Piero's Light

by Larry Witham

  For Christianity, the Good and Beautiful of Plato were transferred to the nature of the Hebrew God, who became the Good and in whose mind exists the Beautiful. The early Christian definitions of beauty came gradually, and one of the most influential works finally was written by a Neoplatonist to be known as Dionysius the Areopagite. A murky figure, Dionysius was probably a Syrian mystic from the fifth century c.e., although for a thousand years his text was believed to have come from the hand of Dionysius of Athens, St. Paul’s famous convert. Nevertheless, this text (now called pseudo-Dionysius) convinced a millennium of Christianity that “We call beautiful the thing which participates in [Platonic] beautifulness, because from it is imparted to all reality the beauty appropriate to every thing, and also because it is the cause of proportion and brilliance.”66

  Thomas Aquinas came much later, and he too wrote on beauty. Following a more Aristotelian approach, he preferred to define the elements of beauty in the concrete: “The first is integrity, or perfection, of the thing, for what is defective is, in consequence, ugly; the second is proper proportion, or harmony; and the third is clarity—thus things which have glowing color are said to be beautiful.”67 The Renaissance strongly believed in the mind’s capacity to recognize beauty in created works, for, to hear Alberti, artistic perfection “excites the mind and is immediately recognized by it.” Alberti would have received no protest when he told his public “When you make judgments on beauty, you do not follow mere fancy, but the workings of a reasoning faculty that is inborn in the mind.”68

  Closely related to this Christian and classical agreement about the mind’s innate judgment of beauty was the belief that beauty was bound up with light, both as a spiritual and physical quality. Biblical texts used light as a symbol of origins and truth. Plato was enamored of the Sun, and latter-day Platonism described light as an emanation that created the world. Early Franciscan science took the same stance, eager to find how light and geometry were primordial to the existence of all things. Theologically and scientifically, there was ultimate light (lux) and its secondary sources (lumen). The natural philosophers of the Renaissance could hardly yet imagine the biological complexity of the human visual system—or the origin of color—but the painters among them began to codify various effects that still prove valid in modern visual neuro­science.

  It was Aristotle who first openly wrestled with color. At the dawn of the Renaissance, Cennini’s Handbook (c. 1400) spoke of Aristotle’s “seven natural colors,” a mapping that even Leonardo da Vinci would not improve upon.69 Instinctively, the best artists who worked with color picked up on its two essential features. First of all, color had primaries and contrasts. Second, it is a carrier of luminosity (a degree of brightness). This became known to Renaissance artisans as chiaroscuro, Italian for “bright/dark.”

  Piero presumably understood both of these qualities; his challenge was to exploit them. When he painted the Baptism of Christ, the clothes on the three men in the background are in red, yellow, and blue, the three primary colors. In his day, the humanist Lorenzo Valla criticized those who imbued color with too much meaning, saying “It is stupid to lay down laws about the dignity of colors.”70 Piero was clearly more in line with Alberti’s irenic discourse on the harmonic “sympathy” of certain color combinations.

  It was Alberti who also put a good deal of emphasis on luminosity, although that term is modern and technical. Visual luminosity is about dark and light, which Alberti placed higher than particular colors. “In the nature of things there are only two true colors, white and black, and all the rest arise from the mixture of these two,” he said (as if turning nature into a black-and-white photograph, and thus revealing its most perfect and beautiful form). “Light and shade make it apparent where surfaces become convex or concave,” achieving for the artist what he “must above all desire: that the things he paints should appear in maximum relief.”71 Piero achieved this in obvious ways, but of this Leonardo da Vinci, with his stronger chiaroscuro, became master in the Renaissance.

  Leonardo actually disliked brightly colored paintings with hard-edged imagery and sunny details. His alternative was to create shadowy atmospheres, now called sfumato. In this, his paintings often showed the widest range of natural luminosity.72 Piero was a luminist of a different kind. While he did use a sharp dark/light chiaroscuro on occasion, his taste was in a sunlit, pale, and cool range of color.73 His work as a frescoist probably influenced this bright aesthetic, whereas Leonardo was slow and used layer upon layer of paint (though, later in his career, Piero, too, would employ the richer glazing effects; and Leonardo would lighten up in his Last Supper fresco). Over Piero’s life as a painter, he otherwise stayed with a distinctive coloration—bright, cool, still, and clear.

  Renaissance painters no doubt wondered about the nature of light, and probably turned to the theological explanations of the day: it was an ethereal substance made by God. Science was still centuries away from understanding such entirely alien concepts as electro­magnetism. Early scientists, meanwhile, knew little more than the painters. A century after Piero, Johannes Kepler, a Platonist who used geometry to solve problems in astronomy, viewed light as being colorless and noncorporeal, a higher substance known only to God. For his part, Piero put his light and color into practice, whatever theory he may have subscribed to. As a default philosophy, the Platonist and Christian views of light, color, and beauty were natural enough to adopt. In Piero’s time, it was a short step from beauty to religion. People wanted to see God and miracles in their paintings. It was no different back in San­sepol­cro, where Piero brought about another visual marvel, a painting of the Resurrection.

  Some Italian towns boasted ancient Roman origins. For San­sepol­cro, the origins story was distinctly religious. The name meant “holy sepulcher,” the tomb from which Christ had risen from the dead. A stone from Christ’s grave was said to have been brought back from the Holy Land by saints Arcano and Aegidius and to have marked the original San­sepol­cro settlement.

  A large and powerful city such as nearby Siena had shown what a commune could do to celebrate its origins in visual imagery, both sacred and secular. At Siena’s city hall, the Palazzo Pubblico, Simon Martini’s great fresco of the enthroned Madonna, the Maestà, radiated its theological message opposite the wall that featured Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s sprawling story of civic life, Good and Bad Government. A smaller town such as San­sepol­cro felt no less civic pride. When expressed, though, it was more exclusively religious by comparison. This was evident when San­sepol­cro’s city fathers commissioned Piero to adorn an improved city hall with a painting of Christ rising from the dead, a fresco seven feet square.74 Placed directly inside the entrance room to this public building, the picture made no bones about the secular and the sacred: Christ was like the mayor of the town, the judge of right and wrong.

  As usual, Piero tried to do something new in the Resurrection, which otherwise was well defined in the conventions of medieval painting. Presenting Christ as a nearly life-size figure, he fills the picture with a peculiar quality of cool, gray light and morning stillness. Paintings of the Resurrection had a few typical formats, including Christ floating in the air. Instead, Piero has him emerging from the sarcophagus, his foot on its edge. Some art historians point to the Resurrection to suggest that medieval Siena had the strongest influence on Piero’s lifetime work in general, and not Florence (as pro-Florentines have argued), and not least, in this case, because a prominent Sienese painting of the risen Christ already existed in Piero’s home town.75 Typical of most such paintings, the sleeping soldiers assigned to guard the tomb are also shown, and in Piero’s treatment, they almost seem to be dreaming up the event at hand. In the dawn light, Christ looks ashen, as might any man who has survived crucifixion and the grave, his dark, circled eyes sleepless and hypnotic. He has the rough visage of a Tuscan farmer. Yet he is framed by fluted columns and he bears a heraldic banner, as if simultaneously a prince on the field of
battle.

  Although the Resurrection is one of Piero’s simpler compositions in a painting, it is not without a good deal of complex thought and rendering. It mixes two perspectives, for instance. From a viewpoint below, the viewer sees how one sleeping soldier’s head is thrown back; the architectural frame and sarcophagus are painted in a similar from-below viewpoint. However, Christ is rendered as if seen straight on. He is defying earthly optics. With his figure as the anchor, the rest of the picture is filled with irregular, dynamic patterns. The sleeping soldiers create angles. Their clothes alternate between dark green, brown, and red, making the pale Christ and his pink garment luminescent.

  In the background, Piero has painted two different kinds of land­scapes, although they both have the Tuscan feel that he is known for. On the right side of the painting, the trees are slim and in full bloom, and they lead down the hill to a village in the distance. On the left, the tree trunks are thick and the branches barren. These trees lead up a steep, rocky slope.

  Piero was hardly the first medieval painter to moralize a land­scape, if that was indeed his intent. An older tradition viewed such visual dichotomies as a contrast between the Old Testament and the New. Piero had doubtless heard sermons about the Christian choice of two paths in life, and it would have enriched his painting to infuse that kind of duality into the countryside: the lush, rich land­scape of those who believe in a risen Christ, and the barren waste­land of those who did not welcome his teachings. And yet was this really Piero’s symbolic intention, whether by his own design or at the behest of his religious patrons?

  The other possibility is that modern interpreters have misread Piero’s painting for an embarrassingly mundane reason: old paint often falls off fresco surfaces over the centuries, especially if inept cleanings are conducted on the work. It has been suggested that Piero had painted both sets of trees in the Resurrection with leaves, but those on the left were not painted in true fresco, and thus had abraded away, revealing only the leafless, wintry branches.76 (In fact, at one point in later centuries, the Resurrection was whitewashed by uninterested parties, and it would be one of the miracles of antique restoration that Piero’s fresco was so well restored once again, perhaps minus some green leaves.)

  Such caution over finding too much “green and dry” symbolism in Piero’s paintings may also apply to his Death of Adam scene in his great frescos at Arezzo; while it has been said that “the dead tree in the Adam panel echoes the death content of the scene in contrast with the new tree which Seth plants,” it may not have been a dead tree at all back when Piero painted it. His green foliage, applied by a brush, may have simply sloughed off over the centuries, leaving only the barren branches.77

  Through all of this interpretive hindsight, Piero—like his Resurrection painting—seems to have survived with a repose of confident indifference. He left behind no record of his personal symbolic intentions in any of his works. Nor is there evidence of whom he may have used as models for various human faces, such as the sleeping soldiers in the case of the Resurrection. Nevertheless, some enterprising local would soon pass on a tradition that survived long after Piero’s death: it says that Piero painted himself as the sleeping soldier with his head thrown back—a head done in exacting perspective, of course.

  Up to this point, Piero had conceived two paintings with a monumental figure dominating all else. The first was the larger-than-life Madonna in the Misericordia Altarpiece. The Resurrection was his second painting with an outsized divine figure. His future paintings would be filled with many more outstanding human images, but none so enormous in their centrality as these two: Mary lifting her protective cope and Christ bearing his triumphant banner. By adorning the town hall, the Resurrection may have been the more civic of these works, but even with that political connotation, it would pale next to the politically explosive frescos that Piero would begin in nearby Arezzo. They would be the largest project of his life.

  CHAPTER 4

  Strange Legends in Fresco

  On his travels, Piero had probably visited Arezzo before. Located on a hilltop overlooking the Arno River, it was a mere twenty-mile journey west across the mountains from San­sepol­cro, and was known for its picturesque assemblage of medieval towers and walls along the main route to Florence. Now the little town, with its Franciscan presence and big “Aretine” pride, would dominate a good part of his life. As the 1450s began, Piero would embark on a massive fresco at Arezzo’s central Franciscan church, adorning two thousand square feet of wall with one of the most alluring tales in medieval Christianity, the story of the true cross.

  Arezzo had a taste for grand narratives of all kinds. It had produced a number of influential figures in Italian cultural life. They began with Petrarch and passed through Leonardo Bruni, the longtime chancellor of Florence. The city was also mindful of the political events of the day, the most shocking at about this time being the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453. Islam seemed to be sweeping the East, knocking at the door of the Baltics and Italy. This was of dire concern to the Arezzo Franciscans. The papacy had designated the Franciscan order as the preachers of popular causes and as keepers of the Holy Land. In the past, they had been at the forefront of crusade preaching, and the new Turkish threat made a similar demand.

  Piero’s series of storytelling frescos at the Franciscan church would one day be known in their entirety as The Legend of the True Cross. But for the Aretines and Franciscans who commissioned them, they may well have been a running commentary on the perennial Christian troubles with the Holy Land and the East.

  The Franciscans had already set a high standard for fresco cycles. The premier exemplar was their Assisi mother church, where the life of St. Francis was painted in twenty-eight stories, like a film strip, across the vast walls.1 The true-cross story had been painted in at least two other Italian churches, but the Arezzo Franciscans aspired to have it told with the splendor of an Assisi, especially given the Arezzo church’s storied heritage.2 On the outside, San Francesco was nothing special: it was the typical Gothic barn, large and simple to suit popular preaching. Its origins had a taste of the supernatural, however, for the church was said to have been established after St. Francis had a vision on the outskirts of the city.

  A project of this scale was going to take both good theology and a good deal of money, and so it was that the Franciscan friars and one of the wealthiest families in Arezzo, the Bacci clan, tried to work out the proper arrangements. The Bacci were well-connected spice merchants and apothecaries.3 About the time of Piero’s birth, the family had promised the Franciscans that they would fund frescos for San Francesco. After decades during which no money was forthcoming, the Franciscans pressed for fulfillment. The results began to come in the 1440s.

  As paying patrons, the Bacci probably had some say in how the Legend of the True Cross frescos would tell that story. The Bacci hand may explain why the frescos ended up with more than just theology: they would feature a set of worldly sagas, two battle scenes from the true-cross legend. One of these featured Emperor Constantine. Aretines, as it happened, claimed that their city had been the first to convert when Constantine made Christianity the state religion in 325 c.e. The other battle scene would show Heraclius against the Persians, a reminder, of course, that Christians at that hour were still contending with the East, now personified in the Ottoman Turkish Empire.

  To recruit a seasoned painter, the Aretines turned to Florence, and there they found the elderly Bicci di Lorenzo, a Quattro­cento veteran who had both rebuilt and painted churches. When Bicci arrived, the Arezzo church was not a blank slate: the interior was dotted with late-Gothic imagery, including allusions to the Franciscan founding and Arezzo’s favorite saints. The new frescos were to go up on three towering walls. Each was three stories high at the very front of the church, an enclosure called the choir, the large space around the altar where the priests and monks sit during the Mass. When Bicci di Lorenzo began his w
ork in the late 1440s, he brought to the project his Florentine experience with frescos, but also his conventional style.

  No sooner had the project begun to make progress than Bicci fell seriously ill. This was 1448, when he and his assistants had probably completed the imagery around the arched entrance to the choir: the four evangelists, some fathers of the church, and a last-judgment scene. Then Bicci died in 1452. At some time between Bicci’s illness and death, Piero was hired as a replacement master painter.

  The painterly task that now faced Piero was a Herculean case of problem-solving: geometrical calculations, the rendering of large-scale human figures, and the painting of scores of organic and architectural images. Taking the baton from Bicci, however, Piero might not have viewed the Arezzo fresco as one of his most important artistic undertakings. As evidence of this, he would interrupt his work at Arezzo for other ventures that, perhaps, were more interesting, prestigious, or profitable. Anyway, whatever Piero’s immediate attitude, the Arezzo frescos would stand the test of time. Over the centuries they would become known as Piero’s monumental masterpiece.

  The frescos would also speak to the popular imagination. They told the true-cross story, but they also reminded people of the most popular written work of the Middle Ages, a medieval anthology of saint biographies called the Golden Legend (Legenda Aurea). This collection, from which every grammar-school student learned to read (even in hand-copied manuscripts prior to the invention of printing), was the source for the episodes in the true-cross story that Piero was about to paint.