Piero's Light

by Larry Witham

  All this church construction would have an impact on Piero’s vocation, but so would the tenor of the religion of his day. Religious groups were trying to reform themselves from within, giving rise to stricter “observant” movements that espoused a return to the original precepts that had founded Christian monasticism. Such sources included the teachings of the early church fathers (who were drawn to Christian Platonist mysticism) and the legalistic Rule of St. Benedict, a pithy guide to monastic life and Christian charity dating back to the sixth century.3 These spurred both the religious orders and confraternities to acts of piety, simplicity, and charity and public displays of flagellation, all of which were no doubt characterized in the Corpus Christi parade in Piero’s home town. Piero’s fate would be bound up with the confraternities for the simple fact of their strength in San­sepol­cro. This prominence grew from two sources. As a small town, San­sepol­cro was historically lorded over by other powers, from princes to popes, and confraternities were a local method to organize in a somewhat independent spirit. Just as important, the leading religious order in San­sepol­cro was the Camaldolese, with its allied confraternities. Together they resisted the encroachment of the closest papal authority, the bishop of Città di Castello, who was constantly trying (but failing) to establish his clergy and a parish system in Piero’s home town.4

  Quite apart from these religious forces, there was another intellectual movement—and a distinct one for the Renaissance—that was coming to the aid of a stronger Italian identity: this was the revival of the literature, philosophy, architecture, and sculpture of the Greco-Roman past. Roman ruins that had been ignored for centuries now became objects of fascination to an emerging group of learned Italians, and the same applied to piles of manuscripts—medieval Latin copies of Roman originals—that had managed to survive, and yet were mostly forgotten, in the old monasteries that dotted Europe. On visiting the ruins of Rome around the time Piero was born, the Florentine sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti saw a statue unearthed from a sewer, proclaiming that “Our tongues cannot express the skill, the art, the mastery, the perfection with which it was done… . The head was missing, but the rest was complete.”5 Clerks in the papal court took up the hobby of searching out reported caches of old manuscripts. They jealously collected them and produced more copies as a kind of cottage industry. All of this recovery of pride in ancient Rome became a new esprit in Italian cities.

  With eyes on both antiquity and the scriptoriums of modern bookkeeping, the Italian Renaissance produced a unique literary industry. Before the Renaissance, the independent (and often isolated) monasteries had invented a medieval book industry, or actually the art of hand-copied and bound manuscripts, which had been amassed in monastery vaults for centuries. But a shift was in the making. Its primary sponsor was the centralizing papacy, which was now creating the largest bureaucracy of literate clerks yet known.

  Although the traveling poet and courtier Francesco Petrarca, better known as Petrarch, pioneered the elegant Latin of the Renaissance humanists, there were many other aspiring scribes in his wake who, part monk and part scholar and secretary, filled the growing papal bureaucracy—indeed, the papal civil service. These growing bands would also master quality Latin, and later Greek. Apart from the revival of fine Latin, they would also transform the Tuscan dialect into modern Italian. And like the precedents set by Petrarch, they also unearthed, collected, translated, and multiplied the lost writings from the Greek and Roman past. The clerks who mastered these materials were to be called the “humanists,” for they had trained in the new, though still informal, curriculum of ancient literature called the studia humanitatis.6

  A third unifying force that worked against the natural fractiousness of the Italian people and their land­scape was political in nature. It was the way that cities and old landed families would pledge loyalty to either the papacy or the emperor in Germany (now only a shadow of his days as Holy Roman Emperor). If at some points in medieval history this loyalty to the emperor or pope produced real political consequences, by the time of the Renaissance the effects had largely become symbolic. Old families, local princes, and the new town councils initiated by the growing merchant class were the real power brokers. “Every city has its own king, and there are as many princes as there are households,” Pope Pius II lamented in his memoirs. “We regard ‘pope’ and ‘emperor’ only as empty titles and figureheads.”7

  Such local powers had one obvious limitation, however, and that was the lack of a local army. Whether a city was an autocracy under a prince or a “commune” under a town council, they all needed a military protector. This necessity gave rise to one of the most colorful and dynamic figures of the Italian Quattro­cento, the condottiere. He was a mercenary who commanded a roving army-for-hire, and, mounted on their horses, these soldiers became models for the equestrian statues and paintings of the Renaissance. The condottieri, too, were a kind of unifying feature in Italian culture, if only because they were everywhere, capturing the public imagination. These soldiers of fortune commanded armies for the emperor and the pope. Their leadership was an art form of bravado, in effect, because the actual “battles” of the time were mostly bloodless, carried out like maneuvers on a game board. Losers retreated, and winners took prisoners and spoils.8 A good reputation in this kind of battlefield success could help a condottiere rise to fame and become a local prince.

  Such had been the state of things in the Upper Tiber Valley where Piero lived. For a century, it had been part of an area that extended east to the Adriatic coast and was governed by one condottieri clan, the Malatesta in Rimini. Various popes, exiled from Italy, had commissioned the Malatesta to oversee these parts of the Papal States. From the 1370s onward, the Malatesta had “owned” San­sepol­cro. They built the fortified walls around the town, and they oversaw the city up through the time that Piero painted the candle shafts for the Corpus Christi parade.

  When it came to styles of painting in Quattro­cento Italy, the fractiousness of the national character still seemed to apply. Pope Pius II may well have added that every city, to only slightly exaggerate, had its own artistic look as well. All Italian painting had added its own peculiar touches to a broad medieval milieu that had mixed the traits of Byzantine and French Gothic art, and now each city was going its own way. In Florence, which had imported a number of styles from across the peninsula, the newest was the imitation of Greek and Roman statuary and architecture, thus suggesting that Florentine art had a kind of classical and rational look. For its part, San­sepol­cro had a political affinity with Siena, which had indeed supplied Piero’s town with a Resurrection altarpiece for its abbey (later to be the cathedral). The Sienese painters had developed a Byzantine-derived mystical look to their imagery, and that is what Piero saw in the main religious objects as he was coming of age.

  A single style did not necessarily dominate a single city, of course, and Siena was a case in point. The painters of Siena had both a traditional and a “modern” approach, the latter of which tended to decorate its civic buildings. Siena had adopted the communal tradition of a town council and, accordingly, it had commissioned great wall paintings in the Palazzo Pubblico, or city hall, to express this governing ideal. Those ideals, and the style of painting, changed somewhat, as would be seen in the great murals that decorated the inner Palazzo. Around the 1320s, the painter Simone Martini painted both a condottiere who had saved the town and the Maestà, the enthroned Madonna, who effectively saved the citizens spiritually. Then, in 1339, the Sienese painter Ambrogio Lorenzetti completed a radically new kind of mural, a panorama of six frescos known as The Allegory of Good and Bad Government. For this project Lorenzetti pioneered a new naturalism in painting, unifying his land­scape with an informal perspective not seen in the late-Gothic murals.

  Piero may have seen Lorenzetti’s modern approach in Siena. Just as likely, he might have seen innovations in painting on the trade routes as far south as Perugia, a journey of just more than
forty miles, or even Assisi, where frescos revealed early experiments in perspective.9 The essential Piero, however, was shaped by what he learned in San­sepolcro.

  Italians had developed a variety of ways to educate their youth. While the wealthier families turned to church schools and Latin schools, the general population relied on an entrepreneurial phenomenon rising from the grass roots, the vernacular grammar school. Anchored on a local or traveling teacher, these schools met in homes or available buildings. Meanwhile, the commercial culture had brought another kind of teacher and school to the fore: the abacus school. It taught boys commercial mathematics. San­sepol­cro did not have a permanent abacus teacher, so it probably relied upon an itinerant.10 Being the son of a merchant, Piero probably had two sources of learning: an abacus teacher; and the town market, where he saw buyers and sellers using calculation tables. He may well have honed his skills by doing his father’s account books, but, as one historian of medieval mathematical arts has lamented, “We do not know when and where Piero learned mathematics.”11

  Piero’s Italian roots certainly paved the way for such learning. In all of Europe, Italy had taken the lead in advancing the mathematical arts. At the start of the thirteenth century, Leonardo of Pisa (also called Fibonacci) returned from North Africa, where he had learned the mathematical notations of the Arabs. He translated this knowledge into the vernacular and produced the first handbook on mathematics, Liber Abaci (1202). At the heart of Fibonacci’s work was the more ancient tradition of Euclid, the Greek geometer, and together their legacy in geometry (Euclid) and arithmetical calculation (Fibonacci) increased that learning in Europe.

  The most available Italian version of Euclid’s Elements, the translation by Companus of Novara from the middle of the thirteenth century (still used for lectures at Italian universities), eventually fell into Piero’s hands (for his late-life writings cite Companus twice).12 Much later in life as well, Piero would gain access to a rare copy of the collected works of Archimedes, the Greek geometer who had come after Euclid; Piero would become fascinated—even obsessed—with Archimedean calculations and the ways to draw the many-sided shapes called polyhedra.13

  Alongside Plato, Euclid had built on the mystical Pythagorean tradition, which viewed numbers as the essence of the world. In Greek theology, such as it was, the gods made the world by number. “Number is the ruler of forms and ideas, and the cause of gods and daemons,” said Pythagoras, the early Greek mystic and mathematician.14 Plato was more specific: the Creator used ratios (such as 1 to 1.6, now called the “golden ratio”) to organize the material world. The elements of the world were made of perfect solid shapes composed of geometrical units, such as perfect squares and triangles, with a given number of faces (such as a tetrahedron, which has four triangular faces, or a dodecahedron, which has twelve pentagonal faces). The Creator, Plato said in his Timaeus, organized life to move “in all the six directions of motion, wandering backward and forward, and right and left, and up and down.”15

  While such ideas had a mystical side, they also proved eminently practical. One example is the Pythagorean theorem regarding the sides of right triangles (if you know the length of two sides and one angle, you can calculate the length of the third side). The theorem was logically proved by Euclid, who, as part of the Greek critical tradition, believed that demonstrable reasons must justify basic claims about reality.16 In San­sepol­cro, Piero surely witnessed how surveyors used the tools of Pythagoras and Euclid to measure his father’s cultivated acreage, cementing for him how the math and geometry of the ancients could be applied in everyday life, to a world beyond matters theological and metaphysical.

  Like many Renaissance figures, Piero would nevertheless combine his wonderment toward numbers with his Christian beliefs. From the thirteenth century, the Franciscan intellectuals of Europe had made mathematics no less than a divine science. In this, the monks were not shy about giving Pythagoras, Plato, and Euclid credit for finding in Greek science that which was also testified to in the Bible and the doctrines of the church.17 This mingling of antiquity with Christianity would continue through the Renaissance. It was a way to universalize the Christian claim that the God of the Hebrew Bible was working in the hearts and minds of people everywhere, even apart from the biblical figures. As an intellectual venture, this overlapping of Greek thought and Christianity, typified by attempts to reconcile Plato’s Timaeus with the biblical Genesis, was still mostly a topic for the monastery or university. In the backwater of Piero’s upbringing, however, the undercurrents of Platonism still had some impact.

  Such a Greek/Christian synthesis reached San­sepol­cro by way of the Platonist-minded religious orders, beginning with the Franciscans. The Franciscans had a strong presence in San­sepol­cro and Tuscany. Their great mother church was just fifty miles south in Assisi. Just as Aristotle was the pagan patron saint of the Dominican order, Plato served that philosophical role for Franciscan thinkers. This alignment was more due to historical accident than to any particular theological difference between Dominicans and Franciscans. The leading Dominican thinker of his age, Thomas Aquinas, was a friend of a leading translator of Aristotle’s lost works, and in them he found a wide range of philosophical categories on which to expand Christian theology. In turn, while the Franciscans were perhaps more mystically inclined than the Dominicans, a few of their leading thinkers in the Middle Ages believed that mathematics was the key to earthly science, and it was Plato alone (and his late-Roman expositor Boethius) who gave a fulsome treatment to mathematics alongside arguments for a Creator and the human soul.

  Piero’s early encounter with Platonism probably came from a source that was even more Platonist in spirit than were the ordinary Franciscans. This was the local Camaldolese order in San­sepol­cro. The Camaldolese drew upon a desert monastic tradition that had adopted Platonist mysticism. And when it came to setting a spiritual tone in San­sepol­cro, the supreme religious authority was the Camaldolese abbot, leader of the town abbey. The head of the entire Camaldolese order in Piero’s lifetime was Ambrogio Traversari. A scholar of Greek and of Plato, Traversari was a leading humanist in Florence, where he convened great gatherings of the Italian men of letters. Piero’s family had Camaldolese affiliations and, not least, his brother pursued his religious calling in that group.18

  Too young to be a thoroughgoing Platonist himself, of course, Piero completed his grammar education (and presumably some abacus) around the age of fifteen. Then he began to meld his knowledge of math with craftsmanship, probably as an apprentice in a merchant’s shop. Renaissance merchants were jacks-of-all-trades. They bought and sold. Their shops made and repaired things. Working with wood, plaster, stone, and cloth, these shops produced everything from the heavy scaffolds used by builders to delicate frames for artwork in churches. In this setting, Piero met the people who—short of being career painters—did a good deal of preparatory or repair work on the city’s decorations: large altarpieces, sundry flags and banners, and stage settings for religious theater or visiting dignitaries.

  San­sepol­cro was not a large enough town to have an artisans’ guild for painters, which often was the guild of pharmacists, with their chemicals and pigments. But there were at least two goldsmiths in town, and Piero surely had the opportunity to see an array of aesthetic objects. Judging by his future works of art, four particular objects made a lasting impression on Piero. By far the largest in any medieval town would have been the great altarpiece, often with gold surfaces, pointy spires, and richly painted panels. These rose like alternative realities. Next would be religious statues of wood or clay, which Piero encountered in great number, as if human figures frozen in time, their faces and their robes painted brightly. Piero’s eyes were also treated to the great city banners, with their bright, clear shapes, like posters. Finally, there was the town marketplace itself. In its precincts for wealthier shoppers, Piero viewed opulent new fabrics, shiny metals, jewelry, and leather goods. One day, Piero wou
ld draw upon all these visual memories and paint them with an unusual vividness.

  Once Piero’s father accepted that his son might end up being a painter, he had to look for a master painter and workshop to ensure that Piero received the best training. Where Piero actually studied is unknown, but it was most likely along familiar roads of commerce. The two adjacent territories were Umbria, with its main city of Perugia, and the Marches, which included mountain towns such as Urbino and the far busier coastal ports of Rimini and Ancona. Wherever it was that Piero found a master, the emphasis was on the master’s authority. Like a brass stamp on wax, master painters of the Quattro­cento impressed their methods and styles on apprentices. The apprentice could certainly be “fired … with ambition,” said painter Cennino Cennini in The Craftsman’s Handbook (c. 1400). Even so, he advised, “Submit yourself to the direction of a master for instruction as early as you can; and do not leave the master until you have to.”19

  Some masters became veritable celebrities as bearers of a new style, and this was the case with the Marches-born traveling painter Gentile da Fabriano.20 Gentile’s renown gave him wings. From Venice to Brescia and Mantua, he produced works for the most prestigious courts. In Florence he was welcomed into the painters’ guild. At the end of his life, Gentile worked for the papacy as it began to restore decorative art to Rome. By all accounts, Gentile dressed like a humanist/nobleman—with rolled-up sleeves on his frock—not like a dour craftsman.