by Larry Witham
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 auctio
n 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.
PART I
CHAPTER 1
The Renaissance’s Apprentice
On a hot Tuscan day in June 1431, nineteen-year-old Piero della Francesca stood in the dusty streets of his native Sansepolcro and admired his handiwork, a painted candle holder that was passing by in a religious procession. The candle was a small job, even insignificant. It nonetheless marked Piero’s passage from novice to artisan, a painter who would be duly paid for his skills.
For one day every year, the procession of the Corpus Christi festival dominated the walled city of Sansepolcro, which had a population of more than four thousand. With a priest at its head, the parade was a sea of banners on poles, movable shrines, small statues, and candles, all carried by the townsfolk. At other times, these objects were permanent decorations in churches and chapels—a testimony to the dexterity of local artisans. Citizens in the parade also bore the emblems of Sansepolcro’s guilds and the city’s lay religious groups, called confraternities.
Piero had painted the candle for the Confraternity of Maria della Notte. In time, other account books in Sansepolcro would begin to list payments to Piero as a “painter.”1 During most of the Italian Renaissance, there was no such thing as an “artist.” There was only the carpenter, goldsmith, sculptor, or painter. Usually the painter was no higher than a baker or a mason, although some, called a “master” (maestro), were enterprising businessmen with street-side workshops (bottegas). High or low, the painters made their living by the support of patrons, the people who would commission, or buy on the spot, their various crafts.
As Piero would learn soon enough, patronage followed the general hierarchy of the late-medieval social order. At the top were the aristocrats and leading merchants, a relatively small number and, for the most part, the wealthier segment of the population that also organized the important confraternities in the cities. Then came the Roman Catholic Church with its many priests, monks, and nuns and its large public following that, while not excluding the elite, ranged mostly from workers to peasants. A senior painter, the maestro, received his commissions for altarpieces, wall paintings (frescos), and palatial decorations from the more elevated patrons, of course: princes, guilds, city councils, bishops, and confraternities. The average painter was more likely to have been decorating household objects for ordinary citizens. The social level best known by Piero was the growing class of ordinary merchants, tradesmen, and farmers; and, with the rise in prosperity, many of them bought terra cotta madonnas, decorated wooden trays, chests with scenes painted on their surfaces, family coats of arms, and small religious diptychs for their homes.
The toil, creativity, and exchange of money and goods among all of these classes produced in Quattrocento Italy a vibrant market-style economy yet unknown in Europe. The Italian peninsula became relatively rich. Its location on the Mediterranean Sea also made it a prospering crossroads of trade; a city like Florence became the banking house for Europe and for the papacy as well. The widespread homage to Christianity went without saying, for if the church was active anywhere on the Continent, it was on the Italian peninsula, home to the papacy and record numbers of clergy, lay groups, and designated saints. Nevertheless, a society counting its financial successes was beginning to demand more secular excellence. Society was changing in the Quattrocento, and so were the expectations in what a painter could, or should, do.
The skill of the painter, especially in attempts at realistic representation, was now being measured against what patrons saw in the commercial marketplace: the new applications of mathematics and geometry. Standing on street corners, merchants divided investment percentages and estimated volumes in barrels of goods or piles of grain. As if by magic, builders turned square ground plans into octagonal structures, and surveyors measured plots of land by triangular calculations found in the principles of Euclid, the ancient Greek mathematician. Painters who could demonstrate such skills—painting the perfect illusion of geometric objects—were bound to be equally impressive to potential patrons.2 To succeed in his mercantile society, Piero would need to learn a wide range of geometric skills, and his challenge was to merge these with his society’s traditional tastes in religious paintings and decorations.
For all the merchant activity in Sansepolcro, Piero’s town was by no means a bustling city like the relatively nearby Florence (about seventy miles by road). But for a country town, it was fairly cosmopolitan. In religion and in trade, Sansepolcro was a busy crossroad in the Upper Tiber Valley. It stood along small pilgrimage routes from the Adriatic. It boasted its own famous relic, a piece of rock from Jesus’ tomb brought from the Holy Land (and the basis for the name Sansepolcro, or “holy sepulcher”). It was also an agricultural center for the cultivation and sale of the plant that produced indigo dye. The valley itself was worth visiting for its beauty, an arena surrounded by mountains, bisected by streams, paved with pale earth, and richly green in its native flora.
In Piero’s family, the ancestral plot of land and house had been at the top of the Via Borgo Nuova in Sansepolcro since the mid-1300s. The house was inside the walls of the town, which, like so many Quattrocento boroughs, was a postcard picture of orange-tiled roofs and flat-topped lookout towers (campaniles). It was in Sansepolcro that Benedetto and Francesca, Piero’s father and mother, reared a family of six children (counting two who died young). Benedetto had elevated the family from the farming to the merchant class. Formerly a tanner of rough animal hides, he had moved up to finer leather products, buying and selling land, trading in plant dyes, making architectural repairs around town, collecting taxes, and even making loans. In a town like Sansepolcro, family connections of both a religious and commercial nature were important. To the benefit of his sons, Benedetto had done well in this respect.
Piero’s two youngest brothers became merchants. His closest sibling became a monk in the regional Camaldolese order, an influential religious movement alongside the Franciscans—both of which would provide social advantages for Piero’s painting career. Being a merchant, Benedetto probably took his sons on business journeys south, to Perugia, or over the mountains to the east, where coastal towns such as Rimini and Ancona were friendly to Sansepolcrans.
As a parent, Benedetto had done his c
hildren one other great favor: he fathered them in wedlock. The Italian Renaissance, especially in higher social classes, was full of illegitimate children. These sullied offspring often had to be legitimized by special decree, from a pope or other authority, if the child was to eventually pursue the honors of a high-profile profession, become a ruler, or seek holy orders. In return for Benedetto’s decency, the sons honored his good name by choosing respectable occupations. The exception, perhaps, was the dubious choice of Piero—as his eldest son—to be a painter, not a merchant or an educated cleric. This doubtless worried Benedetto, but Piero persisted. One day his name would honor Sansepolcro more than any other.
In the overall sweep of things, the local cacophony of the Corpus Christi procession in Sansepolcro was small compared to the shifting political fates of Piero’s homeland. The Italian peninsula had set itself apart from the rest of medieval Europe. It was a world of small city-states, often defined by mountains or valleys in a rugged, partitioned landscape. It had preserved the Roman Empire’s tradition of towns and legal courts, not the kind of feudal fiefdoms seen everywhere else in medieval Europe. By the 1400s, Italy’s cities and the accompanying civil structure had replaced most of the old dynastic families who had once ruled the countryside. Filled with local pride, the cities waxed and waned. More often than not, it seemed that they were at war with each other over trade routes, land, and other resources.
Within this fractious type of culture, a unified Italian identity still tried to assert itself, and perhaps the most unifying cultural force of all was still religion. The Italian people had long had the pride of the papacy; but in the early Renaissance, it was popular faith that had unified the landscape. The Franciscan and Dominican orders vied for popularity and influence in urban centers across Europe, but in Italy in particular they had brought about a peak in popular preaching. A new kind of large church to hold crowds had, in consequence, stimulated the need for more painters to decorate their vast walls and many side chapels.
