eyes of Science
CHAPTER 11 A Celebrated Life
Acknowledgments
Image Gallery
Illustration Credits
Notes
Index
As a rule, individual artists do not change the course of human history. Only with the rise of mass media in the twentieth century have artists of the past appeared to be such titanic figures, shaking the world in their own time (when they actually did not). Nevertheless, artists have held a special place in our imagination as markers along the road of great cultural transitions. As a child of the Renaissance, Piero is such a figure. A painter of religious topics, he was also the “painter-mathematician and the scientific artist par excellence” of his time, says one historian of mathematics.1 Transcending his time in history, Piero’s legacy allows us to understand the precipitous change in art, religion, and science that began to take place during the Renaissance and has affected the Western world ever since.
Piero’s story begins in the early Quattrocento, the 1400s on the Italian peninsula. It was a time when there actually was no modern Italy, but rather a mosaic of city-states, from Florence and Milan to Venice, Perugia, and Rome. In Piero’s day, many of the barriers we have now erected between art, religion, and science did not exist. This was the so-called “medieval synthesis,” and Piero was its product. He was in the artistic stream of the late medieval craftsman: a painter of religious topics and an innovator in mathematics and geometry. In his lifetime, the synthesis of the Middle Ages was being added to by the Renaissance’s revival of the classical past: the arts and letters of Greece and Rome. Art returned to an imitation of nature. Religion revived Platonist thought. And in science, there was a growing fascination with mathematics, optics, linear perspective, and the physical structure of the heavens.
On the whole, Piero della Francesca is a figure who represents a kind of integration of the aesthetic, spiritual, and intellectual aspects of human life during his time in history. He was part of a cultural consolidation that perhaps was uniquely achieved in the late Middle Ages as a prelude to the Renaissance, and it is one that, in the modern world, we are still very interested in experiencing. For people of the Middle Ages, “Life appeared to them as something wholly integrated,” the Italian historian Umberto Eco says in his essay Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages. “Nowadays, perhaps, it may even be possible to recover the positive aspects of their vision, especially as the need for integration in human life is a central preoccupation in contemporary philosophy.”2
The story of Piero allows us to explore this bygone vision and see its continuing relevance. To assist in that goal, a second theme of this book will be that one of the revivals of the Italian Renaissance—namely, the philosophy of Platonism—had provided an integrating framework for Piero and others. Piero lived and worked within a Christian Platonist tradition that was maturing during the Italian Renaissance. It was an intellectual subculture that was attempting to reconcile Greek philosophy and science with Christian belief. He was introduced to the Platonist revival by the religious movements and humanist scholars around him, and, while not university-trained, Piero had ample opportunity to absorb the new thinking. In his own right, he edited, transcribed, or illustrated at least eight physical manuscripts on mathematical topics, some of which reflected the Platonist interest in ideal shapes and numerical proportions.3
It was the early-Renaissance enthusiasm for antiquity that prompted Italian book hunters to collect and translate many Greek texts. Among these were the writings of Plato. Eighteen centuries earlier, in Greece, Plato had been the student of Socrates and the teacher of Aristotle. To speak of Platonism, however, is to speak of the Western world’s first wide-ranging debate about the nature of things. In his twenty-five dialogical texts, Plato does not necessarily declare his own view; rather, through the many dialogues, he reveals the intellectual duels among Greek philosophers. At bottom, though, one Platonist doctrine comes through more strongly than all others: reality is dualistic, made up of a physical realm and a transcendent realm, a world of physical perception (the sensible) and one of mental transcendence (the intelligible).4
Although the Platonic dialogues explain how difficult, even impossible, it is to perfectly apprehend either the physical or transcendent worlds, Platonism presents both pursuits as worthwhile and basic to human life. The transcendent world offers ideals or essences that are deemed worthy of contemplation and explication. In turn, the physical world is in constant flux, vast and elusive and yet knowable by a process of critical thinking and reflective experience. And as Platonists have consistently argued, this world of flux mysteriously yields to the power of mathematics.
Piero was not the originator of such mathematical concerns during this transition from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, but he applied mathematics to his art, innovated in arithmetic and geometry, and wrote extensively on these topics. The mathematical features of Platonist thought would eventually contribute to the Scientific Revolution, and Piero was an important benchmark on the way there. Going further, it could be argued that even the artistic innovations of the Italian Renaissance helped shape a new scientific view of the world.
Platonism is not the only big idea that emerged from the Renaissance. That period in history perpetuated a number of philosophies that are still with us: individualism, humanism, skepticism, Epicureanism, scientism, political cynicism, the occultism of the perennial New Age, and certainly the striving for fame, wealth, and glory. Yet amid these many streams of thought, Platonism has proved to have much broader implications about the nature of reality and human perception, and thus an enduring ability to integrate the ideas of visual beauty, spiritual or mental transcendentalism, and scientific progress. Accordingly, the second part of this book, which follows Piero’s legacy down to the present, will also explore the Platonist legacy.
Because art and religion are both forms of human perception, they finally are based on our understanding of the human brain and the powers of the mind. It is no surprise, therefore, that the final science to challenge the transcendent nature of aesthetic and spiritual experience is neuroscience, which presents the case that all human experience can be reduced to neurons and modules in the brain. In this book, Platonism and neuroscience will meet in surprising ways. But in the end, the jury will still be out on whether brain science can fulfill its claim to “explain away” transcendental experiences such as God, beauty, or the desire for Platonist essences in a world of change.5
The jury is still out on the nature of the Italian Renaissance itself, too, surprisingly enough, and this further complicates any story about Piero and his significance in history. Some historians view the Renaissance as no more than an extension of the late medieval world, rejecting the idea that it was the chief moment of European “rebirth.” Even more skeptical of its existence, other historians have called the Italian Renaissance a fiction created by later generations, a kind of romantic hindsight.6 At any rate, for our purposes, this book takes the conventional view that the Italian Renaissance was a distinct period of change. It was by no means an idyllic time, to be sure. “Good and evil lie strangely mixed together in the Italian States of the fifteenth century,” the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt wrote accurately enough.7 Still, Burckhardt pegged the Italian Renaissance as a turning point, a period that “must be called the leader of modern ages.”8 In making this claim, Burckhardt was astute enough to acknowledge that he was presenting a very personal “picture” of the Renaissance based on his own modes of research and analysis.
This book shares Burckhardt’s basic confession that any broad interpretation of a trend in human history and thought must be simply a picture for readers to consider, nothing more. When it comes to Piero’s life in particular, many approaches could be taken.9
Biographies of Piero virtually require an interpretive viewpoint to fill in so many empty spaces and missing pieces. Given the paucity of documented dates in Piero’s life, one art historian has concluded: “With Piero the essential truth must, in the end, be elicited from the [art] works themselves,” of which about sixteen survive.10 Piero’s works also include his three treatises on arithmetic and visual geometry, revealing his thoughts in page upon page of procedural explanations and mind-numbing numerical notations. Yet as another Piero scholar says, with nearly perfect accuracy, “In the hundreds of pages of his own writings there is not one remark of a personal nature” (though he does, in fact, show a bit of piety or wry humor here and there).11 In summary, “Nothing involving Piero is simple or straightforward,” says James R. Banker, a Piero scholar who should know, having been in pursuit of him for two decades.12 Thanks to Banker’s research in Italy, where he has lived in Piero’s home town, something like an alternative consensus has emerged on dating Piero’s life. Its central feature is to give Piero an earlier birthdate of 1412, a rejoinder to the often-used date of 1420. This book will adopt the early-dating approach, which offers a significantly altered view of Piero.13
Despite Piero’s elusive presence in history, it is a testimony to his acclaim that his story has extended far beyond his lifetime: this has been called the “search for Piero.” Following his death, his memory was briefly chronicled. Then he was virtually forgotten until the nineteenth century, when there was a kind of Piero revival in Europe, bringing him to the attention of the English-speaking world. The universal quality of Piero was recognized again in the twentieth century. This was the century not only of modern art, which in itself put a new lens on Piero, but of the era when physics and biology provided a firm foundation for the mechanistic sciences. These included neuroscience, and thus a final challenge to belief in the transcendent Platonist ideals of the Renaissance.
In the following pages, Piero’s life and legacy will be explored across these three epochs, following the twists and turns of art history, science, and religion—and their indebtedness to Platonism—down to the present. For our modern day, the nearly-forgotten Piero della Francesca was “discovered” in the 1850s, and the mood on the Italian peninsula, as our story begins, was one of revolution.
PROLOGUE
In that fabled city of the Renaissance, the brewing political changes of the 1850s became the backdrop for two very different men—an Italian and an Englishman—to achieve one common goal. Amid those tumultuous days, they recovered the memory of a long-lost Renaissance painter: Piero della Francesca.
The Italian was Gaetano Milanesi, a linguist by training.1 Milanesi was a native of Siena, about forty miles south of Florence, and he frequently visited Florence for his archival research on art history. Milanesi was there in 1855 as the Austrian troops, sent by the Habsburg Empire to restore order in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, were pulling back from their occupation of the city. Many Italians were calling for independence. The slogan in the streets was risorgimento, or resurgence. The goal was a unified modern Italy.
For Milanesi, recovering Italy’s art history was an equally patriotic pursuit. At age forty-two, he was an expert in interpreting antique Italian language, deeds, and contracts. He had studied law, but his love of art redirected him into research on Siena’s rich pictorial history. He and his friends had founded the Fine Arts Society. The society had published a new commentary on the single most important source on Renaissance art history, Giorgio Vasari’s second edition of his Lives of the Artists (1568). With precocious zeal, Milanesi and his cohorts corrected many of the mistakes in Vasari’s massive work, which chronicled 124 Italian artists over 250 years, including a somewhat vague entry on Piero della Francesca.
By 1855, Milanesi’s full attention had turned to new developments in Florence. Despite the political tumult of the decade, the Habsburg-appointed Duke of Tuscany had decreed that the historic Uffizi Palace be turned into an art museum and a vast state archive; it was Tuscany’s first centralized repository of historical documents. In a year, Milanesi would be hired as a staff member at the State Archives. Until then, he was casting his research net widely. This included the archives of one of Florence’s famous establishments, the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, a great monastery complex that had been a Renaissance pioneer in medical services and in patronage of the arts.
To reach Santa Maria Nuova, Milanesi traversed the narrow cobblestone streets of Florence, avoiding soldiers and pamphleteers at every turn. From the center of the city, with its great Renaissance cathedral and tower, he crossed several more city blocks to find the hospital, known by its ornate classical façade. Despite the Grand Duke’s call to centralize Florence’s historic documents, the hospital had kept its own small archives, made up mostly of leather-bound account books—a type of Renaissance artifact that had survived in abundance. During the Renaissance, Italy had been an economic power, a bookkeeping nation. No less a person than Petrarch, an early humanist literatus, noted that the young talents of that day “employed themselves in preparing such papers as might be useful to themselves or their friends, relating to family affairs, business, or the wordy din of the courts.”2
The Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, too, had had its share of bookkeepers. During the Renaissance, the business of the hospital was not only religion and medicine, but also to seek funding from businesses, guilds, or wealthy patrons for decorative and devotional artworks in its buildings. On arriving at Santa Maria Nuova, what Milanesi found were the Renaissance-era ledgers that recorded the contracts for these artworks. They were the doorway to much lost art history, for the contracts provided names, dates, descriptions, and amounts of money. They suggested the rank of the artist, or how large a project had been.
On this particular day, Milanesi continued his probing through the ledgers. From the cramped shelves of the hospital archive, he took down one of many volumes dated 1439, a significant year in Florentine history. It was the year of the great Council of Florence, the last great effort of the Latin and Byzantine (Greek) churches to overcome their differences and unite as one Christendom. For much of 1439, the council had submerged Florence in ceremonial pageants and lavish spending. Milanesi surmised correctly that it had been a year of many local art commissions as well. From the archive shelf, Milanesi chose volume forty from that year and, after setting it on the table before him, he leafed through it page by page. Only an expert could read the archaic, often obscure hand-written notations, and Milanesi had the patience and an eye for such detail.
After reviewing page ninety-four, he turned to its reverse side. In the last entry at the top of the page, a date leaped out: September 7, 1439. On that date, Santa Maria Nuova had paid the painter Domenico Veneziano to produce a series of frescos for the hospital. Resembling an afterthought, the entry also said: “Pietro di Benedetto from Borgo a San Sepolchro is with him.”3 In the calm manner of a bibliophile, Milanesi felt the thrill of discovering something not known before. The ledger proved that Piero, son of Benedetto, had traveled from his home town of Sansepolcro to Florence, the center of the artistic revolution.
Here was the most significant document yet found on Piero della Francesca. The scribbled note provided the earliest date known for Piero’s career. The discovery was a small revolution toward understanding that enigmatic Renaissance figure.4
The other man who walked the streets of Florence in that decade of Italian revolutions was a visiting Englishman, John Charles Robinson, a frequent visitor to Florence around this time. As Milanesi was documenting Piero’s life, and the Grand Duke of Tuscany was opening the Uffizi archive, Robinson was among the elite band of British buyers and collectors on the prowl in Italy for Renaissance antiquities.
Robinson traveled Spain and Italy as an art hunter extraordinaire. Trained as a graphic artist, he had put that aside to work on building England’s collections of historical art. In his early thirties now, he was the head of art collections for the South Kensington Museum, which had been opened in 1851 in the aftermath of England’s Great Exhibition of crafts and manufactures. Europeans had long beaten a path to Italy for its scenery and history—but, in this decade especially, also to buy antiquities.
In Robinson’s era, the English had developed a sudden taste for early-Renaissance art, a style that was being put under the umbrella term “pre-Raphaelite,” so-called “primitive” works done before Raphael and before the High Renaissance. One British dealer in Florence, writing home, noted that his gallery of hundreds of Italian works was amply stocked with “the sort of [p]re-Raphaelite paintings now so much sought after.”5 At the time, Piero della Francesca was just becoming known in England—sufficiently so, in fact, that shady dealers and auctioneers were palming off anything remotely looking Pieroesque as “a Piero.” But for all practical purposes, the historical Piero was known only to a few elite connoisseurs and collectors. To everyone else, he was just one more Italian painter who had come before Raphael.
Quite by accident, Robinson helped Piero emerge from the crowd. This came in early 1859, when he returned to Italy on another buying spree. It was a time when Tuscany’s break from the Austrian Empire was in full swing. “The country was in a state of war and revolution,” Robinson recalled. Dealers and church officials were not letting their antiquities go cheap, it seemed, but they were eager to do business for cash. “The unsettlements of things in general afforded unusual facility for my purpose,” said Robinson in a delightful case of English understatement.6
Indeed, buyers were acting so quickly before the Italian political situation exploded that “Florence has not had such a raking out as this within the memory of man,” Robinson wrote home at the time.7 Although the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, backed by Austria, had been easy enough on export permits for art, things would be different very soon when the patriotic, revolutionary Italian government seized control of the peninsula. “There will be no more organ lofts or altar-pieces to be had,” Robinson surmised. “The new government of Italy will preserve all these things most jealously.”
Between 1858 and 1859, Robinson was nevertheless able to purchase and ship to England about fifty pieces of antique Italian sculpture, a significant addition to England’s art collections from the Renaissance period. He had several ways of learning about the good deals in artifacts. One was the Monte di Pietá, a local bartering institution found in many towns, part of what he called a “national pawnbroking establishment of the papal government.” He received tips about art objects here and there, some in Florentine churches, others in Pisa, and he would eventually go to Rome as well. By one Robinson account, he obtained an elaborately sculpted marble cantoria, a choir box. Having been alerted to some construction activity in Florence, he dashed to the demolition site, “obtained admission to the church, and succeeded in purchasing the cantoria for the Museum as it lay disjointed on the ground.”8
Through contacts with the local dealers, the best of whom had amicable ties to the Grand Duchy, Robinson got word that a painting by Piero della Francesca, The Baptism of Christ, had been put on the market. On his trips to Italy, his primary goal had been to buy sculpture. So, on learning of the Piero, he wrote officers at the National Gallery in London to see if they were interested in a quick purchase. Receiving no reply, Robinson then inquired of a collector friend in England, who approved Robinson’s efforts to obtain the work.
Robinson had been touring the Tiber Valley, visiting churches and convents in search of antique sculpture, and this finally led him to Sansepolcro, Piero’s home town. The cathedral was replacing some of its old altar lamps, and the antique discards were just the kind of sculptures that perked Robinson’s interest. The cathedral had been desperate for funds, so it had also put Piero’s Baptism of Christ on the market. At first, the cathedral had tried to sell it to the Tuscan government as a piece of cultural heritage. That had failed, so other buyers were welcome.
When Robinson arrived in Sansepolcro, he found the ancient cathedral gutted, its furnishings shunted aside. “In spite of troubled times and universal penury, the ecclesiastical authorities of the place were bent on ‘restoring’ (in reality, desecrating with cheap [neo-baroque] bedizenment) the interior,” he said.9 He looked at the sculptural objects and was also shown the Baptism of Christ, for which he offered four hundred pounds, a goodly sum, since prices had been rising in Italy in these years of ferment. To hear the local fine-arts assessor, the Baptism panel painting—measuring four by six feet—was neither special nor valuable, so the cathedral had “a really good piece of luck” to sell it off.10
Once the government approved the sale, Robinson had the painting removed from its medieval-looking frame, and he prepared it for shipping back to London. By this time, another painting purportedly by Piero (and now deemed authentic) had already reached England, acquired by a couple traveling in Italy in 1837 for their private collection.11 But the Baptism would be the first undisputed Piero original to reach Great Britain, and it would be the first for public viewing in the English-speaking world.
Its arrival on British shores was a very close-run thing.
The sale to Robinson took place in April 1859, the same month that Grand Duke Leopold II, in a bloodless coup, fled his Florence capital and an Italian contingent of Sardinian soldiers began to occupy Tuscany. Robinson’s purchase and shipment of Piero’s Baptism had been “concluded just in the nick of time,”12 he wrote, dashing off another letter to England.
His own swift departure from Italy was the next pressing matter. Robinson and others had tried to depart by the sea route, but the chaos was already descending. Ocean travel was “all but cut off for passengers as the boats have been reduced in number by being taken off to carry troops and these that remain are so crowded that it requires a week or two’s application beforehand to get a berth.”13 So his party took the land route due west to Pisa, and then apparently found the northerly Turin passage out of Italy open. From there, all roads led back to England. Of course, the inveterate art buyer Robinson was back in Italy again in the fall of 1860. But, as he had predicted, and as his traveling associate wrote home, “The exodus of works of art from Italy is to be and indeed is stopped” (though it was never stanched entirely, of course).14
In two years, after exchanging hands and going on the auction block at Christie’s, the Baptism was hanging in London’s National Gallery, an antique work that now reposed elegantly in a gold Renaissance-style frame. It was as if Piero himself had escaped the revolution in Italy and, though strictly a regional painter in his day, had been resurrected onto an international stage.
Traditionally, such events as the Milanesi discovery and the National Gallery debut have marked the rediscovery of Piero della Francesca. His artistic works—altarpieces, frescos, and portraits—began to take a more central place in interpretations of the Italian Renaissance. Before long, he was being acknowledged as among the world’s greatest painters (a phenomenon in human art appreciation that happens frequently, with Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Van Gogh as just a few examples of unknowns who suddenly became famous). And as befits great paintings, Piero’s works would evoke a search for hidden meanings behind the painter’s hand. His life became emblematic of a new kind of Renaissance craftsman. Piero was the artist as a Christian humanist who bridged the sciences with the arts and religion, and thus has become a figure who would seem relevant to many such encounters of art, religion, and science down through the centuries.
All such elevated visions of Piero, of course, inevitably must be wrapped in the messy, ambiguous, and contentious world of human affairs. In the artistic confusion of the 1850s, Queen Victoria herself plunked down eighty-four pounds at a Christie’s auction to buy a pre-Raphaelite portrait painting she liked very much, barely noticing that it was by someone named “Piero della Francesca” (though, as with other not-quite-Piero paintings on the art market in that period, the Queen’s picture was later found to actually have been done by the Flemish artist Justus of Ghent, a contemporary of Piero’s).15
This was the same decade when Gaetano Milanesi and John Charles Robinson recovered aspects of the true Piero by entering, in one case, the dusty, arcane world of Renaissance archives and, in the other, the shifty and speculative world of a wartime antiquities trade. By luck and persistence, they pioneered a wider search for Piero by bringing new facts and art objects to light. After this, they went on to make significant marks on their fields: Milanesi became known as the founder of modern Italian art history; and back in London, Robinson rose to be Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, which he achieved by a brilliance born of worldly-wise enterprising, despite being “a difficult man, who plunged headlong into a series of violent controversies,” and who eventually lost his South Kensington Museum job because, as his superiors reported, “whilst traveling at the public expense he had sometimes purchased works of art for himself and for his friends.”16
After the 1850s, Piero himself gained increasing notoriety, and, for those who took an interest, it was almost always bright and admiring.17 He would become one of the surprising stories of art history. He has become a unique window on the revolutions under way at the dawn of the Italian Renaissance, and on the transition between high medieval approaches to art and culture and Renaissance ways of thinking. Piero was a true offspring of that age, beginning with his artisan apprenticeship in the town where he was born.