by Larry Witham
With the Quattrocento, the Greek language barrier was finally being broken in Italy. The crumbling Byzantine Empire jettisoned caches of Greek manuscripts in the direction of Italian courts and libraries. In Florence, the scholarly Byzantine ambassador Manuel Chrysoloras taught Greek. Linguistic adventurers such as Giovanni Aurispa were on manuscript-buying sprees in Constantinople, and he, too, at the invitation of Traversari, became a language teacher in Florence.35
Platonism had its greatest secular—that is, pagan—advocate in Gemistos Plethon, a native of Greece who had also arrived in Italy. Soon to be a kind of celebrity around Florence, Plethon vociferously rejected the way Christian theologians often mixed Plato and Aristotle. When he lectured during the great council, he emphasized their irreconcilable differences. For the attentive Christian mind, the important difference between Plato and Aristotle was probably this: although Aristotle had gods as movers, and he had “forms” that were actualized in things as their inherent natures, he rejected his teacher Plato’s ideas about pre-existing essences (Ideas) and eternal souls. Plato also spoke of a creator as an artificer that used number, while for Aristotle mathematics bore little interest. Plethon’s lectures in Florence do not survive. But it is said that Cosimo de’ Medici was so impressed (hearing a simultaneous translation, probably, from Traversari), that he envisioned a Platonist revival under his own patronage. In all, 1439 marked a major wave of Platonist influence in Italy.
Being a young painter in the hinterlands, Piero was not immediately aware of these cultural migrations. His taste for Platonism probably began locally, derived from his enchantment with Greek mathematics, the intellectual Franciscans whom he painted for, and the spirituality of the Camaldolese circles that his family moved within. When he began painting The Baptism of Christ, his artistic influences had been regional, the strongest probably being Siena’s styles, although Florentine artists who traveled the countryside may also have passed something on to Piero. To be a revolutionary in his own setting, it was enough for him to depart from the late-Gothic look that still dominated Italy.
Piero may have taken two years to paint the Baptism. He may well have been in Florence with Domenico during a break in the middle of the Baptism project. It was only a trip of a day or two to Florence, and Piero was as good a horseman as any merchant’s son. Much of his life was spent coming and going between nearby towns. A methodical enough artist, Piero could keep projects going for years, leaving them in suspended animation for months, and then picking up where he had left off. And so it may have been with the Baptism. If, by this time, Piero was well established as a painter, he could have had assistants working with him on the Baptism, even in his absence. Such accounts, of course, must enter the realm of pure speculation.36 There is absolutely no evidence, such as diary entries or secondhand testimonies, of how Piero proceeded on any of his paintings. For the sake of argument, however, we can easily imagine that once Piero had done a good deal of work on the Baptism, he stopped, stored it safely in his workshop, and then, jumping on a horse, traveled to Florence to see what all the excitement was about.
In this scenario, Piero completed much of the Baptism before he left. Applying his undercoat came first. According to future chemical analysis of the painting, Piero next put in the background, laying down the landscape before the figures.37 This Tuscan countryside, stretching under a blue sky with strange skittering clouds, had a barren look. Piero made the hills brown and dry. With gray paint, he revealed some of the cement-like deposits of the region. Then he dappled this terrain with vineyards and olive groves in summer greens. Nestled in those hills, Piero next painted the distant town of Sansepolcro, a city with towers. A mountain stream widens into the foreground and passes by a large walnut tree. Everything is bathed in morning sunlight, it seems, pouring in from the east.
From time immemorial, the chronicles of Sansepolcro had spoken of its landscape, a land of thick woods and giant walnut trees, later cleared to make fertile fields. In his career, Piero used this idealized Tuscan style of landscape extensively. He had seen landscapes of late medieval masters: those by Gentile or even the Lorenzetti murals in Siena. Presuming that the Baptism was Piero’s earliest work, it established a kind of signature countryside. It appears in Piero’s small paintings of St. Jerome (both around 1450). Those works may have spread Piero’s Tuscan naturalism to painters in the north, to Ferrara, and then beyond. With his liking for crystal clarity, though, what Piero would not use until late in his career was aerial perspective—innovated by Flemish artists—which put haze in the air and softened distant horizons with blue.38
On top of the landscape in the Baptism, Piero began filling in his human figures. In the foreground, these are Jesus, John the Baptist, and three angels. Back in the middle distance, he also placed various men at the riverside. His techniques included the line underdrawing, some pouncing from a cartoon (at least on one angel’s robe), and a fine crosshatching in some of the brush strokes, which is a way to model the gradations of shapes with egg tempera. Although the Baptism is a complex picture, Piero had simplified its essence: he created the shapes and volumes by light and color, not by strong lines. He also employed more than a little geometry. Using the standard Renaissance measure of the “braccio” (length of the “forearm,” or nearly two feet), on a two-braccio-wide panel he made Christ 1.5 braccia tall. The spaces on either side of him are one third of his height. Furthermore, in composing the picture, Piero conceptualizes an equilateral triangle to frame Jesus’ position, having his joined hands mark the place where the triangle’s bisecting lines would intersect. If Piero had seen any manuscript copies of Euclid’s Elements by this time, he may have used Euclid’s diagram of a pentagon superimposed on a triangle as a further guide, or as deeper meaning, behind the proportions in the picture.39
In this sort of painting, with no major architecture, there was little surface geometry to produce the effect of perspective. Every object in the Baptism is organic. By his modeling under a coherent and unifying light, Piero created the depth and atmosphere he needed. His objects, according to perspective, were all the right size, and if distant things were rendered in a more informal brush stroke, things in the foreground were done in crisp detail: the hairs on Jesus’ head, ripples in the water, and the sprigs of buttercup, licorice, and clover in the soil.
In its finished form, the Baptism bears one significant clue that it was completed after Piero returned from Florence. Amid the extravagance of the great council season, what apparently caught Piero’s eye was the dress and hats of the Byzantines. In the Baptism, Piero inaugurated one of his signature hats, a tall flaring cylinder, which he apparently invented after seeing the Greek stovepipe headgear. The Baptism featured this flamboyant hat on one of the four bearded men who stood on the distant riverbank, men who represented the priestly officials who went to the Jordan to assess John the Baptist’s claims. Piero turned the four men into stylized Greeks, giving them Eastern beards and cloaking them in red, yellow, and blue, their hats various and rakish. Throughout the Renaissance, it was only Piero who used such a fabulous cylindrical hat. For years to come, stovepipe hats and pointy beards would become his common devices.
Piero may have garnered other ideas in Florence for his final work on the Baptism, including the nonconformist way he presents the three angels. Piero does not pose the angels in Gothic veneration. Instead, he shows them clasping each other’s hands, as in a pagan allegory of friendship. With wreaths on their blond heads, they look very much like the classical Roman “three graces,” Christianized with wings. He may have had time to study the architecture in Florence. But if he did, those features—such as fluted columns—would not show up in his paintings for well over a decade.
In the Baptism, though, Piero did grapple with an important optical problem: How would he show Jesus’ feet in the water?40 The Bible said he was “in” the water, being the very nature of baptism. Water has unique optical effects. It r
eflects like a mirror but also refracts (bends) images. This double contortion had been studied for centuries, but in painting it was a relatively new problem. The puzzle was compounded in a theological painting such as the Baptism. The water would both reflect and refract Jesus’ feet, appendages that were both human and divine.
Piero’s apparent solution was this: to avoid distorting Jesus’ feet, and also to avoid an awkward reflection of the divine ankles, Piero painted the stream as if it ended right where Jesus was standing. He painted small ripples around his ankles, yet retained handsome feet as if seen straight through clear water. Thusly, Piero put a perfect divine figure in a world of natural phenomena, a mystery at the root of Christianity and Platonism. Beyond Jesus’ feet, Piero’s portrayal of water returns to complete naturalism in the landscape. Shining like a mirror, the river reflects the sky, the trees, the mountains, and the men in hats.
Most noteworthy of all was how, at a time when the ethereal look of late-Gothic painting still dominated, Piero had created a visual world that was precise and solid, and yet equally strange in its beauty. The substance, light, and gravity of nature pointed to something theological beyond. There was no need to paint theological items into the script. There was no God the Father in the sky, no angels in gold. At the same time, the Baptism was like a tight puzzle of abstract shapes. In an era when religion was speaking of the devotio moderna, and scholasticism the via moderna, Piero had done something similar in painting: he made an age-old biblical story look modern.
The splendors that Piero had seen in Florence in 1439 would not be a harbinger of good fortune in Sansepolcro. The pope had chosen Ferrara as the location for his council because he wanted to avoid a possible attack by condottieri who worked for Milan. After the Council of Florence, the Milanese aggression went unabated. In 1440, Milanese forces arrived in the Upper Tiber Valley. The Milanese passed through Sansepolcro as part of their plan for a surprise attack on the combined Florentine and papal forces near the hilltop town of Anghiari. No friend of Florence, and long unhappy with papal rule of their city, the disgruntled Sansepolcrans volunteered hundreds of men. On that hot summer day, June 22, 1440, the Milanese army finally headed across the valley, Anghiari in its sights. The dust it raised on the road, however, ruined the element of surprise, and when the forces clashed, the hapless Milanese were routed.
The Battle of Anghiari, which became a legendary memory of Florentine triumph over Milan, would one day be painted in Florence’s city hall by Leonardo da Vinci. Preceding Leonardo, Piero also would paint a number of battle scenes. It has always been tempting to imagine what Piero might have seen of this (presumably bloodless) clash of armies in the fields below Anghiari, with their armored legions on horseback, banners and trumpets, and lances piercing the air.
After the battle, Sansepolcro was viewed darkly by Florence and even by the pope. Most of the town’s men were political prisoners for a time, only gradually released to go back to their families and work. The city once again became a pawn on the Quattrocento chessboard. Florence’s expenses for hosting the Council of Florence had been so great that in 1441 the pope “sold” Sansepolcro to Florence as compensation. Here again, the Italian bookkeepers would not disappoint later historians in search of details: the amount owed to Florence was duly recorded as 2,500 ducats—not a king’s ransom, but impressive enough. For the indefinite future, Piero’s home town was a vassal of the Florentine city-state. Adding to this humiliation, the 1440s would be a time of commercial decline in Sansepolcro, at least compared to the relative prosperity of the 1430s, when Piero had gotten his start. The city council had to turn to Cosimo de’ Medici for loans to buy grain.41
As the local economy soured, and hardship seemed at every turn, Piero took stock of his ability. His family was well connected, so work as a painter would not be too hard to find. Yet he must have craved some adventure, as well as intellectual and emotional stimulation; for, in the next ten or fifteen years, Piero was mostly away from his home town. He took his ability into the Quattrocento marketplace of north-central Italy.
CHAPTER 3
A Platonic Painter of Light
Piero’s Tuscany fell under the bleaching summer sunlight of the Mediterranean. This sunlight may be one reason why Italian landscape painting is known to be so clear and vivid. Piero adopted this brightness as a matter of course, and if this central Italian environment had infused Piero’s work with a regional charm and manner, he was now taking it east and north, in the opposite direction from Florence. In one small painting of this period, known as Jerome in Penitence, Piero signed it “the work of Peter of Borgo, 1450,” showing that he knew well how to leave a business card around his itinerant circuit.1
As a successful son of Benedetto, Piero apparently had enough reputation to build a career in his home town, which, admittedly, was still shaken by the failed Battle of Anghiari. During that aftermath, Piero was listed as eligible for the town council. He may have been known for his big-city experience in Florence as well. Although none of this would keep him at home, a young man from the provinces like himself could not completely escape his roots. This was especially so with the kind of strong, devoted, and probably controlling father he had in Benedetto.
So while Piero may have been on the road physically, his family helped secure him another large painting commission in his home town, doubtless a familial attempt to keep him connected to his native soil. For this contract, Piero had presumably returned to Sansepolcro in 1445. The project was an altarpiece, a “polyptych” of several panels, and he signed the agreement with the Confraternity of Santa Maria della Misericordia. This was the confraternity to which his family had close ties, and to which Piero himself may have belonged.
In hindsight, this polyptych—to be known as the Misericordia Altarpiece—would be a major accomplishment by Piero.2 At the time, though, he may have had mixed feelings. In painting the Baptism, he had apparently had a degree of freedom to innovate. The Misericordia Altarpiece was the result of a stricter agreement. The contract dictated that the painting must have “the images, figures, and adornment which will be expressly detailed by the above Prior and council.” It was to be “gilded and colored with fine colors, especially ultramarine azure.” Piero had three years to complete it. He also had to maintain it for ten years, fixing anything that deteriorated. Most importantly, the contract informed Piero that “no other painter can put his hand to the brush except the said painter himself,” just in case Piero was tempted to ask a talented assistant to do some important passages in the work, which was the occasional practice of busy master painters.3
The confraternity’s desire to control the artist was understandable. It was a male religious community made up of wealthier merchants, and it had seen nothing but trouble for a quarter century in trying to obtain a spectacular altarpiece for its chapel. Now that Piero, a native son, had become a master painter, he seemed a dream come true. They paid him a master’s fee as well, an extremely generous 150 florins. As it would turn out, the project ended up haunting Piero much as Antonio had been dogged by the massive altarpiece he had failed to produce. At one point, the primary donors on the Misericordia project, the Pichi family, sued Piero. They demanded (in 1455) that he return and “sit down in Borgo [Sansepolcro] and work on the panel during the entire upcoming Lent.”4 In the end, Piero delivered, of course, but it seems to have taken him fifteen years. There is really no saying when he actually began painting the work.5 He apparently tackled it in two stages, as modern-day analysis would suggest.6
In the first stage, Piero completed the most important parts: the large central painting with a monumental Madonna surrounded by eight donors in the confraternity; a small crucifixion scene at the peak of the polyptych; and two of the four saints on either side of the central Madonna. This grouping—Madonna and saints—is so solid, weighty, and colorful that Piero may have been thinking of the large amount of religious scul
pture that he had grown up with in Sansepolcro. The altarpiece was to be a veritable wall in size. Standing nearly nine feet high and more than ten feet wide, it had nineteen separate panels and, at its sides, vertical buttresses to bear its considerable weight.7 Because of its size, the “hand to the brush” of Piero finally applied only to the most important panels; his workshop assistants painted some panels as well. In the end, Piero would paint the main sixteen human figures, out of some forty total.
The Misericordia Altarpiece revealed a choice Piero was making about his own signature style. His painting of the crucifixion above, and the Madonna at the center, could not have been more different. The crucifixion was Piero’s most emotion-laden experiment in painting human figures. It looks very much like a crucifixion that the Florentine painter Masaccio (one of Alberti’s men of “genius”) had painted in Pisa, a day’s trip from Florence—a trip that Piero may have taken. Below, however, is Piero’s Madonna. She has the cool, monumental look that finally would characterize all Piero’s paintings. In a panel to her right, Piero painted St. Sebastian, a favorite saint to protect against the plague, since Sebastian himself was a survivor of extreme wounding. Shot through with arrows, the tortured Sebastian of Piero’s imagination, like the Madonna, reposes in classical calm. In the Baptism, Piero had painted a partly naked Jesus in the river, but his Sebastian is perhaps the first almost entirely naked, anatomically sophisticated, and thoroughly realistic figure in a Renaissance religious painting.
