by Larry Witham
Despite this general voiding of Piero’s memory, a small cadre of chroniclers would begin to put his name in print. Piero’s first chronicler was Luca Pacioli (1445–1515), his mathematician friend with the same Tuscan roots.4 Born in Sansepolcro, Pacioli had a natural vista on the life of Piero. Younger than Piero by thirty years, he was an eyewitness to the French invasion. He was present in Milan when troops breached the gates in a rampage and, soon after, used Leonardo da Vinci’s clay model of a giant equestrian statue for target practice. Along with Piero, Pacioli had seen more peaceful days. He was educated in Venice, where he studied mathematics and lived with a wealthy merchant, whose sons he tutored. Around 1470, he joined the Franciscan order. Like any Italian humanist with a scientific bent, friar Pacioli attached himself to the courts of various princes.
Back in Sansepolcro, Piero might have taught Pacioli about mathematics. During Piero’s last years in Urbino, Pacioli was probably on the scene as well, tutoring Federico’s son Guidobaldo. Pacioli was the rare associate of Piero who could follow what he was writing about in his treatises on mathematics, perspective, and geometry. Pacioli had also been writing on mathematics informally but, like Piero, wanted to publish something momentous. That opportunity came two years after Piero’s death. Bolstered by the Venetian publishing trade, Pacioli issued in vernacular Italian in 1494 his Summa de Arithmetica, the first printed book on commercial arithmetic. On its dedication page to Duke Guidobaldo of Urbino, Pacioli offers Piero’s first, if brief, footnote to history. Pacioli calls him “our contemporary, and the prince of modern painting.”5
In Pacioli’s second major work, De divina proportione (On Divine Proportion), written in 1497 and published in 1509, he goes further with biographical details:
The monarch of our times of painting and architecture, Maestro Piero deli Franceschi, made famous, thanks to his brush, at Borgo San Sepolchro and, as one can see, also at Urbino, Bologna, Ferrara, Arimino, Anconna, and in our own land, whether in oils or gouache, on murals or woods, but especially in the city of Arezzo, where he painted that great chapel, one of Italy’s most worthy achievements and one acclaimed by all; then he wrote the book about perspective which can be found in the magnificent library of our most illustrious Duke [Guidobaldo] of Urbino.6
Pacioli’s emphasis on Piero as a painter, not a mathematician, was perhaps not without judicious, or devious, reason. As became apparent in time—according to what may be called the pro-Piero viewpoint—the geometry section in Pacioli’s Summa de Arithmetica is essentially lifted from Piero’s Abacus Treatise. Thus was born the charge of plagiarism, which has circulated through history, and been hotly debated, ever since.7 A similar pattern shows up in Pacioli’s De divina proportione. In this, and without attribution, he seems to have copied Piero’s entire Five Regular Solids, though he translates it into Italian. In a famous Renaissance painting of Pacioli, he is shown garbed in a Franciscan frock, pointing at things of a geometrical nature. A great deal of what Pacioli knew about such topics—geometrical proportions and the polyhedra of Archimedes, for example—had apparently been gleaned from Piero’s work.
All of this aside, Pacioli nevertheless established Piero’s name in history. By way of Pacioli, Piero’s interest in geometrical shapes and Archimedean polyhedra probably reached the mind of Leonardo da Vinci. In Milan, Leonardo had purchased a copy of Pacioli’s Summa de Arithmetica. Being the court painter and jack of all trades, Leonardo persuaded the Milanese ruler Ludovico Sforza to invite Pacioli to teach geometry. Pure mathematics was never Leonardo’s forte, though he tried, once writing in his notes: “Learn the multiplication of [square] roots from Maestro Luca.”8 Leonardo’s notes on linear perspective never amounted to a formal treatise. If the brilliant yet procrastinating, distracted Leonardo had actually aspired to write such a formal treatise, he might finally have balked, knowing that it had already been done in Piero’s On Perspective. Meanwhile, Leonardo’s fascination with polyhedra grew.9
The relationship of Piero to Leonardo may finally be interpreted in two ways. At the minimum, when Leonardo produced sixty illustrations of polyhedra for Pacioli’s De divina proportione, those drawings appeared just following the section Pacioli had copied from Piero’s Five Regular Solids. Piero’s text must have served as a guide. If Piero’s influence on Leonardo was greater than this, it would come by positioning Piero as Leonardo’s teacher—with Pacioli the tutorial go-between. As one such generous interpretation says, Piero’s “knowledge of Archimedes made its way into the mind of Leonardo.”
At any rate, whatever Piero’s influence on Leonardo may have been, they shared a unique kind of role in the Renaissance. By painting in their workshops, and by penning intellectual theories at their writing tables, both of them operated between the two opposing social classes and cultures of their time, the humanist Latinists and the practical artisans. By producing achievements in both realms, Piero and Leonardo represented a new kind of figure in their century: “Their uniting of the two cultures enabled them to make important innovations in art and thought.”10
The French harassment of Italy soon began to seriously disrupt life in Milan. So in 1499, Pacioli left for Florence. He launched a career as university teacher and popular speaker, transfixing his audiences from Naples to Bologna and from Perugia to Florence. His public talks were filled with entertaining stories and jokes, but his most popular were about the mathematical mysteries of Christianized Platonism. These presented mathematics as a doorway to even God’s nature and providence. Elected a superior in his Capuchin order of the Franciscans, Pacioli lived out his latter days in the Santa Croce Monastery of Florence. For all his speculation on the mystical quality of numbers and proportions, Pacioli’s influence was ultimately practical. Europe was advancing quickly in commerce and science by the rush to quantify the physical world. In the long run, Pacioli assisted by inventing the technique of double bookkeeping. Wherever Pacioli died—it may have been Rome, Florence, or Sansepolcro—records locate him teaching in the papal city until 1515, well before it was sacked by invaders. He would have seen Rome in the final glory days of the Renaissance.
The sack of Rome in 1527 signaled the end of the Italian Renaissance’s cultural and political idealism. Some features on the Italian peninsula seemed impervious to change, however, and one of these was the enduring resilience of the Medici dynasty. It proved remarkably adaptable, despite brief exiles and constant intrigues. The family continued to claim power in Florence. It also managed to extend its power to Rome by way of three Medici popes, the first being Leo X from 1513 to 1521. Piero had never been active enough in Florence, presumably, to have been part of the Medici circles, a social niche into which many ambitious artists competed to enter. If any artist of the sixteenth century was famous for that affiliation, it was the painter Giorgio Vasari. He was the next person in history to give Piero della Francesca his due.
Vasari was born in 1511 in Arezzo, not far from Piero’s home. Later in life, Vasari claimed that his great-grandfather had helped Piero on the great Arezzo frescos. Vasari loved to make such connections. He would assert, among other things, that he had studied in Florence as a youth under Michelangelo. Most important of all, the young Vasari had become friends with two young Medici heirs, Alessandro and Ippolito. Once they had all come of age, the two Medici became Vasari’s Florentine and Arezzo patrons, funding his considerable energy as a designer, painter, and architect. This was from 1532 to 1537, the year that Duke Alessandro was assassinated. Now Vasari headed out on his own. Under church patronage in Rome, he began a new stage of his career.
At this point, Vasari would invest a great amount of energy in writing his Lives of the Artists (1550), a chronicle of 250 years of Italian art. By the time of his second edition in 1568, it would include 142 artists, a wide range of lucid observations on art, and finally his own autobiography. To compile this material, Vasari relied on his many travels, observations, and conversations. Despite his rel
iance on a good deal of hearsay, a defect that introduced numerous factual errors into the artist biographies, his encyclopedic memory, treks around Italy, and observant note-taking were unparalleled for his day.
When it came to Piero, Vasari had as good a source as anyone. A native of Arezzo, he had seen Piero’s frescos for years: they were his first impression of what a Renaissance painting looked like. In nearby Sansepolcro, he had glimpsed other Piero works—the Baptism, the Resurrection, and the altarpieces—and when as a working painter Vasari managed a large artisan workshop, he had two storytelling assistants from Sansepolcro. Mostly, Vasari was necessarily vague in what he wrote about Piero’s life. If he inserted mistakes, he was at least correct in attributing the right paintings to Piero. His excuse was a good one: much of Piero’s legacy had been destroyed or ruined by the half century of tumult in Italy since his death. “I cannot write the life of this man,” he admitted, and then wrote what he could.11
In Vasari’s time, the classical simplicity of the early Renaissance had given way to a new emotional and elaborate drama on canvases and in fresco. This was the High Renaissance opening the gate to the baroque. At a time like this in the arts, Vasari placed Piero in a bygone era, an early time when Italian painting had a “certain dryness, hardness, and sharpness of manner,” which Vasari compared unfavorably to the new look of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael.12 Although Piero fell short of Michelangelo, Vasari embraced him with a sense of local Tuscan pride. Foreshadowing the custom in future generations of art travel guides, Vasari gave the most ink to Piero’s Arezzo frescos. A second high point in Vasari’s “Life” of Piero was his praise for him as a mathematician. Piero “had a very good knowledge of Euclid, insomuch that he understood all the best curves drawn in regular bodies better than any other geometrician, and the clearest elucidations of these matters that we have are from his hand.”13
In this area, Vasari felt that Piero had been robbed of that Renaissance fame. Vasari somehow knew the back story of Piero and Pacioli, and thus said that Piero had been “cheated of the honor due his labors.” Thus it was that Vasari was the first to establish the charge that Pacioli had stolen Piero’s mathematical material without giving him credit. “Truly unhappy,” Vasari said, is such an artist who did not find fame when he was alive. “Time, who is called the father of truth, sooner or later makes manifest the real state of things,” he said of Piero’s accomplishments.14
As the veritable father of art history, Vasari introduced the idea that “competition” was the motive that had driven Renaissance artisans. He told Piero’s story in this light, speaking of him as a young painter with his “glory and fame” at stake. Piero’s misfortune, he suggested, was that no one (with Pacioli as chief villain) acknowledged this greatness.15 Vasari’s Lives was designed to praise Florentine artists the most. Significantly, he did not find any evidence in his day that Piero had lived or worked in Florence; accordingly, Piero was viewed as a regional painter whose influence may have spread to the hinterlands, but not to the big cities (though modern art historians have disagreed with Vasari, believing that Piero’s most compelling works gradually influenced painting styles in Ferrara, Venice, and Rome). More than three hundred years after Vasari, the question of Piero and Florence would again stir debate among art historians: Was Piero a product of Florence, or was he something homegrown and original?
In the end, Vasari’s Lives created an enduring theory about the three stages of the Renaissance, all of them leading up to the apex, which was realized in Michelangelo, Vasari’s hero and for whom Vasari was commissioned to design a final tomb. For Vasari, true art began when painters pursued realism with nature as their model. Hence, the first stage began with Cimabue and Giotto in the early fourteenth century. Then, new techniques developed and a second stage emerged, characterized by artists who looked at nature more closely and who managed “to give rules to their [use of] perspectives.”16 With his bias toward Florence, Vasari naturally touted the Florentine sculptor Donatello and painter Masaccio as bellwethers of this second epoch, and he would also trace the painterly invention of perspective to the Florentine painter Paolo Uccello, not to Piero of the hinterlands. Nevertheless, unlike any other artist mentioned in the second epoch, Vasari recognized Piero for his superior knowledge of geometry and of Euclid and, not least, because he “gave no little attention to perspective.”17 It would take a few more centuries for these superlatives to be widely acknowledged by historians of art and science in the Renaissance. Everyone in Vasari’s second epoch, meanwhile, was merely a prelude to the ultimate perfection of art, which came in the third and final stage, the time of Leonardo, Raphael, and ultimately Michelangelo.
More than any single person so far, Vasari, by writing his Lives, raised the status of artists, a profession in which he also made a living as a painter, art writer, and eventually architect. The term of his era was not artist but “artisan.” Yet Vasari broke that barrier and spoke in terms more like our modern understanding of the artist, a kind of genius who makes objects of beauty. Accordingly, he extolled the “divine Michelangelo.” At the moment when artists were finally being welcomed into the upper classes (and could almost speak to aristocratic patrons as equals), Vasari justified that seemingly divine rank. He also began a tradition of connoisseurship, the practice of interpreting, comparing, and contrasting the looks or styles of different artists.
Vasari gave fairly good, or at least sympathetic, marks to Piero. Yet thanks to Vasari as a tastemaker, it would soon be common opinion that Piero was simply too old-fashioned. After a glimmer of recognition in the Lives, Piero was pushed farther into the shadows of history. For the next several centuries, Vasari remained the primary reference point for anything said about Piero, which was not a great deal.
Fortunately for the memory of Piero, there was one more book that, by its practical success, established his name in the field of art and geometry. This was Pratica della perspettiva (1568/69) by Daniele Barbaro, a Venetian patrician, cleric, and diplomat who was active in publishing at a time when his city was a leader in the book industry. The Pratica was probably the most popular book on perspective in the sixteenth century. And in producing this book, Barbaro was apparently confronted with a choice: Would he use Albrecht Dürer of Germany as his model, or would he use Piero?
Now that book publishing was in full swing, Barbaro had a number of works by Dürer, who was Germany’s greatest graphic artist, illustrator, and advocate of the very perspective that had been rediscovered in Italy during Piero’s generation.
About the time that the French were occupying the Italian peninsula, Dürer had aspired to visit Italy and learn what he called the “secrets of perspective.”18 Northern painters had achieved a kind of realism of space in their pictures, but Dürer must have felt that the Italian approach had a deeper theoretical basis, something almost magical, even a kind of alchemy. How he learned Italian perspective remains elusive. He may have learned the techniques in 1499 in Nuremberg, where an Italian follower of Pacioli had fled the fall of Milan to the French. In turn, Dürer would speak of his proposed journey to Bologna, and if he made that trek, this too could have been a point of contact.
Whatever the route of transmission, Dürer eventually became familiar with Piero’s work. Before Dürer wrote his own book on perspective, The Painter’s Manual (1525), his notes copied Piero almost exactly. “Perspective is based on five things,” he wrote. “The first is the eye that perceives things. The second is the object seen,” and so forth.19 The day would come when Daniele Barbaro aspired to write an even more expansive book for the Italian market, and Dürer’s Painter’s Manual was a very tempting model—until he learned about Piero’s older manuscripts, apparently now available in more duplicate copies. Perhaps naturally, Barbaro turned to his fellow Italian, and in doing so acknowledged his accomplishments by name.
Barbaro was a type of Renaissance man, an amateur in mathematics, but articulate enough to prod
uce a modern edition of the Roman architect Vitruvius’s De architectura, in Italian and Latin, and to represent Venice as a diplomat. His book on perspective flowed, in fact, from his interest in Vitruvian concerns about stage or theatrical scenery; in this, Pratica della perspettiva was geared not to mathematicians, but to draftsmen and designers.
No particular method of drawing perspective was dominant in the age of Barbaro, but it was a time characterized by extravagant new directions in illusionistic painting, as perhaps seen in Venice, with its apotheosized ceilings and paintings with viewpoints at dramatic angles. Barbaro himself commissioned the famed Villa Barbaro, built by Palladio and decorated inside with illusionist murals by Veronese. But Barbaro nevertheless warned against using perspective for extreme effects alone: such excess could undercut a painting’s natural or pleasant effect, producing an effect that is “strained, dizzily steep, deformed, or awkward.”20 At another extreme in Italian experimentation were the late Renaissance “Quadraturisti,” a small school of painters who produced “ideal cities,” absent human figures and plants but excruciatingly rendered as perfectly geometrical architecture.21
With these trends as backdrop, the section on perspective in Barbaro’s Pratica nevertheless copied Piero’s plain method almost exactly. Unlike Piero, his book waxed historical and philosophical in his treatment of perspective. Whereas Piero had plunged immediately into explanations, demonstrations, and practice exercises, Barbaro cited the ancients. And, when it came to the Platonic solids, he explained that “by these [bodies] Plato signified the elements, and heaven itself, and through the secret intelligence of their forms he rose to the highest realm of the speculation on things.”22 In the book’s preface, Barbaro interjects that “Piero and the others,” by their simple formats of presentation, had pandered to “the idiots” when it came to teaching perspective, step by step, as if to schoolchildren.23 Nevertheless, Barbaro gave Piero credit for his pioneering work more than anyone else had in the nearly eight decades since his death. He brought his name to the attention of future writers and the growing audience of patrons who wanted to stock their libraries with books on various new sciences.
