Piero's Light

by Larry Witham

  In this passage, Piero reveals that he has been reading on the physiology of optics, presumably from Pecham’s Perspectiva Communis, which was used by humanists. Yet Piero has unaccountably stuck with an antiquated view of vision, espoused by Plato, Galen, and others, that the power of the eye begins in the mind and then physically extends out to the world as visual rays (the opposite of light entering the eye by its own power). As Piero asserts in On Perspective, “[The] eye, I say, is round and from the intersection of two little nerves which cross one another the visual force comes to the center of the crystalline humor, and from that the rays depart and extend in straight lines, passing through one quarter of the circle of the eye, so that this part subtends a right angle at the center… .”38 Here Piero is trying to explain the “visual force” and its limits, but in ways that naturally fall short of the better science to come.

  For anyone at that time in history, the science of options was still complex and enigmatic. In Piero’s case, the question was, How do you reconcile the “natural perspective” of the physical eye and the interpreting brain with the “artificial perspective” drawn by a draftsman with rulers in the form of rigid geometric lines? Piero lost this argument because of the confusion between geometrical optics—what he called “painters’ perspective”—and the physiological optics of the eye. He saved himself at the end by proposing a valid rule: a painter should limit the painting to cover no more than what the eye sees at sixty degrees (in other words, as if the viewer is not too close to the scene viewed). A generation later, Leonardo da Vinci would puzzle further over the curvature problem. He would also state the obvious: that human binocular vision (two eyes at different points) made perfect human perception of linear perspective impossible, except by looking awkwardly with one eye, or with two eyes at a very great distance.39

  Piero had made a valiant attempt to link his true science of painting and perspective with natural philosophy and humanist learning. On Perspective was not playing to the casual reader. Its pages are filled with diagrams, skeins of tracer lines, and countless tiny numbers to designate points on a shape. By this time in the Renaissance, most craftsmen had learned linear perspective by a rule of thumb, doing what Michelangelo later said: the trained eye itself, not mathematics, could be the compass, “because the hands work and the eye judges.”40 Piero’s On Perspective was too complex to influence the more popular drawing books that were cropping up with the invention of the printing press. Nevertheless, it established Piero as an early authority, and it guaranteed that Leonardo, the third significant Renaissance writer on perspective after Alberti and Piero, was not completely novel in his more famous discussions.

  When On Perspective was done, Piero dedicated the manuscript to the House of Montefeltro in Urbino, where it was gratefully received. At this juncture, Piero had apparently been exposed to the wonders of Archimedean geometry in Rome, where his relative Francesco da Borgo showed him the Vatican’s rare Latin translation of Archimedes, a copy which Francesco may have pilfered, like an overdue book, from the papal library. In On Perspective, however, Piero does not cite the ancient Greek mathematician. His passion for complex Archimedean geometry was still growing, and in time Piero would become the first modern European to try to master such Archimedean topics.

  Three years after Piero left Rome, Pius II declared a crusade. This was 1463. The princes of Christendom remained reluctant. So Pius vowed to lead it himself, traveling finally to the port city of Ancona, and there he waited for promised vessels from Venice to carry an army across the Adriatic. Pius II died waiting. The ships came, but too late. The crusade fizzled. With the demise of Pius II, the later High Renaissance papacy of legend—a papacy fraught with familial self-interest and free spending on the arts—was about to commence.

  The aged Bessarion, champion of Platonism, carried on the old humanist tradition. As dean of the College of Cardinals, he oversaw the next two papal elections, which came in 1464 and 1471. The great Cusanus was passing from the scene. When he died in 1464, the baton of Christian Platonist scholarship was just beginning to be taken up by a successor, the humanist Marsilio Ficino in Florence. Bessarion, Traversari, and Cusanus were the theological Platonists of the first half of the Quattro­cento, the figures under whom Piero would have learned his Platonism. Generationally, though, Piero would have probably missed the work of Ficino, who dominated the late Quattro­cento. In those twilight decades, Piero was far from Florentine circles and far more interested in three-dimensional geometry than in new Platonist commentaries in Latin.

  Ficino was the son of Cosimo de’ Medici’s physician, which assured him of the necessary patronage. Being a physician, his father wanted Ficino to pursue Aristotle, who put an emphasis on the biological brain and material sensations. The age of medicine had begun to expose both theologians like Ficino, and painters such as Piero, to the inner anatomy of the body, including the vital systems in the head: the eye and brain.41 Neither physiological optics nor nascent brain science would advance much beyond old Roman explorations. Yet the newly investigated anatomy and organs of the body were part of the new visual picture for painters, as would be suggested in one of Piero’s later paintings.42

  Internal anatomy notwithstanding, Ficino was most interested in theology, for it still was the rare Renaissance thinker who gave up on classic religious belief even as the human body was looking very much like a machine. Ficino was persuaded by Plato’s view of the soul, the mind, and the tran­scen­dent Ideas. After not a few crises of conscience, he embarked in this Platonist philosophical direction, advocating it with energy and productivity.

  Cosimo de’ Medici would give Ficino a villa and the resources he needed, and through the 1460s Ficino completed a Latin translation of all the dialogues of Plato. He was also planning an original work, a kind of Platonist version of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, which had relied on Aristotle as “The Philosopher.” Ficino called his work Platonic Theology (Theologia Platonica, 1482), and in it he assured Renaissance readers that “Plato does not forbid us putting our trust in the theology that is common to the Hebrews, Christians, and Arabs.”43

  Like Cusanus, Ficino was also in search of an “ancient theology” that showed that the earliest cultures, from the Egyptians to the Greeks, agreed on basic metaphysical truths. This was part of the solution to his own crisis of conscience—common among Christian humanists—that arose from spending so much time enjoying ancient pagan authors. During the writing of Platonic Theology, Ficino also was ordained a priest, rising in the ranks to become canon of the Florence cathedral. When his summa was finally published, it was the Renaissance’s most systematic Christianization of Platonism. Critics in Rome would cry heresy and say Platonic Theology was a slippery slope to heterodoxy. Yet Ficino’s Platonist translations, and his furtherance of the Platonist and Franciscan solar theology of the Sun and light, became the dominant alternative to Renaissance materialisms, especially those of Epicurus and Lucretius. The influence of Ficino’s cosmology lasted for the next two and a half centuries, up until the Newtonian revolution.44

  When Ficino was just getting started with his Platonist writings at a Medici villa in Florence, he was in his thirties, and this was at a time (in the 1460s) when Piero was in his fifties. Accordingly, Piero’s Platonism was derived from the earlier Platonist ferment stirred by such events as the Council of Florence (1439). To this he added his mathematical interests, which fit nicely with Plato’s dualist concept of the “intelligible” and the “sensible” realities. On occasion, Piero would apply this dualism to the problem of appearance and reality, as he drew a contrast between “the eye and the intellect” in later writings.45

  It was this complex vintage of Platonism that Piero, having recently worked in Rome, took back with him to San­sepol­cro. He eyed the town as not yet a place to retire, but as the continuing hub for his further travels to paint. A major transition came in 1464, when his father died, and Piero and his closest brother
, Marco, began to settle the future of the family properties. As a new future awaited Piero, one major feature of his home region on the peninsula was fast crumbling away.

  About this time, the House of Malatesta in Rimini was in a state of disintegration. The lands under its control were dwindling. Sigismondo had ended up at odds with an increasingly powerful papacy. At one point, the pope had designated Cardinal Cusanus to preside at a church court to which Malatesta could make humble appeal, which he did not. Pope Pius II, using the colorful images of perdition, excommunicated him, saying that “Until now, no mortal has been solemnly canonized in Hell.” A humanist poet who could always turn a nice phrase, Pius consigned Sigismondo to “Orcus and eternal fire.”46 The next pope, Paul II, treated the Duke of Rimini no better, leading to a reported attempt by Sigismondo to arrive in Rome intent on murdering the pontiff with his own hands. He returned to Rimini and died a month later. It was late 1468.

  By contrast, the rival House of Montefeltro in Urbino had cultivated its relations with the papacy, even to the point of one intermarriage. Piero’s regional travels began to attach him to Urbino, a kingdom on the rise. He might have sought fame in Florence—but there, Medici tastes had turned to a more decadent decorative art, now a specialty of the closed-shop art worker guilds.47 Piero, too, had evolved, but in old age had retained his purist—some would say primitive—style. It was a style welcomed in Urbino, where Federico da Montefeltro had set up an elaborate court of humanist arts and letters.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Aging Geometer

  In Piero’s day, whenever the plague arrived, the best course of action was to leave the crowded town or city. That was Piero’s choice when the pestilence swept through San­sepol­cro once again in 1468. The death toll had risen in that decade. It was no wonder that Tuscany had become known for its banners with “plague saints,” protectors against the scourge.1 Not wanting to risk anything, Piero headed to the countryside and took his work with him.

  In the village of Bastia, five miles away, Piero’s family owned property. It was there that he set up shop, completing a banner he was working on for a confraternity in Arezzo. Its topic was the Annunciation. Compared to a major fresco, a banner could seem small indeed. Yet even a banner had demands for quality and detail. It was in effect a large canvas mounted on a square frame that could be transported on a pole, either placed in a chapel or carried in a procession. This banner was much anticipated in the city where Piero had completed his wall-to-wall frescos. Journeying to Bastia, the confraternity treasurer paid Piero on November 7, 1468 and then loaded the painted fabric in a horse-drawn cart for the return trip to Arezzo. The next Sunday, the confraternity was awestruck by its beauty.2

  Seasonal plagues weren’t the only things that could delay the work of painters, of course. In Piero’s case, he still faced his perennial dilemma of having too many projects going at once. With a good many outstanding matters hanging over his head, the latter stage of Piero’s life could be characterized by three themes: his completion of some striking madonna paintings; his commissions in the city of Urbino; and his upgrading of the family estate in San­sepol­cro, which included paintings for his own home, a time of apparent religious reflection at the end of his life. A fourth great preoccupation also arose along the way, and it was no less revealing of Piero’s final fascination with Plato’s numerical world and the ideal Archimedean shapes: this was Piero’s production of exceedingly complex manuscripts related to geometry.

  During his travels around Tuscany and its borderlands, Piero would paint two of his most memorable madonnas, one for his late mother’s home town nearby and another, much later, while working in Urbino. Piero’s mother was born in Monterchi, a hillside town just thirteen miles southwest of San­sepol­cro. It was on the road to Arezzo, Perugia, and Rome. Outside the town stood the small Church of Santa Maria. The church sought a new madonna image for its altar, and, perhaps in honor of his mother’s native soil, Piero agreed to the commission. This was no ordinary altar picture, however. This fresco stood like a monolith, a portable wall of sorts, rather than being painted directly on the plaster wall of a chapel. Measuring eight and a half by six and a half feet, the fresco introduced one of Piero’s most notable madonnas, a regally dressed Mary with the rare feature of her midsection bulging with pregnancy, now called the Madonna del Parto.

  Mary stands in a kind of red-cloth tent that is lined inside with fur-like panels. She is striking for her monumental presence, but also for the attitude she projects. This queen of heaven has the bearing of a confident country girl. Absent both a crown and a throne, her hand rests on her stomach. Her blue dress swells to show an opening in the overgarment. Though a visibly pregnant madonna was rare in Italian art, Piero used a not-unknown composition. The Madonna del Parto stands at the center of a stage on which two smaller-scale angels pull back a curtain.

  The painting projects Piero’s taste for symmetry and heraldry, in which bright flags use matching patterns. Each angel steps forward with one leg, each has a single wing showing, and each is drawn by Piero from the same cartoon. The two angels are poised as mirror opposites, and even their red and green garments are like thesis and antithesis. At this country Church of Santa Maria, tradition was appreciated, and this meant exaggerating Mary’s size to drive home her symbolic significance (she stood for Mother Church itself), even if Piero’s realism made her look like a graceful giantess. The Madonna del Parto was Piero’s atypical solution to his patron’s need of a madonna, and no other work by him would be comparable.

  It is not known how many madonnas Piero painted. But with a third of the churches in Italy devoted to Mary, it was a common theme for commissions. Another such Piero commission—to be known as the Senigallia Madonna—produced one more extraordinary image of Mary. She was modern and domestic; and if any painting by Piero echoed the look of the portraiture coming from the Netherlands, this madonna was the one. Piero may have painted it for one of the daughters in the House of Montefeltro. While this links the work to Urbino, where the paintings by traveling Flemish craftsmen were highly appreciated, the painting’s name speaks to how it was placed in a church outside the Adriatic coastal city of Senigallia.

  In the panel, a male and a female angel stand on either side of Mary and her child. The setting is indoors with outdoor light breaking in, casting shafts of light on a distant wall, shafts that also seem revealed by passing through dust particles in the air. Gone is Piero’s love of ornate columns, marbles, and moldings. The interior is of the starkest kind, lending to a simple and peaceful composition. Using soft colors, he allows the light and shadow to reveal the figures and geometrical setting.

  For this work, Piero adopts the Flemish practice of painting on a walnut panel; in fact, in its entire feeling, the Senigallia Madonna suggests Piero’s familiarity with, and admiration for, Flemish portrait painting.3 This may explain his choice of an indoor domestic scene, as if the Madonna is a housewife at home with child and attendants, and his use of the shafts of light. After these, he adds his own Tuscan traits. Painting in tempera, he has achieved the subtlety of oil, defining all of his figures and their geometrical setting purely by color and form, with very little sense of line present. Unlike the Flemish, his figures are classically statuesque, not organically busy, and he puts them in a room of Italian gray stone, not a wood interior favored by the Netherlanders.

  Piero’s Italian/Flemish hybrid was important, at least as a harbinger of things to come. For this time in Italian painting, his use of a simple domestic background for a madonna (or for any portraiture) was relatively unknown. In future years, it would become a European standard in genre scenes, prescient even of the Dutch master Vermeer.4

  The Senigallia Madonna was not the only lure that had taken Piero on the rocky mountain journey to the princedom of Urbino. During his post-plague visit to Urbino in the spring of 1469, he had lodged with the court artist Giovanni Santi, the future father of Raphael (wh
o was born fourteen years later).5 Vasari would call Santi a “painter of no great excellence, and yet a man of good intelligence,” the latter evidenced by his surviving poetic chronicle, Cronica Rimata, of events in the Urbino court, including a few lines of praise for Piero.6 Piero had arrived at the invitation of a confraternity that needed an altarpiece finished; the Florentine painter Paolo Uccello had completed the scenes in the small lower panels, the predella, but then had apparently moved on, leaving the rest undone.

  The records say that Piero “had come to see the panel in order to do it.”7 He was probably asked to finish the work, and he may have agreed, except that plans changed. In the end, a Flemish painter in Urbino, Justus of Ghent, would complete the main part of the altarpiece, a logical conclusion since Federico da Montefeltro, duke of Urbino, was extremely fond of the new vogue of oil painting. What awaited Piero was something different—the opportunity to paint the portraits of Federico and his wife, Battista. He would do so in the enchanted world of a flowering Renaissance court.

  Through the 1460s, Federico was rebuilding the walls of Urbino. When he began to reconstruct his Palazzo Ducale, he turned to the architect Luciano Laurana, a classicist who was of the generation following the innovations of Brunelleschi and Alberti. In the rival city of Rimini, Sigismondo Malatesta had emphasized a synthesis of the pagan and the Christian. At Urbino, Montefeltro was classical in style and Christian in thought with far less conflation and confusion between the two.8 The new Urbino complex combined a rough-hewn fortress with a Renaissance palace. Inside were classical courtyards and patios with vistas off the mountain­top. A grand staircase reached Federico’s throne room. Downstairs was a family chapel (and, adjacent, a pagan chapel). A private study, or studiolo, was lined with intarsia, the elaborately inlaid wood. In all, the building was like a classical temple and a monastic cloister combined.