by Larry Witham
Despite its many conventions, the altarpiece showed Piero’s innovations. Mary projects modesty, yet she also has the stylish shaved forehead of the city girl. Piero applied the gold leaf in a lighter pattern than usual, and he managed to produce the striking effect of strongly realistic human forms living inside a golden mist. Despite the gold, the saints on either side of Mary occupy real space in a uniform light. They are like great statues that, having coiled springs inside, seem ready to come to life. The painting in the Misericordia Altarpiece does not feature any architecture, and so at this stage Piero’s fascination with mathematics, geometry, and perspective was held in abeyance. He was waiting for the right time and place to express this knowledge and skill more fully.
If the account of the late-Renaissance chronicler Giorgio Vasari is true, Piero’s early travels as a painter may have pulled him eastward, toward the Adriatic, at the outset. He may have painted in the coastal town of Ancona, doing a “marriage of the Virgin” fresco and perhaps the Jerome calling-card painting. He may have worked in Pesaro, another coastal borough, this one ruled by Alessandro Sforza of the Milan dynasty. Then there was Loreto, an inland pilgrimage city, where Vasari says that Piero and Domenico Veneziano decorated a cathedral sacristy.8
By around 1448, all of Piero’s known commissions had come from churches or, perhaps, leading families, but there was nothing yet that had risen to the level of aristocratic recognition. That would change around this time, when he was summoned to the House of Este in Ferrara. Piero may have been recommended to the Ferrara court by the Camaldolese or humanist circles of the late Traversari, or by the very much alive Bessarion, who was known to travel on occasion through Sansepolcro.9 Whichever human channel had spread Piero’s name, it was the rulers of small courts around Italy—Mantua, Padua, Rimini, Urbino, and Ferrara—that seemed most eager to commission the arts and humanities to enhance their own renown and glory.10
Ferrara had experienced a brief moment of fame for hosting the Council of Ferrara in 1438. Since then, its ability to attract humanists and artists had only increased. It had a humanist school for the children of princes. The manuscript collector Giovanni Aurispa was a teacher of Greek and the Platonist heritage in the city. Ferrara had a university, but just as important, Padua, the great intellectual center, was just a day’s journey north. Roman ruins surrounded Padua, so it produced a Renaissance humanism that especially valued classical architecture.11 Ferrara’s love of fine buildings was seen in its city planning and wide streets with fine urban vistas. Its palaces were small but thoughtfully designed and executed, and these worthy structures needed to be decorated and painted.
When Piero resided in Ferrara sometime between 1448 and 1450, the Este House was in transition, so his precise patron is not clear.12 Nevertheless, this was the city where Piero encountered the Flemish oil painting style that had recently come down into Italy, and it was the city to which Piero carried his own light-filled central Italian style, which would push against the remaining Byzantine influences in the north, derived especially from Venice, which had looked to the Orient for a century. More precisely, art historians have argued that Venice was late in adopting Renaissance classicism because of the later influence of the “Flamboyant Gothic figurative culture” of Gentile da Fabriano, who had otherwise departed from the full Byzantine look by developing the International Gothic style.13
As Piero would learn in Ferrara, it was not a long boat trip from that city to Venice, which was a storied maritime republic. Venice may have been part of his itinerary during the late 1440s, and it does seem a logical opportunity for him to take enthusiastically. Otherwise, there is only one surviving piece of physical evidence that hints at a Venice sojourn. This is Piero’s small painting Girolamo Amadi Kneeling before Saint Jerome, which has ended up in Venice, and therefore may have been painted in that city of canals and watery light.14
The sparse available evidence also suggests that Piero’s name was getting around in the fertile northern plains that bordered the Alps. It was in northerly Milan, for instance, that the humanist Antonio Filarete, writing in the 1460s a fictional dialogue about creating an ideal city—titled Treatise on Architecture—cited Piero as among the “most satisfactory” painters of the age.15 There is no evidence that Piero’s style would produce influential followers in Florence, but the opposite seemed to be true in the north, where future frescos and other pictorials took on the monumental, geometrical, and light-filled classicism of the mature Piero.16
On arrival in Ferrara, Piero’s knowledge of geometry and perspective also seems to have rubbed off on a group of craftsmen who specialized in inlaid wood, called intarsia. These craftsmen began to take on new experiments, creating entire three-dimensional and illusionist scenes. More broadly, and in several Italian courts, intarsia would be used to imitate entire landscapes. In time, this form of wall decoration was illustrating domestic scenes with ornate tables, open cabinets, lutes, faceted cups, astrolabes, and piled-up devices.
Alongside intarsia, Piero would have also met the new phenomenon of Flemish oil painting. The arrival of the oil technique in Italy during the Quattrocento, as one expert opinion summarizes, “will never be fully understood” because of the historical loss of evidence.17 By the middle of the fifteenth century, the Flemish achievement was showing up in places scattered from Naples and southern France to Austria, Switzerland, and Spain. Piero’s most important encounter with oil painting must surely have been in the north, and in Ferrara in particular, which had become host to Flemish artists from guilds in the Netherlands. One of these artists was Rogier van der Weyden, whose oils adorned the Este court by the end of the 1440s; Piero probably had met him in that city. Some have speculated that, since truly learning oil painting required an apprenticeship—not simply a hard look at a finished product—Piero may have traveled farther north at some point to experience a Flemish workshop.18
Such speculation aside, on his arrival in Ferrara, Piero and his Flemish counterparts would have begun to analyze the differences in their native styles. This would have marked a key moment in the evolution of all Renaissance art. The Flemish style was characterized by the brilliance of oil paint, modeling by glazes, minute detail, lush landscaping, a peculiar northern light, and a type of homely portrait. The Italians, characterized by Piero, brought a more stark southern light, a simpler classical and monumental look derived from statuary, and the more cerebral approach to linear perspective.
Just as with the Italians, Flemish art was not uniform. Rogier worked in a simpler style, whereas the older Jan van Eyck was a master of detail and complex glazing. The impact on the Italians was singular nevertheless: the brilliance of oil was a marvel to behold, since the egg tempera that they used—adding pigment to egg yolk, not to oil—could not match the glossier luminous effects. Italian painters began to use oil in the 1450s and 1460s. Piero was very early in this development, and there is evidence that he began using oil on the finishing stages of the Misericordia Altarpiece.19
Through his travels north, Piero’s name began to mix with others of renown in Renaissance history. After presumably meeting Rogier in Ferrara, Piero saw paintings by Jan van Eyck years later, presumably in Urbino, where van Eyck was popular. Also during his time in the north, Piero very likely studied works of the painter Pisanello (1395–c. 1455), a native of Pisa born about two decades before Piero. Pisanello had worked alongside Gentile da Fabriano in the International Gothic style. Importantly, Piero may have seen how he handled battle scenes he painted for the House of Gonzaga in Mantua. An all-around craftsman, Pisanello invented the bronze portrait medal, which became a popular item for Renaissance nobility to have struck in their own image. To these medallions, too, Piero could have turned to distill his own concepts about formal side-view portraits.
In Ferrara, Piero would have been equally impressed by a new literary trend afoot in Italy. This was the revival of pre-Gothic heroic storytelling (Carolingian and Arthuri
an chivalry). Painters would follow suit, and in time they were inserting patrons into such visual epics, with Sandro Botticelli’s inclusion of the Medici at the birth of Christ not atypical (Adoration of the Magi, 1475). Renaissance dynasties were also mingled with Greek and Roman mythology. Applied as large frescos in palaces or churches, these epic stories—whether biblical, mythological, or legendary—would be called cycles, a kind of epitome of Renaissance art (and something that Piero would eventually undertake).
What Piero had brought to the northerners, and even the Flemish, was his linear perspective and classically statuesque figures.20 But he also brought a new sense of light. He saw the bright light of the Mediterranean, not the darker, moodier light of northern Europe. Piero’s treatment of light had a kind of trademark coloration that tended toward paler and cooler tones. From his Baptism of Christ forward, he would also show a mastery of the visual representation of light operating on reflective surfaces and through media such as water, air, and glass. In the Baptism, Piero offered his solution to refracted light (in regard to Jesus’ feet in the water), but he also revealed his taste for painting watery surfaces with the stillness of a mirror (seen again in later paintings, from his Battle of Constantine river scene in the Arezzo frescos to boats on a lake in a diptych for the Duke of Urbino).
At the time, some writings on the effects of light were available to painters who could read Latin. The most available work was John Pecham’s Perspectiva Communis, a book on optics which discussed the scientific behavior of light. Piero may have combined the reading of such material with his own concentrated research into how light worked. Before his career was over, he would excel in such virtuoso effects as the perfect reflection of light on metallic armor, the simulation of a crystal jar, a beam of light revealing itself through dust particles, reflected light bouncing around curved interiors, the hazy light of a distant landscape, and the subtle backlighting on the perfect ovoid shape of an egg.21
Most of these accomplishments in painting light are proved by Piero’s surviving works, but the story of his activity in Ferrara and the north would not be so fortunate in terms of documentation. Nothing from his northern enterprise has survived except a few sparse written accounts and a good deal of stylistic interpretation of his lasting influence. On these grounds, it is believed that he painted at least two battle scenes in the private rooms of one of the Este brothers. Given the humanist setting of Ferrara, Piero must surely have painted secular as well as religious topics. He could see that even as a painter, his work was compelled to navigate the new encounter between Christianity and classical learning. Whichever topics he mingled, Piero’s classic style was distinctive enough, according to some scholars, to have influenced a future Ferrara school of painters, which in the sixteenth century carried out great campaigns of mural painting. Many of these murals would be of Greco-Roman myths (such as the triumphs of Minerva, Venus, and Apollo), stories of the twelve astrological months, or the heroic life of the Este clan. Later still, a large illustrated Bible seemed to mimic Piero’s clarity of human and architectural forms.
At this point in Piero’s life, the question of his relationship to Leon Battista Alberti, the reigning art theorist of the day, has become intriguing. By the time of his work in Ferrara, Piero may surely have read something by the great humanist and architect for the papacy, or even engaged in conversation with him. The historically documented opportunities for Piero to cross paths with Alberti were actually few: they arose only in Florence in 1439 and then, possibly, in Urbino around 1470. History has provided no conclusive evidence either way, but it seems that Piero and Alberti (in no particular order) tended to follow in each other’s footsteps around Italy.
They may have met up in Ferrara. In the 1440s, Alberti lived in that city. He was a friend of the new head of the Este household, Lionello, and it was Lionello who commissioned him to write a single architectural treatise (its chapters called “books” in those days). Begun in 1442, his On the Art of Building in Ten Books (De re aedificatoria) was completed a decade later, modeled on Vitruvius, the sole surviving Roman source on architecture and related topics. Alberti frequently cites Plato, and although the citations are mostly about ancient architectural features and city planning, Alberti is clearly a partisan of the Platonic vision of numerical essences and ideal proportions.22
Based on Alberti’s On Painting, and perhaps on his writing on architecture, a growing number of painters in Italy presumably adopted the Albertian outlook. He told them that viewing a painting should be like looking through a window. He expounded on how objects occupy space and are defined by color. “The representation in painting of this [color] aspect, since it receives all its variations from light, will aptly here be termed the reception of light,” he said in On Painting.23 Alberti also advocated a geometrical perception of nature, saying “that a painted thing can never appear truthful where there is not a definite distance for seeing it.”24 He famously criticized the medieval look in which figures were crammed into small spaces, as if dollhouses. These are pictures in which men are “painted in a building as if they were shut in a box in which they can hardly fit sitting down and rolled up in a ball.”25
Alberti was advocating real architectural space in painting. Already well attuned to light, space, and color, Piero at some point began to take the painting of architecture seriously as well. He had seen its innovations in Florence, but, at least from what survives of his works, architecture did not come to the fore in his painting until he departed Ferrara. In his travels so far, Piero had seen a good sampling of new and old architecture, from the sundry Roman ruins around Tuscany, to the dominant Gothic and Romanesque styles of a Perugia or Ferrara, to the classical innovations of Brunelleschi in Florence. His imagination was most captured, though, by the motifs seen in authentic Roman remains. He did not seem to be reading treatises on architecture; instead, he was observing practical examples, which included how builders were making renovations that imitated antiquity.
Over the next few decades, Piero tended to favor three architectural objects: columns, marble surfaces on walls, and decorative floor tiles.26 He looked for how it had been done in antiquity, then adapted that to his own innovations, such as when he put a Renaissance-style loggia in a religious painting. Sometimes he painted architecture as if it was actually load-bearing; other times, he put things together as a matter of composition, not true to engineering. Piero seems to have “stored [architectural] images in his mind over long periods,” said one art historian. “Things seen many years earlier proved relevant to the work at hand.”27 To take just one example, Piero no doubt saw Corinthian columns early in his life, and later saw the ancient Roman star pattern in a palace or church floor. In his early Baptism, he includes no architecture; but years later, Corinthian columns and elaborate floor tiles begin to appear, applied prominently in one of his earliest known paintings to use a complex architectural scene, The Flagellation of Christ. More generally, Piero’s paintings would over time use the fluted columns he saw in Florence, the roundels viewed in Rimini or Venice, and the variegated marble, piers, and barrel vaults witnessed in Rome or Rimini.
In all of this, Piero apparently did not need tutorials from Alberti, who, ghostlike, nevertheless haunted the same places in Italy that Piero traveled through. Indeed, Piero’s next set of projects would come in Rimini, a place where Alberti would make a significant mark in the history of architecture. Situated in Rome for the rest of his career, Alberti would send designs to Rimini to give its old Gothic buildings a new classical look. As usual, Piero would learn to paint the new architectonics simply by observing the construction projects. In Rimini, he would leave behind his first serious rendition of classical architecture.
At mid-century, the small courts of Italy were prospering and in search of painters to decorate their growing estates. One of these was the court of Sigismondo Malatesta in Rimini, the household that had once ruled Sansepolcro. Buoyed by a military victory in
1447, Sigismondo had returned to Rimini full of self-confidence and a plan to renovate his holdings in the image of Rome’s classical past. For this he needed a painter, of course. After inquiries, the Medici had recommended Fra Filippo Lippi, a popular painter in Florence (who turned out to be too busy).
At this point, Piero’s name came up. Commensurate with the growing coherence of his style, with its statuesque figures and geometrical clarity, Piero had become an identifiable brand. Even princes wanted to know in advance what kind of paintings they would be getting, and Piero had passed enough tests to be deemed reliable—a kind of Renaissance Seal of Good Housekeeping—for an important commission. His name may have been floated at the court of Rimini by recommendation of the Este, who were Malatesta relatives, or by an old Sansepolcro connection, an in-law of sorts. One of Malatesta’s advisers was the humanist scholar Jacopo degli Anastagi, a Sansepolcro native whose relative had recently married Piero’s brother.28 The ultimate outcome was that around 1450, Piero packed his bags and headed for the town of Rimini.
Rimini had prestige as an ancient Roman port. It boasted a forum and was a link on the Via Flaminia, a road from Rome. Where the route reached Rimini, the Emperor Augustus had erected a great arch in his own honor. Sigismondo was feeling a bit like a local caesar himself, so he began to refit his fortress and church, San Francesco, with a Roman classical look.
Sigismondo had been lord of Rimini for twenty years, and, although a tyrant (Malatesta unfortunately meant “bad head”), he had served his people well enough to be popular. Probably born near Milan, the illegitimate Sigismondo had been reared in a humanist and military household. He is said to have led a military charge, such as it was, at age thirteen against a papal army. When he rose to power in Rimini, he nurtured his taste for the arts and antiquity. And he definitely took Alberti’s words to heart in regard to the role of a Renaissance prince: “It is possible to achieve fame and power by using wealth with generosity and magnificentia for important and noble purposes.”29
