by Larry Witham
When Eugenius had originally arrived in Florence, there was far more to see than a few colorful banners. He witnessed Florence’s revival of classical architecture, sculpture, and painting. It had been in full swing for a few decades, and its first phase had been in the most public of art forms, architecture. At the start of the Quattrocento, Florence held a great competition to design new bronze doors for the octagonal Florence Baptistery, one of Florence’s oldest buildings, erected in the eleventh century in the Romanesque style. In the final two-man runoff, both designs incorporated the new naturalism. Both employed shallow sculptural relief, realistic human figures, and a semblance of linear perspective. Lorenzo Ghiberti won this competition, but his rival, Filippo Brunelleschi, went on to still greater things: he won the competition to build a massive red-brick dome on the cathedral, one of the great architectural feats of all time.
As illustrated in the bronze doors, and in many free-standing statues, it was the sculptors who had introduced naturalism to the Renaissance painters by imitating Greek and Roman works. Outside Italy, to the north in Burgundy, realism in sculpture had also reached a peak.2 Based on the work of such predecessors, the artisan Donatello brought this kind of sculpture to perfection in Florence. He and Brunelleschi had traveled to Rome to view the sculptures of old and—in Brunelleschi’s case—measure the ancient ruins to understand Roman buildings and architecture, realizing that there was a geometrical element that contributed to what made these ruins so thrilling to behold. The painter who was most attentive to this new sculptural realism was Masaccio, a hulking young man who had arrived in Florence from the provinces. Masaccio revived the kind of earthy realism that Giotto’s painting had shown a century earlier, and then he added a new visual dimension: the accuracy of geometrical perspective.
Neither Martin V nor Eugenius IV had been a great patron of the arts. Martin at least formed a committee to restore the basilicas in Rome, and painters did start arriving in that city in his wake. Eugenius made his first cultural mark in north Italy. Coincident with his nine-year exile from Rome, he threw his support behind the humanist agenda at the University of Bologna, a city to which he moved for a time.
Eugenius’s real preoccupation was the consolidation of papal authority in Christendom—and, naturally enough, a bit of Florentine politics as well. The year before Eugenius arrived, the aristocratic Albizzi family of Florence had persuaded the town council (the Signoria) and one of the key municipal officials (a gonfaloniere) to expel from the city its most powerful banker, Cosimo de’ Medici, an Albizzi rival who had become a kind of economic prince in his own right. Under its communal system, though, the Signoria changed regularly. In a year, it was again leaning in Cosimo’s favor, and he soon beat a triumphal return. On the day that Eugenius and Cosimo met up in Florence, they were two men who knew the sting of exile; they would soon be in business together.
Even before the exile of 1433, Cosimo was renowned as a patron of the arts in Florence. The most skilled craftsmen sought his financial support, as did the humanists, who aspired to collect and translate ancient texts, a task that required financial resources. Of humanists in Florence, there were two kinds: those who tended toward the secular, and those who embraced the religious. The exemplars were the secular Leonardo Bruni, at times a chancellor of Florence, and the monk Ambrogio Traversari, a leader of the Camaldolese religious order. Both were skilled translators of Greek. For more than a generation by this point, the Florentine government had been inviting Greek scholars to teach in the city. Bruni and Traversari had been among their most avid students. These two Florentines, however, were driven by different motives. Skeptical of popular piety, Bruni was interested in secular learning, patronage, and literary fame. If Bruni put the Greek speeches of Demosthenes and the political works of Aristotle into Latin, Traversari went in another direction, interested especially in Latinizing all the writings of the Greek Church’s fathers. He wanted to claim the rich Greek heritage for the Church, and his skills in Greek translation easily matched those of Bruni.
In either case, the Church still set the agenda in scholastic and literary matters, and while Traversari was fairly safe with the impeccable credentials of a cleric, Bruni had to walk softly to avoid offending the religion of his day. Having been a papal secretary, he knew how to work Church circles for its patronage. When he translated Plato for one pope, he said it was to strengthen Christianity, while in reality he was trying to secure more funding for humanist projects. “Although Christian doctrine needs no help in this matter,” Bruni advised this pope, the translation of Plato “will bring no small increase to the true faith if they [people] see that the most subtle and wise of pagan philosophers held the same belief about the soul as we hold.”3 In another case, Bruni translated St. Basil of Caesarea’s “Letter to Young Men” for one obvious reason: the ancient churchman’s Greek epistle encouraged the study of great pagan literature. Bruni’s dissembling contrasted with Traversari, who truly believed that the ancient Greeks were precursors of the Christian faith. Though a worldly banker, Cosimo had no grudge against the strict religious groups, and he often gave them patronage.4 When he wanted a set of Plato’s writings translated into Latin for his personal library—a compendium called the Vitae philosophorum—Cosimo turned to Traversari for the task.
Like Bruni, Traversari moved easily in the city’s intellectual circles. From the early 1420s, he had convened leading humanists at S. Maria degli Angeli, the headquarters church of the Camaldolese. When, in 1433, he completed his translation of the Vitae philosophorum, Traversari gave Latin Christendom its first accessible book on Plato’s original works and on the works of his late Roman interpreters, the Neoplatonists. Traversari also gave Plato an honored place in the Church: his introduction said that Plato is “largely in agreement with Christian truth.”5 Two years before, Traversari had been made head (prior general) of the Camaldolese order, and now he was poised to usher in an even greater Christian openness to Platonism.
In his flight from Rome, Pope Eugenius would bring his own Platonist to Florence in the person of Leon Battista Alberti, a learned clerk and secular priest in the papal Curia.6 When Alberti wrote his own autobiography, he presented himself as the quintessential Renaissance man, interested in everything, comfortable with fame, and very much at home in the world. Displaced by the Colonna revolt in Rome, Alberti and many of the other clerks had made their way up the peninsula to rejoin the pope. Alberti had been educated at Padua and Bologna, and he traced his ancestry to Florence, from which his family, too, had been exiled. He had visited once briefly to see the new artistic revival. Now, as part of Eugenius’s entourage, he became a kind of honorary Florentine (though he traveled a good deal with the papacy, and finally spent most of his career in Rome). Awash in the arts of the city, Alberti almost immediately produced a small treatise that one day would probably inspire Piero. It was titled On Painting (1435).
In marveling at the success of Florentine painting, typified by the naturalism of Masaccio, Alberti naturally gave credit to sculpture as its precursor. On Painting opens with praise for the “genius” of Brunelleschi and Donatello. For the time being, Alberti gave genius status to only one painter, Masaccio, whose Florentine frescos on St. Paul in the Brancacci Chapel and the Trinity in Santa Maria Novella Church employed realistic modeling and geometrical perspective. On Painting went well beyond the kind of how-to Handbook produced by Cennini three decades earlier. A refined humanist, Alberti had the rhetorical skill necessary to improve the social status of painters. For the first time in Italian literature, he put them in the company of men of letters instead of confining them to the status of tradesmen. He described painting as having religious-like powers—“a truly divine power,” Alberti said—and he encouraged painters to see themselves as part of a new cultural class.7
As Alberti wrote On Painting, Antonio and young Piero were still two rough-hewn craftsmen stacking up commissions in Sansepolcro. In one of them, a set of fre
scos for a new chapel in the town’s Santa Maria dell Pieve Church, Piero showed off his prowess in the painting of human figures: Antonio did the principal characters, but Piero did two of the three saints, Santa Fiora and Santa Lucilla. Centuries later, viewers of his two female saints described them as among Piero’s “most beautiful and praised works.”8
In his mid-twenties now, Piero was ready to work on his own. His family connections, and the misfortunes of Antonio, opened the way. Antonio’s contract obligations were not going well. Six years earlier, the Franciscans had paid him for their altarpiece, and yet the naked structure still sat in their church. Antonio had simply been overwhelmed by too many projects, or at least that has seemed the most plausible reason for his troubles. Accordingly, the Franciscans revoked his contract, and the old painter left for nearby Arezzo, five miles away, to eke out a living for his large family. Piero had learned a great deal from Antonio, but the hour had come to claim his role as Sansepolcro’s native talent.9
About this time, the church of Benedetto’s affiliation, San Giovanni Battista, was also embarking on a large decorative project. One of the church’s members had left money to build a wooden altarpiece. Another church family, the wealthy Graziani, had meanwhile offered to pay for a painter, receiving in return the honor of having the Graziani coat of arms appear on the finished work. Now viewed as a young maestro, Piero was chosen to do the painting; it apparently would be his first major commission.10 Since the church’s patron saint was John the Baptist, Piero had to compose an image that featured him prominently. Thus was conceived the painting to be known as the Baptism of Christ. Not only would it make John the most dynamic figure in a story about Christ, it would mark a small revolution in the visual culture of the Renaissance.
Already, Italian painters had begun to tell biblical stories in contemporary settings. For a baptism story, Piero needed a Jordan River scene, so he used the Tiber River headwaters of his own valley as a worthy substitute. In first-century Roman times, the imperial magistrate Pliny the Younger had described the view on Piero’s valley from the mountains as “looking not at the landscape but at some painting of a scene of extraordinary beauty.”11 Pliny was suggesting that even nature could be idealized, enhanced, or abstracted into an “extraordinary beauty” in the proper hands. Mindful of this potential in painting, as if penetrating the normal world to discover its spiritual, or Platonic, essences, Piero combined both nature and something more in the Baptism, an early hint of where his lifetime oeuvre was heading.
The altarpiece structure allowed for a painting six feet tall and four feet wide at its center. Piero would give the panel a semicircular top. To make this painting’s support, Piero obtained two wide planks of poplar. He joined and smoothed them and applied layers of gesso. Piero may have done sketches for his composition; but rather than stencil them on the gessoed surface, he composed his drawing directly. Then he prepared his egg tempera paints. His first color was a green underpainting, a technique preferred as a base for skin tones. Such a project required a painter’s environment, a space both organized and messy. At the time, Piero was probably renting workshop space along with his brothers on a street in Sansepolcro.12
The years of the Baptism project, beginning in 1438, remain a mystery. During that time, Piero made a trip to Florence. It was there especially that he would learn more about the great debate over artists using perspective to imitate nature. In Florence, he may have heard of On Painting, and probably found himself agreeing with the premise that the painter was someone more than a mere craftsman. In Florence’s busy streets, workshops, or humanist gatherings, Piero may have met Alberti himself, who was only eight years his senior.13
Despite their common interest in the visual crafts, there was nothing obviously in common between two men like Alberti and Piero, especially looking at their educational backgrounds. The difference could be illustrated by one Latin word: perspectiva.14 During his life around merchants, or among painters, Piero may have heard this Latin term dropped amid the Tuscan vernacular. To his ears, it simply meant, broadly speaking, “seeing.” By contrast, Alberti had learned Latin at the northern universities and had read entire treatises titled Perspectiva (even though, for some unknown reason, Alberti would not use the term in his two writings on the practice of drawing in perspective, whereas Piero would enthusiastically adopt the term late in life in his own work, On Perspective).15 This seemingly simple concept would, in hindsight, become one of the most contested and debated in the history of art. Its roots were fairly ancient, and the start of its actual application as a technique in painting was a bit obscure. In other words, who “invented” the perspective that is said to characterize the Italian Renaissance?
By the time of Alberti and Piero, the search to understand what the ancient Greek geometer Euclid had called “optics”—in his treatise Optics—had been under way for several centuries. Using what remained of Euclid’s lost works, the Christian statesman Boethius, in the late Roman period of the sixth century, translated the term “optics” into Latin as perspective, and the word would come to mean all aspects of sight: physical, geometrical, mental, and metaphysical.
The full recovery of Euclid’s Optics was achieved by the Arabs, who came into the possession of Greek manuscripts that had survived the Western dark ages by being carried to the East. The Arabs made advancements on Euclid by studying how light behaved geometrically and emanated in all directions from objects. In his book De aspectibus, the Arab polymath Alhacen refined this emanation theory. He proposed that rays of light radiated from points on objects and arrived at corresponding points in the eye, a basic idea that has been confirmed by modern physics and biology.
In Europe, a group of learned Franciscans absorbed these Greek and Arab insights. They produced a new geometry and physics that was steeped in theology and that viewed light as the originating source of the universe. All of this was summarized in the work of the English Franciscan Roger Bacon’s Perspectiva, which set an agenda for the Latin natural philosophers (scientists), and indeed would be known as “Franciscan optics,” so influential were members of the order in exploring the topic. When Alberti entered university in north Italy, he would be reading textbook treatments in the Bacon tradition by two later writers, Erasmus Witelo, a Polish cleric in central Italy, and the English Franciscan John Pecham, who worked in Paris and whose text Perspectiva Communis was especially influential in the Quattrocento.16
None of this optical science could escape the religious and metaphysical context of medieval culture. In its early development, the optics of the Arabs and Christians easily mixed with such Platonist concepts as the divine nature of light, its role in creation, its procession by emanation, and the geometrical nature of the universe. St. Augustine, a sophisticated Roman philosopher, popularized the idea that physical light was a perfect analogy for the mind’s seeing spiritual light. During the Quattrocento, the orders of preachers were especially eager to draw upon the new optical science. It was the last great century of popular preaching in Italy, even in its cities, and as perspective-style painting emerged, sermons pointed to it as an example of how humans can see the world as God sees it—clearly, geometrically, and in perspective.17 Florence had its champion of these ideas in the Dominican Antonino Pierozzi, a theologian and orator “of marvelous eloquence.”18 Soon to be archbishop of Florence, he preached divine optics, he moralized vision, and he discussed these finer points with the city’s artisans as they produced altarpieces and frescos.
At the start of the Quattrocento, therefore, the idea of perspective was caught up in several driving cultural forces, from religion and geometry to experiments in architecture. The surviving records of the time, unfortunately, do not reveal exactly how technical perspective was rediscovered and promulgated in the arts. The logical place to start has rightly been with the Florentine architect Brunelleschi. As early as 1413, Brunelleschi was being spoken of as “an ingenious perspective man.”19 This
may simply have meant that he was interested in the theological and geometric topics that were suggested in the Perspectiva manuscripts owned by humanists or were heard about in sermons. Whatever the timeline, Brunelleschi’s knowledge of practical perspective surely had grown. As perhaps the world’s first “paper architect” (since others used wooden models), he very likely had been an early user of technical methods to draw in linear perspective.
At some point, Brunelleschi conducted two visual experiments in his neighborhood. This was the precinct that included the Florence Baptistery, with its surrounding piazza. Famously—yet known by only one account—Brunelleschi had positioned himself across from the Florence Baptistery and, somehow using a mirror, drew and painted the Baptistery building in accurate linear perspective. On a second occasion, he drew another picture, the angled view of a building across the street from the Baptistery, which was also an illusionist success.
What Brunelleschi had done in his drawing method was apparently something entirely new. According to his biographer, he had discovered a “regola” for perspective, a term used for a method that solved a mathematical problem.20 In other words, he had found a geometrical principle for drawing anything in correct perspective, via a formula of visual points, lines, and angles. Brunelleschi may have stumbled upon this formula quite by accident. He could simply have been drawing the Baptistery for a neighborhood banner when the geometrical properties of painting in perspective leaped out at him.21
