Piero's Light

by Larry Witham

  After the war, the British interest in things Italian reached new heights. The fascination ranged from medieval tales to histories of the Roman Empire. The enthusiasm lasted for more than twenty years. It revived the Grand Tour, to the point that British travel books on Italy reached record numbers. Inevitably, a number of British literary figures headed for the land of Dante and Michelangelo. In 1816, George Byron, the romantic poet, fled there (from his marriage), followed by Shelley, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. England’s rising new star in painting, Joseph Turner, first set foot in Italy in 1819. In all this, the stage was being set for Piero’s name to reach the English-speaking world.

  For the history of early Italian painting, Vasari’s Lives of the Artists was still the primary sourcebook. By the 1830s it had been translated into German, and the Italian version was receiving updates that added notes on Piero and more clarity on the list of his works, although some confusion still prevailed. Among Italian art historians especially, the quest was to expand on Vasari by confirming, correcting, or improving his data on all his subjects. New data on Piero in particular was taking centuries to resurface. It was not until 1822, for example, that the first modern discovery was made of a concrete date in his life: the archives of Urbino disclosed a document showing that Piero had arrived there in 1469 to consider an altarpiece commission.4 More information dribbled out, but at a glacial pace. In the 1830s, when Piero’s descendants in San­sepol­cro, the Franceschi Marini family, had his “life” from Vasari’s Lives specially printed, the annotations noted that some of his old manuscripts were still held in the ancestral library (alas, only to disappear again, apparently, into the voracious antique-manuscript market).5

  For non-specialists in the 1830s, Piero began to show up in Italian art guides, if just barely. One of the first was for the Tiber Valley (Istruzione Storica-Pittorica), a work by the amateur historian and lawyer Giacomo Mancini, who noted Piero’s “excellent” works in San­sepol­cro.6 Still, for foreign travelers in Italy, it was not exactly easy to discover Piero. Not being a Florentine painter, he did not get much ink in the Grand Tour guide­books. It was still Arezzo that put him on the map. This was illustrated by one popular French work, Historical, Literary, and Artistical Travels in Italy (1831), which cited his madonna painting in Arezzo but, meanwhile, presumed that Piero was “a great Florentine artist … who lost his sight at the age of thirty-four.”7 The story of early blindness, while dramatic for a great artist, was one of the erroneous tidbits in Vasari’s Lives, and now greatly exaggerated. Piero may have finally lost his sight, but hardly at a young age, proved by his writing of his own will at about age seventy-five.

  If ordinary tourists were still essentially blind to Piero, the painters of Europe were opening their eyes to him—and to much else from the early Renaissance. Probably driven by the romanticism of that era, artist colonies had begun to gather in romanticized Italy, where they found time to study and copy the Italians of the past. In an altruistic vein, some painters began to worry about the deterioration of many great frescos, including Piero’s in Arezzo. Reportedly, this is what sent the Frenchman Antoine Ramboux to Arezzo, at points between 1816 and 1842, to paint a duo of watercolor replicas from the walls. One was a true-cross scene and the other a battle scene. These Ramboux copies provided the last record of the frescos’ rich color and detail before a period of further deterioration set in at the centuries-old church.

  As the gathering of artist colonies testified, young painters on the Continent had long viewed Rome as a place of pilgrimage, especially in the nineteenth-century age of romanticism. No colonizing group would become more significant (in hindsight) than a gaggle of German painters belittled by their critics as “the Nazarenes” for their desire to fuse romanticism and Christian art. Some of them lived a somewhat monastic life, taking up in an abandoned monastery in Rome. They experimented with frescos, the lost art of the early Renaissance. From Austria and Germany, these young painters were rebelling against the same kind of neo-classicism that had been established in France and England, and from them would emerge one of Europe’s most significant chroniclers of the visual arts, the German painter Johann David Passavant (1787–1861). Still an unknown quantity at the time, Passavant would eventually cast new light on early Italian painting and on Piero as well.

  Passavant would put down his brushes to become an art scholar, indeed a developer of several genres—scholarly biography, travelogue, and reference book—that would shape art writing. He retained his Nazarene aesthetic, which had much in common with early Italian religious painting. As a kind of archetype of the cross-cultural artist, he lived and worked in Paris, Rome, London, and finally Frankfurt, cross-fertilizing information among the new generation of connoisseurs. For example, in 1833 he published a memoir of his visit to England’s art and collections, which was put into English three years later as Tour of a German Artist in England, translated by the English Germanophile Elizabeth Rigby (of whom more later).

  Italy, however, was the place where Passavant had wedded his artistic soul. He had made his first of many visits to Florence and Rome around 1817, and returned to Italy in the 1830s to offer what the Germans were doing best, a rigorous form of scholarship, which he now applied to the first authoritative biography of Raphael, “the greatest genius of modern painting.”8 The Passavant volume was published in 1839, and the result was to throw more light on Urbino, still a storehouse of information related to Piero. Up until then, German art historians had tended to see Piero as a mere student of an otherwise notable school of early Italian painters at Padua.9 Passavant’s volume began to correct that impression in the German-speaking world. His index of painters who had worked in Raphael’s home town itemized all the currently known facts on Piero’s life.

  Much that was in common with the Nazarene romanticism had been catching on in England in the meantime. One manifestation was the surprising decision of Parliament in 1835 to decorate the new Palace of Westminster with frescos, shades of early Italy. For everyone the great Raphael, willing or not, was becoming a kind of reference point in the debate over art styles that England should adopt or appreciate. Thus was born the term “pre-Raphaelite,” a kind of umbrella phrase for all early Italian styles, although it became best known when the young painters used it as a slogan of rebellion against High Renaissance academicism.

  Passavant also played a role in making Raphael a touchstone for the English, and in inspiring a British search for things “pre” Raphael. Viewed as a kind of trigger, Passavant’s biography of Raphael would galvanize three up-and-coming people who would shape British art tastes in the Victorian era. They were Elizabeth Rigby, her future husband Charles Eastlake, and the Scottish art collector James Dennistoun. Together, these three Renaissance aficionados (and two or three other enthusiasts in England, to be sure) would revive British interest in early—so-called primitive—Italian art, and thus in Piero as well.10 Their attentiveness to Passavant also revealed a shift of British cultural interest for Italy to things German, and it came for a very good reason: in 1840, Queen Victoria would marry the German-born Prince Albert.

  As the Victorian era began, Eastlake was destined to be one of England’s most important figures in the arts. He was perhaps more conversant with the historical art of Italy than anyone else in Britain.11 He was also handmaiden to a small, but historically important, revival of Piero’s legacy. This began in 1840 when he wrote a review of Passavant’s biography of Raphael, taking it as an opportunity to call Piero “one of the most accomplished painters of his time,” which was probably a first-ever mention in an English typeface.12

  Such a comment on Piero had required Eastlake’s own familiarity with early Italian works by dint of his travels on the peninsula. As a young painter, he had been eyewitness to some of the events of the Napoleonic Wars. Having seen the captured Napoleon embark on a prison ship for exile on St. Helena, he painted that scene to some acclaim. Like many gifted painters, he transplanted himse
lf to Italy, where he relished “a union of History and Land­scape.” He especially relished “the retirement, quiet, and the cheapness of Rome,” where he essentially lived for most of the next fourteen years.13 Eastlake became a host to other English on the Grand Tour and was elected, young as he was, to the Royal Academy of Arts, later being its president. He wrote articles on Dante and painted such romanticism-era topics as Byron’s Dream (1827). And he must have seen something of Piero’s works either in Arezzo, San­sepol­cro, Urbino, or Florence, where the Montefeltro diptych was displayed in the Uffizi Gallery. About a decade after he returned to London, Eastlake was made secretary of the government’s Fine Arts Commission. That was in 1841. Soon after, he also became “keeper” of a government art collection, the National Gallery.

  Despite his roots in Italian art, Eastlake had met many German painters and art scholars, and he watched the art literature in Germany closely. His marriage to Elizabeth Rigby, a notable translator of German, opened the way for their teamwork on several Germanophile publishing projects on the history of art. They began with an English translation of the 1810 work by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Theory of Color, translated by Elizabeth and annotated with her husband’s commentary.14 In this project, Charles Eastlake thought of himself as being like the Italian humanist Portius, who had translated Aristotle’s Treatise on Colors for the Medici. The Eastlakes quickly moved to something more ambitious: the translation of the modern German school of art history’s leading work, the multi-volume Handbook of the History of Painting. Written by Franz Kugler, it was a comprehensive look at world art far surpassing the offerings of Winckelmann. When the Eastlakes published the work in 1841, it was a milestone in art-historical translation. By contrast, Giorgio Vasari’s massive Lives of the Artists would not be put into English and published in London until 1850.15

  Kugler was well worth the trouble of translating, of course. He was a product of the Berlin school of historical writing. That academic school was led by Leopold von Ranke, a pioneer of the so-called scientific methods of history, relying on critical use of documents and hoping, as Ranke said, “simply to show how it really was.”16 Alongside Ranke was Kugler (1800–58), who tried to achieve the same scientific objectivity for the history of art. Kugler began publishing his multi-volume Handbook in 1837. Winckelmann had made Greece the measure of art; in contrast, Kugler set down the much-imitated format of an all-purpose descriptive art history of the entire world, though still focused on Europe, which was his publishing market.

  A man of his age, a time of German romanticism, Kugler wrote extensively on the medieval period in Italy. He gave similarly ample coverage to the early Renaissance and, like Lanzi, compared Piero to the styles of other painters, weaving him more densely into his time. Still, his coverage of Piero was short and bland. Eastlake tried to make up for this, if only in footnotes. In the English translation of the Handbook, he opined regarding Kugler’s neglect of the San­sepol­cran: “Considering the claims of some painters in the author’s [Kugler’s] catalogue, perhaps Piero della Fran­cesca deserved more honourable mention. His frescos at Arezzo, so highly extolled by Vasari, are now almost ruined; but at Borgo S. Sepolcro, his native place, several of his works still exist.”17 Revealing his traveler’s knowledge of Tuscany, Eastlake said that Piero’s best painting was the Resurrection, and though he did not name it, he offered the homely fact that it was on display in San­sepol­cro’s old city hall, where some rooms seconded also as a church pawn shop (the ubiquitous Monte di Pietá, present at the grass roots across Italy).

  Eastlake’s book review of Passavant a year earlier was still having an effect, like an echo. Reading the review, James Dennistoun of Glasgow had been galvanized to uncover the true story of Urbino, the birthplace of Raphael. This inexorably led him to Piero as well. A Scottish person of means, Dennistoun had taken his first Grand Tour in 1825. In the 1830s, he began a twelve-year excursion across Europe, spending winters in Rome and summers touring Italy and Germany, researching literature and looking at the monuments of art. Then, after Eastlake’s book review alerted him to the Passavant volume, Dennistoun was launched on his mission in life: to write a book on the rulers of Urbino. During a total of six years in Italy, Dennistoun traveled to Urbino three times. There he collected everything that was known of the Montefeltro dynasty. A good deal of his book was written while in Italy. On his return home to Glasgow in 1847, he completed his authoritative Memoirs of the Dukes of Urbino, published in 1851.

  With the Urbino glimmer in his eye, Dennistoun—a “humble pioneer” in his research—had both Vasari and Lanzi as guides, including on the topic of Piero, and he openly concluded that Vasari had gotten the whole story of Piero off on the wrong foot, coming up short on Piero’s importance, since Piero “ranks high among the reformers of painting.”18 On this, Dennistoun was already receiving pro-Piero signals beyond Eastlake’s praise. His friend and fellow Scot collector, Alexander Lindsay, who was leading a movement for Christian appreciation of early Italian art, first saw Piero by way of the Arezzo frescos in 1842; at that time, Lindsay wrote home that Piero was “totally unknown and under­appreciated by modern historians and alas!”19 Over time, Lindsay, too, would become an advocate of Piero (and indeed, Dennistoun dedicated his Urbino book to his fellow Scot).

  Dennistoun’s story of the Urbino dynasty paid full attention to its patronage of artists. Perhaps following Lanzi, he further argued that Raphael must have learned from Piero, and even competed to outdo his works, adopting similarities to Piero’s composition and use of chiaroscuro. He reminded readers that Piero’s Flagellation was in the Urbino cathedral, and provided new information on some of the popular interpretations of its meaning. And perhaps for the first time in memory, he told an English-speaking audience of Piero’s fresco of the kneeling Sigismondo Malatesta in Rimini, while also warning of the otherwise impressive Arezzo frescos as being “mere wrecks” with “menacing cracks.”20 Such comments abroad probably helped prompt the first modern restoration of the frescos by Italian officials in 1858, and further prompted copyists to go see them before they were long gone, victims of time, the weather, and neglect.

  As another superlative, Dennistoun was the first to report that one of Piero’s original manuscripts of Five Regular Solids existed in the Urbino library. He recited parts of Piero’s dedication to Duke Guidobaldo Montefeltro, the last of the family line. Dennistoun thus treated English readers to the first flavor of Piero’s humanity: Piero called himself “a rude and unpolished peasant,” but then declared his “novelty” as better than Euclid, and then finally confessed that his old mind was going.21 This was a far less splendid voice, of course, than the way Michelangelo’s utterances were immortalized in his letters and poetry, or the way Leonardo exalted himself in his voluminous scattered notes. In the midst of their celebrity, Dennistoun had nevertheless managed to let people hear Piero speak.

  Writing on the Urbino dynasties, Dennistoun corrected some errors in Vasari’s Lives and introduced a few new ones regarding Piero. But his literary labors emerged as the first in English to extensively praise Piero as the painter of “perspective and light.”22

  As English knowledge of Italian art and literature was reaching an apogee in the decades after Napoleon was gone, the brightest Renaissance lights continued to be figures such as Michelangelo and Raphael. They were High Renaissance giants, and it was going to require a detour around them for the English to notice earlier Renaissance art: the so-called “primitives.”

  In a romantic age that was looking for rebellions against aristocratic classicism, the so-called Nazarenes were among the first to hark back to the early Italian aesthetic, and poets and writers were soon to follow. If the German term “Nazarene” began as a slur against a group of apparently foggy-headed romantic art students who fled the academy in Vienna, the English term “pre-Raphaelite” would have less clear origins. Whatever informal use it had previously had, it was formalized in 1849 when a group of youn
g painters, some at the Royal Academy, met as the secret Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

  This romanticized act of looking back to a time before Raphael had also been imported by way of Italian expatriates. They had fought Napoleon and other European dictators, and on arrival in London they earned a storied place among exponents of English liberalism and the study of Italian arts and letters. At the forefront of this importation was the Rossetti family. The father, Gabriele Rossetti, had arrived in England in 1824. He taught Italian and extolled its literature, and his British-born children, Christina the poet and Dante the painter, carried it deeper into English culture. When the “Revolutions of 1848” stirred across Europe, and the Chartist movement of workers’ voting rights was revived in England, some young artists also felt the need to throw off the old order, and thus was born the insurgent gathering of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Three of the younger Rossettis and some Royal Academy students made their secret pledge to the cause in a London living room, and then cryptically went public at a Royal Academy exhibit, each putting the initials “PRB” at the bottoms of the paintings along with the artist’s signature.

  As perhaps England’s first real avant-garde movement in the arts, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a small affair. The more successful painters among them did indeed pioneer a distinctive style, somewhat like the early Italians, a style that one expert aptly describes as “minute description of detail, a luminous palette of bright colors that recalls the tempera paint used by medieval artists, and subject matter of a noble, religious, or moralizing nature.”23 A literary branch of the movement also mixed evocation of Dante Alighieri—whose divine comedy tales from the Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise were being reworked in paintings as well—with current English romantic poetry.