by Larry Witham
The brilliant Newton had nevertheless opened the modern debate on the nature of light. Was it a wave, or a particle? It was no longer considered something that had to be strictly divine or spiritual. Relying on the Renaissance study of the harmonics of music, Newton used hearing and sound waves as an analogy for vision. It was known that the proportional lengths of taut strings produced scales of sound, each with distinct vibrations. Newton hypothesized that light, too, is a vibration, for, in the case of hearing, “Vibrations of the Air, according to their several bignesses, excite sensations of several sounds.” Light and its colors are also vibrations, Newton proposed. These wavy rays of light “are not colored,” but in them is “a certain Power and Disposition to stir up a Sensation of this or that Color.” This was akin to how the “sound in a Bell or musical String, or other sounding body, is nothing but a trembling Motion.”45
Newton eventually stepped back from his convictions about waves in the face of one compelling fact: light did not bend around corners as did sound. On the proverbial fence, he ended with a strong suggestion that light was therefore a corpuscle or particle that traveled in straight lines. Different colors, he said, might result from different masses in the particles. Newton left these two options—the wave and the particle—on the table in his final writing. But in an age when corpuscular theory was growing in popularity, the advocates of ancient Greek “atomism” insisted that Newton favored light as a hard particle. Furthermore, Newton’s new mathematical physics of gravity had suggested a machine-like universe, and so other natural philosophers (exceedingly tired of Aristotle, and perhaps of Plato, too) viewed hard little particles as fitting that mechanical picture splendidly. Actually, Newton was a bit of a mystic on the side, and he was reticent about the world as a machine. But in the ebullient days of the Enlightenment and deism, when a God of the clockwork universe had appeal, others would be eager to attach his name to this clockwork belief.
Under this new mechanistic view of the Enlightenment, the question of beauty itself would be subjected to a new debate, both in the human sciences and in art history. The classical ideal of Beauty, traced to Platonism and revived in the Renaissance, continued to dominate general opinion—that is, Beauty is proportion and brilliance, a quality both metaphysical and mathematical. The Newtonian era, however, opened the way for mechanistic skepticism about what seemed to be pure mysticism about the sources of Beauty. In this debate, the line was drawn between two parties. One was the “innate” school, which located the sense of universal beauty in the spiritual mind; the other was the empirical school, which argued that “opinions” about perceived beauty were simply learned from external physical experiences, prejudiced this way and that, person by person.
The clash of these two outlooks was personified in a friendship between two English thinkers, the doctor and philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) and his student, the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper (1671–1713). Locke personified the new empiricism, while Shaftesbury, a popular writer of his age, an implicit Platonism. Both were products of the age of Newton, who invited Locke to Cambridge on occasion. Locke in turn oversaw the young Shaftesbury’s education. Shaftesbury would finally reject Locke’s argument in the Essay on Human Understanding (1690) that there were no “innate” ideas in the mind, though they remained good friends.
Shaftesbury believed that there is a higher ideal of beauty, which existed in a metaphysical essence. Arguing that the sense of beauty is innate, he defined it as a perfect unity of parts: “particulars … must yield to the general Design.”46 Shaftesbury also reasserted a Platonist psychology: Beauty was certainly a pleasure, but primarily a mental pleasure. From that point of view, a sense of beauty arises in a person who is in a disinterested state of mind. That is, the pleasure has nothing to do with self-interest, as Shaftesbury illustrated in a story about the wealth connoted by owning a metal coin. This coin’s beauty is not in its metal, but is traced to the mind of its designer, and thus to the coin-maker’s idea of beauty. Once this realm of ideas is reached, a final sense of beauty relates to something universal, the Platonic ideal, “the Principle of Beauty.” This is the essence that can make coins beautiful.47
Shaftesbury’s belief in Platonic Beauty was not persuasive to Locke, of course. Over time, Locke’s anti-innate theory of beauty has been taken to be the utter antithesis of Platonism. Actually, and oddly enough, Locke himself was a type of Platonist. This is evident both in his Essay on Human Understanding’s discussion of the thinking action of the “soul,” and in his treatise defending Christian ideas about providence. Often forgotten, Locke believed that after the Fall of Man, human mental operations had been naturalized. Every human being since has been born with a mind that is a blank slate (tabula rasa). It has no innate ideas, let alone Platonic or divine memories. Nonetheless, Locke suggested that the intellect can indeed ascend to a higher mental clarity, a concept that is parallel to positions in Plato’s dialogues. Locke admitted to higher powers of intuition, those having “no need of Reasoning, but that are known by a superior, and higher Degree of Evidence” and that give people immediate and true knowledge.48
However, in a fast-moving age of science, Locke’s psychology was seized upon by others to argue for a pure materialism of the mind. For the debate on beauty, Locke’s writings did support the belief that judgments about what is beautiful are learned and therefore relative. In this he was joined by the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–76), who came a generation later. Summarizing the dominant conclusion of that age, Hume said that judgments of beauty are indeed relative, but that some judges are better by their experiences and education: they can tell a society what is in fact beautiful.
As the English made this contribution, the Enlightenment was stirring another type of debate in Germany: this was a debate on the very nature of art history, or the practical appreciation of the particular “beauty” of arts from different countries. At the time, the presumption was that art history was essentially about Italy, an idea made evident by the popularity of the Grand Tour of that country. The story of the Italian Renaissance provided a kind of gold standard for chronicling art history; and, in addition, Italy was still Europe’s best preserve of antiquity, a showcase of surviving Greek art, especially as it was imitated and emulated in Roman sculpture, painting, and architecture. This classical allure of Italy was illustrated by events in 1755. In that year, the German historian Johann Winckelmann moved permanently to Rome to explore the roots of classicism. From that ancient baseline, his intention was no less than “to trace the history of art.”49
Giorgio Vasari had done this for 250 years of Italian art. But now Winckelmann would make it a global project. “We have enough lives of painters,” he said.
To my mind it would be much more useful to begin replacing them with entire histories of art… . A history of art should treat the origin, growth, mutation, and decline of a tradition alongside its presentation of the various styles of nations, ages, and artists—all of this, as much as is possible, must be extracted from the surviving works of antiquity.50
With this assertion, Winckelmann established Greek art as a universal standard. Thus was born traditional Western art history: moving from the Greeks through each culture, marking the origin, high point, and then decline into decadence. Vasari had created a similar periodization, but for Italy alone. Vasari had also ended at a high point, never suggesting that Italian art had declined, as Winckelmann would by pointing to the late baroque and rococo. By his approach, Winckelmann freed art history from its normal context of princes, patrons, and local patriotism. He viewed it as a historical process, a story of the rise and fall and recovery of styles, not just a survey of art collections of one royal court or another. “He was soon to hurdle over particulars with his ideal of an entire ‘history of art,’” wrote Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1805), the admiring German poet. “Like a second Columbus, he discovered a long-heralded, long-dreamed-of—or, rather, once known and
long-forgotten—land.”51 For Winckelmann, great art everywhere had a quality of “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur.” This was a somewhat unequivocal stance, and it was solidified by his unrivaled opus, History of Ancient Art, published in 1764.52
The urge to write art history had now been unleashed. If Winckelmann heralded the classical age of the Greeks, it was an Italian who gave pride of place to the medieval period of the arts. This was Luigi Lanzi (1732–1810). In an age still emerging from patriotic art history, Lanzi did try to write more broadly. His masterpiece, however, was History of Italian Art. Covering Italy in such breadth and depth, Lanzi resurrected the story of Piero.
Lanzi had been a young Jesuit when that religious order was dissolved by the papacy in 1773, so he found refuge in a different profession: he became a court scholar of antiquities for Grand Duke Leopold of Florence, investigating and writing on the Italian past, especially the Etruscans. This allowed him to canvass the country and see its paintings as well. The result was his History, published in 1795. Like Winckelmann, Lanzi innovated. Rather than present a medley of artists, he identified the most “celebrated painters” as a way to survey various schools of style and influence. And, invariably, he began with Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael. “Those artists were the ornaments of the Florentine and Roman schools, from which I proceed to two others, the Sienese and Neapolitan,” said Lanzi, continuing down in his list of five major schools, which in the end required three hefty volumes.
I first give a general character of each school; I then distinguish it into three, four, or more epochs, according as its style underwent changes with the change of taste, in the same way that the eras of civil history are deduced from revolutions in governments, or other remarkable events… . A few celebrated painters, who have swayed the public taste, and given a new tone to the art, are placed at the head of each epoch.53
In Lanzi’s quest to find celebrated painters as fountainheads, he could not identify such a master who had taught Piero, suggesting quite accurately that “under the guidance of obscure masters he raised himself, by his own genius, to the high degree of fame he enjoyed.” Fitting somewhere in the broad Florentine/Roman school, Piero was “one of the most memorable painters of this age” and (according to Vasari, he says) “made himself master of the principles of mathematics, and he rose to great eminence both in art and science.” After that, Lanzi gave at least one reason why Piero himself could not be placed at the apex of a school: his work often had the feeling of a “rude sketch of that style which was ameliorated by P. Perugino and perfected by Raphael.”54
Reading this comment in the most positive light, Lanzi was almost suggesting that Piero had influenced—or certainly anticipated—someone like Raphael. This was just one of the Lanzi highlights in Piero’s legacy. His superlatives for Piero would be adopted by future interpreters: Piero’s distinctive use of light, the Greek quality of his figures, and his influences on Raphael, Bramante, and north Italian painting. And of course there was always Piero’s seminal use of perspective:
The art of perspective, the principles of which he was, as some affirm, the first among Italians to develope and to cultivate, was much indebted to him; and painting owed much to his example of imitating the effects of light, in marking correctly the muscles of the naked figure [and] in the study of drapery… . On examining the style of Bramante and his Milanese contemporaries, I have often thought that they derived some light from Pietro, for he painted in Urbino, where Bramante studied, and afterwards executed many works in Rome, where Bramantino came and was employed by Nicholas V.55
Having seen the evolution of painting in the northern schools, from Milan to Ferrara, Lanzi said it revealed the presence of Piero, “from whom perspective in Italy may truly be said to have dated its improvement.”56 Although there were many mediocre painters in Ferrara, “others attained greater celebrity, having modernized their style in some degree, after the example, as I incline to think, of two foreigners. One of these was Piero della Francesca, invited to Ferrara to paint in the palace.”57
In his quest to write a “general historical narrative,” indeed a fairly concise “compendium” for his day, Lanzi put aside many traits of past art history, such as unverifiable gossip about individual artists and, as he said, the style of “so much verbosity by Vasari.” Despite Vasari’s many errors with dates in his Lives, Lanzi said, his treatment of Piero should be taken as reliable enough.58 An inveterate traveler himself, Lanzi frequently noted how painters could move to different cities in a few days, giving an empirical sense of how the influence of painting styles spread.
Unavoidably, Lanzi added his own omissions and misnomers to the story of Piero. He perpetuated several erroneous dates, mishandled the Rimini frescos, and basically overlooked Piero’s works in Sansepolcro (and excusably so, perhaps, because Piero’s dramatic Resurrection fresco at Sansepolcro’s city hall had been whitewashed over). In a common mistake over the centuries, Lanzi at times confused Piero with another artist who excelled in perspective, the Dominican Fra Carnevale, a native of Urbino. Art history was still in search of its facts, and some would prove unattainable (or be happily rediscovered) as the centuries passed. Looking to the future, Lanzi said art history was now a topic for the edification of general readers in a modern age. “The history of painting is the basis of connoisseurship,” Lanzi said. For his renown as expositor of Italy’s art heritage, he was buried next to Michelangelo in the Santa Croce Church in Florence.59
The publication of Lanzi’s History a few years after the French Revolution of 1789 made it a benchmark in the transition from the Enlightenment to the age of romanticism, a transition into the nineteenth century that would deal Piero a new fate. Among art historians, he would no longer be ignored. Modern science, too, would turn its attention to questions of art and beauty, catching Piero in its net as well. Piero probably would not have objected to these developments, for it was he who had endorsed painting as a “true science.” The Platonist ethos of Piero’s Renaissance age had made its mark, perhaps, in the rise of a new astronomy and emphasis on mathematics. Science would shed its Christian and Platonist background, however, and be caught up in the forces of secular ideology. A new challenge lay ahead. If Piero’s art evoked the idea of a transcendent mind—with all its implications for art and religion—could that belief survive the rise of philosophical and scientific materialism?
For the time being, however, the nineteenth century would open with Napoleon’s war on Europe, delaying some of these philosophical debates for later. What the Napoleonic conflict did in the meantime was actually spread more knowledge of Italian art. By wartime seizure, early Renaissance paintings began to reach France, and in the wartime chaos of the free market this art was sent along to England as well. As a consequence, the art of Piero began to cross national borders for the first time.
CHAPTER 8
Piero Rediscovered
During the Napoleonic Wars, the French armies scoured Italy and brought back cartloads of art to Paris, where it was installed in the Louvre as a testament to France’s continental hegemony. The road back to Paris passed through Milan. In that city, Napoleon had turned the Austrian royal Brera Academy into a half-way station to accumulate the best of the art in north and central Italy. In 1811, Piero’s altarpiece of the kneeling Federico da Montefeltro arrived at the Brera, unloaded by the French who had pilfered it from Urbino. A few years earlier, in 1807, the French had closed down the Sansepolcro church that held Piero’s Baptism.1 That painting, overlooked by the Francophone art raiders because of its poor repair, was moved to the abbey, scene of Piero’s tomb. It escaped the fate of Piero’s frescos at Arezzo, which were subjected to target practice, here and there, by French soldiers.
One nation that watched these cultural violations was England, and its hatred of Napoleon gave it a new sympathy, albeit with a Protestant tinge, for the land of the papacy.2 Along with the political sympathy came
a renewed British cultural taste for Italy, a taste that built upon past precedents, including opera, Palladian architecture, and the Grand Tour. The Tour’s main destination had long been Rome, a city of ancient ruins, and to get there British travelers had enjoyed the sublimity of an “agreeable kind of horror” crossing the Alps to begin their journey through Italian cities and landscapes.3
Modern British appreciation of Italian painting had its history as well, and a good place to start would be 1749, the year that the English portrait painter Joshua Reynolds arrived in Rome to study and copy the Italian masters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Having discovered Michelangelo and Raphael, he returned to England advocating them above all others, espousing for his own nation a similar “grand manner” in painting. When Reynolds became head of the Royal Academy of Arts at its founding (1768), he sent students to Rome to copy High Renaissance works. His legacy established in England a traditional “academy” of art instruction. It was a model of High Renaissance and neoclassical taste, and it was against this tradition, in the tumultuous nineteenth century, that a group of young artists would rebel, using the term “Pre-Raphaelite” (and “Sir Sloshua” Reynolds) as a slogan.
Before this in-house British art rebellion was afoot, the Napoleonic Wars had virtually ended the Grand Tours. Another consequence of the wars, ironic to be sure, was to light a fire under the market for Renaissance art. Knowing that the French invaders would confiscate a wide variety of valuables, many Italian families, churches, and clergy began selling off their works of art. European collectors knew the game well enough. During the French Revolution, English collectors purchased a good deal of French heritage that was being liquidated rapidly by a crumbling aristocracy. Now eyes were set on Italy. Collectors used brokers to buy directly from Italy; and whenever the English captured a French contingent, or sequestered a French ship, the caches of stolen Italian art were taken back to London, only some of which was returned to Italy in the end.
