by Larry Witham
Being within the Papal States, Sigismondo needed Vatican approval to alter the San Francesco church, and this was received in 1448. The church was a great Gothic barn-like structure, a Latin cross in floor plan, built to hold the crowds gathered by Franciscan preachers. It was remodeled by putting up a classical façade, like a new skin, around its exterior. The design was produced by Alberti in Rome. Then it was sent to Rimini for the local architects and builders to carry out. Though a great dome in the design was never erected, the building, with its antique façade and Platonic proportions, would be the most purely classical building of fifteenth-century Italy.
In form, Sigismondo was Christian, but his heart was more in the pagan revival. The church became known as the Malatesta temple. Inside, the imagery likened Sigismondo to Apollo and Jupiter, his wife Isotta to Diana, and Rimini to the mythical lands of antiquity. Greek inscriptions declared him a “bringer of victory” in war; his temple was a thank-offering “for God Immortal and the City.”30 The Malatesta temple was to be an echo of the triumphal arch left behind by the age of Augustus. On the exterior, Alberti had designed the front façade with three triumphal arches and each side with seven; it was Sigismondo’s dreamy plan that he and Isotta be entombed in the front, and great figures in the side niches. As part of his program to stock his court with living and breathing humanists, he offered Rimini as a final home to the Hellenist scholar Plethon. Although the Greek declined, Sigismondo would later, when fighting the Turks in Mistra, Greece, exhume Plethon’s remains and spirit them off to Rimini nevertheless.
Before any of the exterior work got under way, Sigismondo began transforming the interior of the old San Francesco church. When Piero arrived, he was tasked with producing a large fresco of Sigismondo himself in one of the three new chapel spaces. In an earlier St. Jerome painting, Piero had shown a prince kneeling in front of a rustic saint in what seems a forest. In the Sigismondo fresco—today known as Sigismondo Malatesta before Saint Sigismondo—Piero enlarged that supplicant-prince motif. Now the scene is a great throne room. Sigismondo kneels in front of a seated St. Sigismondo, his patron saint. And this was no small painting: the fresco was a long horizontal that measures just more than eleven feet by eight feet.
Piero pulled out his full toolbox of skills and knowledge for this new work. Once painted, the Rimini fresco would be like a window on an imaginary world, infused with Christian and classical iconography and using every painterly effect: perspective, architecture, proportion, color, light, and landscape. One can only imagine how such skill impressed Sigismondo, who hailed from a different world than Piero’s. The prince, though five years younger than Piero, had been a ruler since age fifteen. By Piero’s contacts with the court, he may well have conversed with his subject about the fresco. Indeed, he completed a separate profile portrait of Sigismondo, which suggests that he may have studied his human topic closely and thoroughly.
Quite naturally, in the fresco design, Piero placed Sigismondo Malatesta at the exact center, a position usually reserved for a saint (or a caesar). Sigismondo’s head is the vanishing point for the perspective lines, an approach that had otherwise been reserved for religious painting that made a theological point: Mary or Jesus, for example, are at the visual center. With Sigismondo at the locus, Piero organized the space around him in precise proportions. He used two consistent units of measure throughout, adding them together to create a third unit of measure.31 Charming illusions fill the scene. Piero paints a round window that looks out on a landscape, which prominently features the skyline of Sigismondo’s fortress.
There are exotic touches as well. On a great chair sits the solemn and elderly St. Sigismondo, looking very much the foreign ruler. Piero may have derived his costume from what he had seen of Greek robes, hats, and pointed beards (or what he had seen of the contemporary hat and beard of the real-life Emperor Sigismund, a Hungarian just enthroned and traveling around Italy). Piero presents only one bit of Christian symbolism, and this is Sigismondo Malatesta’s praying hands; otherwise, Piero’s brush has dictated that Roman symbols dominate the items within the fresco composition. A garland hangs from the ceiling. Decorative cornucopias and roses are carved on the stone walls. Two sleek greyhounds, one white and one black, sit languidly behind their master, suggesting a household of sport, good taste, and wealth.
In Sansepolcro, Piero had developed a love of the bright banners made everywhere in his city, often by stencils, and almost always with a simple heraldic look in bold colors. In the Rimini fresco, that heraldic aspect comes through. Its objects seem emblematic, even like Egyptian hieroglyphics. With this heraldic inspiration, the entire scheme could have looked flat, and yet Piero presents it in a rounded realism, showing his increasingly refined technique. He combines architectural symmetry and proportion with a completely irregular rhythm of natural shapes, a trait of his future works.
The Malatesta wall painting is the earliest surviving work to be done by Piero in fresco, and, indeed, it was done in the arduous wet-plaster method of “true” fresco. Putting up fresco paintings was not for the faint-hearted. It required fast work, heavy lifting, and the dangers that attended maneuvering on a scaffold often built high above the floor. With experience under his belt from Sansepolcro, perhaps Florence, and in Ferrara, Piero moved ahead on the traditional process. His masonry assistant put up a first layer of plaster (the arriccio). Upon this, Piero incised a few major perspective lines to guide his drawing. Then he painted in some of the major markers of the composition with brush strokes of sepia-colored paint, a method called sinopia (named after a red chalk produced in the Black Sea city of Sinope). That laborious sinopia was soon to disappear under a final layer of plaster.
The final layer (the intonaco) was the actual painting surface. The mason troweled it up in small sections, each one for a day’s work to match the drying time. The daily patch of fresco was so routine that it was called a giornata, a standard measure of progress. In a day, simpler fresco images could be painted in a large swath of intonaco, since it took less time to put in a large patch of blue sky, for instance, or the unadorned robes on human figures. When Piero came to the more complex parts—a face or the detailed lineaments in the architecture—the plaster was put up in smaller patches. For any fresco painter, it was always a race against the drying plaster. One Florentine frescoist reported the piecemeal process in his diary. “On Thursday I painted those two arms.” The next day he did a head next to a rock. “On Saturday I did the trunk of the tree, the rock, and the hand.”32 And so forth. The routine was quick but notoriously careful. A badly done passage, locked into the fast-drying plaster, could be a minor calamity.
Some of Piero’s brushwork on the Malatesta fresco was freehand, quickly judged and painted by eye alone. In the more exquisite areas, he tightened up and used the special tools of a draftsman. He had made preliminary drawings for some parts of the scheme. These are called “cartoons” after the Italian cartone, a heavy paper. He pricked holes in the paper so charcoal dust could seep through at the outlines on the drawing. After a patch of wet intonaco was applied, Piero (or an assistant) placed his cartoon upon it, “pouncing” the holes with a porous bag of dusty charcoal. This transferred the image to the wall. Then, before the plaster dried, Piero commenced a day’s worth of serious painting. With the Rimini frescos, he was already applying the two basic methods of perspective that he would later write about. The first was to incise perspective lines in the wet plaster to create the general, accurate spatial reality of the scene, especially its architecture. After that, Piero would use the cartoons and pouncing to put in the more complex human and organic objects, cartoons that he may have drawn using the “window” pane method seen in Alberti’s On Painting, and for which Piero would develop his own mathematical approach.33
Piero’s use of two perspective methods may have been novel, but the use of fresco was already age-old when he came on the scene. The sturdiest form was true wet fresco, into
which the paint colors fused chemically and permanently. However, true fresco had long been augmented with painted details or glazes after the plaster dried (or after it was kept sufficiently damp by the covering of a wet cloth). Applied on a perfectly dry surface, this type of painting was untrue fresco secco (for “dry”).
The need for such detailing on dried surfaces may have generated some of the first use of oil paint in Italy—and, indeed, oil does play such a role in the Rimini frescos. This would be Piero’s first use of oil that can be dated (though some believe he used “a little oil” as early as the Baptism, did likewise in finishing the Misericordia Altarpiece, and may have tried oil in Ferrara and the north, none of which has survived).34 Despite such ambiguity, Piero is clearly an early Italian practitioner (and innovative, since the oil-inventing Flemish used it only on wood panels). Sigismondo may have rushed Piero on the fresco, not allowing time for immaculate detail in the more durable true fresco. Piero’s use of oil made some of his rich finishes less permanent, as time would prove. But in the moment, it allowed the harried painter to add more precision, color, and highlights.
As was the custom, Piero added a final inscription in praise of Malatesta at the bottom. He also added his name and the date 1451—a rare bona fide date on which modern scholars could reconstruct Piero’s biography. The fresco must have been stunning to contemporary eyes. Word seemed to spread of the unique abilities of this painter from Sansepolcro. Thanks to Piero, whatever Sigismondo’s real-life fortunes, at least two portrait images of him survived for posterity.35 Sigismondo had several medallions designed bearing images of himself and his wife. But it was Piero’s two pictures, like the proverbial two thousand words, that enhanced his chances of becoming a historical figure.
The completion of the Malatesta fresco marked the start of Piero’s mid-career, a year shy of forty. In the next decade, he would produce, or begin, some of his most remarkable works in skill, imagination, and scale. After Rimini, he would also reveal himself to be a thinking man, notably in the tradition of abacus mathematics.
One day, a person of importance, as Piero recounts, asked him to write a book on practical mathematics, presumably as used by merchants and builders. This request makes it obvious that Piero had a public reputation for his interest and ability in the mathematical arts, even though it had only come to light so far in how he designed his paintings. No literary figure himself, and far from the university world, Piero nevertheless decided to take the leap into what typically was the exclusive domain of the humanists. He set his mind to writing a treatise, which is now known by the homely title of Abacus Treatise (Trattato d’abaco), and it would be the first written work by Piero’s hand. As he said in the text, it would be primarily concerned with the arithmetic “necessary to merchants.”36
On all sides, Piero had seen the humanists writing treatises, mostly in Latin. He could at least boast a fine penmanship in the Tuscan vernacular, and indeed his handwriting—with an “e” that looks like a “z,” an angular “a,” his peculiar “et,” and his “g” with a large circular tail—would become clues in tracking Piero’s role in producing Renaissance manuscripts. In addition to being a fine draftsman, Piero was something of a systematic thinker as well, and had to be, taking readers of his Abacus Treatise through fractions, the nature of calculations, and starting each of hundreds of problems with pithy anecdotes such as “Two men are bartering, one has cinnamon and the other saffron,” or “There is a fountain with two basins, one above and one below. And each has three spouts.”37 Such colorful examples, however, could not fully mitigate the essential mathematical tedium of such texts. If Piero’s geometrical paintings could be called “dry,” as Vasari would say later on, the same would have to be said of his Abacus Treatise. Surely, in his heart and mind, Piero must have felt something transcendent, even romantic, about numbers and, in the Platonic sense, their cosmic roles and mysteries.38 Piero opens the Abacus Treatise by saying that with God’s help, he hopes to do a good job. Yet after that, such piety is put aside: he is all business, revealing a surprising aptitude for the mathematical logic and demonstrations invented by the ancient Greeks. “The divisor is always similar to the thing one wants to know [about],” he says with that sharp edge of Greek logic.39
The date of the Abacus Treatise’s composition is uncertain.40 Piero may have spent many years on the project: first in study, then in drafting various parts, and then in producing a final version. Like all Renaissance men, he was racing against time, if not a new season of plague. Fifty percent of the people born during the Renaissance died at birth or during the first year of life. Considering that Piero would reach the remarkable age of eighty, he was a rare case indeed of good health and good luck. But at mid-career there was no guarantee that he would live beyond the average life span (of those who had survived their first year; perhaps the fifties), and this put projects such as the Abacus Treatise, not to mention his painting commissions, always on the cusp between success and failure.
To begin with, Piero’s schoolday training in abacus was long gone, so he must have brushed up considerably. If Piero had conceived of the abacus project at an earlier time in his career—in the 1450s—he would have been entering his forties. At that time, he would still have had the Misericordia Altarpiece deadline hanging over his head. Just as pressing, in nearby Arezzo, a Franciscan church with hundreds of square feet of wall was appealing to Piero to fill it with elaborate—and time-consuming—frescos. Despite the unhappy outcome he had observed in the ill-fated procrastination of his old mentor in Sansepolcro, the painter Antonio, Piero must have had the stamina to keep his composure under pressure and stay on track.
How was he able to balance it all? One way to penetrate the complexities of Piero’s enigmatic life is to recognize his ability to get about. Tuscany, for example, is the size of New Hampshire, and adjacent Umbria about a third that size. Despite their rugged Apennine landscape, they were manageable regions for frequent travel. At his age, Piero the able horseman could have moved between towns and courts in a matter of a day or two. He could have several projects going on in different places, with his Sansepolcro workshop as the hub, a not-unusual circumstance for that smaller segment of Renaissance painters who traveled extensively to find work. In Piero’s case, small panel paintings, or a part of an altarpiece, could be done in a workshop anywhere and then carried to their final home. Thus, Piero may have written the Abacus Treatise in Sansepolcro, returning to this literary project every time he was back in town.
At any rate, Piero had now entered the world of treatise patronage in addition to the world of painting patronage. During the Quattrocento, the primary audience for any treatise was a patron, secular or religious. They paid the scholar and copyists to duplicate ancient works or replicate contemporary materials, sometimes with a commentary to provide scholarly cohesion to the mysteries or contortions of ancient phraseology and thought.41 This was how the papal scribes, from Bruni to Alberti, made a living. Fortunately, Piero had precedents for how to write his kind of arithmetical treatise. This was simply to mimic other abacus manuscripts or excerpts, and he may have had some of these around his home from his school days. The standard was the work by Italy’s great thirteenth-century mathematician, Leonardo of Pisa (Fibonacci).
With effort, Piero could also have found a copy of Euclid’s Elements, which was primarily about plane geometry, though his final sections (if available to Piero) covered what Euclid called “solids,” which have “length, breadth, and depth”—cubes, pyramids, polyhedra, spheres, and cylinders.42 As time went on in his writing career, Piero would be citing Euclid’s name in one form or another more frequently (beginning with the twelve times in the Abacus Treatise).43 Piero by now had also come upon some medieval source that summarized Archimedes, the ancient Greek geometer of three-dimensional shapes, since Piero cites his name in the Abacus Treatise in regard to the surfaces of spheres.44
From the start, Pier
o faced two constraints.45 First, there was really not much pure, speculative, or theoretical mathematics going on in Italian society, at least outside the universities, where Piero had no obvious reason to ambulate. At those centers of academia, humanists related geometry to astronomy. They applied arithmetic to the harmonic scales in music. For medicine, mathematics was about astrology, since the movement of heavenly bodies was believed to affect illness and health. And in theology, still the queen of sciences, the mathematical concerns were focused on the nature of the universe and numerology in the Bible.
The second constraint on Piero was the lack of the notations we now call algebra (such as a+b=b+a, or 4x+1=13). Arithmetic had not yet been applied to geometry. Everything was written out in long numbers and in verbal explanation, almost as if in computer code (do this, then do this, then do this). Indeed, the entire Greek tradition of geometry up to Piero’s era had been to state matters in sentences, not in numbers. And so it was that Piero’s Abacus Treatise was verbal. He calls his readers “tu” (you) as he gives step-by-step instructions. If Alberti had penned On Painting in Latin and in the spirit of Roman essayists such as Cicero and Quintilian, Piero was the no-nonsense abacus teacher.
After opening with exercises in fractions, Piero turns to the popular marketplace “rule of three,” a means of calculating the relations of disparate objects and values. This is a math problem such as: “There is a fish that weighs 60 pounds; the head weighs 3/5 of the body, and the tail weighs 1/3 of the head. I ask how much the body weighs.”46 In the Abacus Treatise, Piero also drew upon the surveying tradition, one that used triangles to calculate distances. One of his examples is the calculation of the distance between two towers in the landscape.
