Piero's Light

by Larry Witham

  Remarkably, the Pre-Raphaelites (who actually had little to do with early Renaissance painters) infused England with nostalgia for the early Renaissance, all of which boded well for Piero, but in a very roundabout way. None of the Pre-Raphaelites actually paid homage to figures such as Giotto and Masaccio, and for the most part their own work was melodramatic. By contrast, a painter like Piero was not emotional at all; rather, he was Stoic and archaic in spirit. Among the PRB members, only Edward Burne-Jones copied and admired Piero, whereas one of the Rossettis described Piero as “unrefined” in the Encyclopedia Britannica.24

  Nevertheless, for most of the English public, “pre-Raphaelite” meant early Italian Renaissance, as illustrated by the effusions of one British art dealer in Florence. He wrote home in 1854 that his stock included ample supplies of “the sort of [p]re-Raphaelite paintings now so much sought after.”25 Writing from Italy the next year, Elizabeth Rigby (now Lady Eastlake) also minced no words, saying “I am fairly bitten with all the true pre-Raphaelites,” those early Italians of “grandeur and earnestness”—and she was obviously not speaking of the “PRB” painters in London.26

  Whoever was bearing the truest image of Italian art before Raphael, it was amid this new ferment—abetted by a thriving Grand Tour and an ebullient antiquities market in Italy—that the first paintings by Piero began to reach England. Technically, the first such panel was not entirely by Piero; it probably shows the hand of his assistant. Nevertheless, this work—done for a patron in San­sepol­cro and now titled Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Angels—was sold by a Florentine dealer as an authentic Piero to Lord Walter Trevelyan and his wife during their Grand Tour in 1837. In her journal, Lady Trevelyan hinted at the modicum of familiarity the English may have had with the San­sepol­cro painter. Having just seen the Baptism in the home-town cathedral (the former abbey), she called it “very pretty” but noted that it was in worse condition than the painting bought in Florence by her husband.27 The Trevelyan purchase was effectively hidden away in a private collection, and so it would take a subsequent purchase in San­sepol­cro itself—that of the Baptism—to truly bring the authentic Piero to public light in England.

  That avenue to the public, for all early Renaissance art, would require an intervention by the British establishment in the form of the National Gallery. Founded in 1824, its collection began with Parliament’s purchase of thirty-eight paintings from John Julius Angerstein, a Russian-born merchant. After that, the national purse kept a close eye on what was bought, both in price and in type. When the gallery moved into its Trafalgar Square building in 1838, it still was a rather informal, haphazard affair. Four years later, Charles Eastlake became the supervising “keeper” of the collection, a next step in the gallery’s future prominence.

  Outside the collection, the private English inventory of medieval and Renaissance art had some impact on the public by way of specially arranged exhibits. They began with London’s “Medieval Exhibition” in 1849 and peaked with Manchester’s “Art Treasures Exhibition” in 1855. A year later, when England’s largest private store of medieval and Renaissance art, the Ralph Bernal Collection, was sold off, more artifacts went into circulation. Finally, the National Gallery had to decide its official stance on the art of Piero’s period in Italy. That moment of decision, not coincidentally, came with the appointment in 1855 of Charles Eastlake as the gallery’s first official director, a position that went along with reforms in the institution’s management.

  Before Eastlake became director, the gallery owned just four early Italian Renaissance paintings. The pertinent committee of Parliament had noted this deficit. But when it came to making choices and spending money, the National Gallery had to weather a storm of controversy. Rooted in the money question, the gallery controversy was about its role in British culture. Should the gallery instruct the public, or please the public? Instruction required less exciting works and historical breadth, whereas the masses liked to see the most famous and extravagant works (today called the “blockbuster” art exhibit). The debate came to a head in 1853 when a parliamentary committee held hearings.

  Some National Gallery trustees firmly opposed buying “antiquarian and medieval pictures,” and yet the committee went forward—or backward, as it were. “What Chaucer and Spenser are to Shakespeare and Milton, Giotto and Masaccio are to the great masters of the Florentine School,” said a final report. It was after this that Eastlake was charged with buying “good specimens of the Italian Schools, including those of the early masters.”28 Backed with a budget, he and his wife traveled throughout Italy to carry out the mandate, which suited their own tastes splendidly. From Italy they brought back works by Botticelli, Mantegna, and Bellini—and, after that, works by the medievalist Cimabue. In a collector’s coup of sorts, they obtained one panel of Uccello’s famous triptych, The Battle of San Romano, which had adorned a Medici bedroom.

  During the debates on National Gallery purchases, the Scottish collector Dennistoun was also pulled into the fray. At the 1853 hearings, he was asked to justify Protestant and liberal England spending money on old Italian works saturated in Catholic piety, questionable also for their primitive treatments and constant repetition of subject matter. Adding insult to injury, some critics noted that many of these Italian works had been done for tyrants, hardly a worthy story for a public collection. When Dennistoun defended the universality of the pictures, a retort came from one commissioner, Lord W. Graham. “But if the public taste is not prepared for these pictures, might it not be possible that the public would call them trash?” Graham asked. Dennistoun replied: “I should hope that a very brief acquaintance with those pictures would correct the public taste.”29

  Eastlake added his own enthusiasm. “There is at present what may be called a rage for very early works of art,” he told the hearing. On the Grand Tour, “there were always fine works by the early Florentines not only in galleries, but in churches and in public buildings in Italy, which were passed over” by typical Tour routes. Now, he said, the public wanted to see them in museums. “The taste is a modern one,” Eastlake argued.30

  The tastes in Italy for its works of art had always been wide, but in this era it felt the additional pride of being flocked to by European painters and travelers on the Grand Tour. Among the Italian connoisseurs, the new rage was to more accurately document the history of Renaissance art. Anyone doing this task naturally began with Vasari, and there was no more intrepid group of Vasari detectives in Italy than the Fine Arts Society (Società di Amatori delle Belle Arti). Founded in 1845 and based in Siena, it was a group project, joined by such art experts as Carlo Pini and the Dominican cleric Vincenzo Marchese. But the energy came from its two youngest members, the Milanesi brothers.

  Gaetano Milanesi was the oldest (born 1813) and, along with his younger brother Carlo (born 1816), had studied law before entering the field of interpreting antique Italian language and art. Accordingly, Gaetano took a post at the Biblioteca Comunale at Siena. As it turned out, Gaetano would emerge as a founder of modern Italian art history. He began his career mastering the history of Sienese art and then writing a modern text on the subject.

  The Fine Art Society had a larger mission, however: it decided to correct all the mistakes that could be found in Vasari’s voluminous Lives of the Artists.

  This included, of course, Vasari’s chapter on the life of Piero. The Fine Arts Society published the first volume of its annotated version of Vasari’s Lives in 1846. The society members continued probing Vasari’s accuracy by putting out journal articles with new data, and then more annotated volumes. Volume IV, published in 1848, contained the first significant additional notes to Vasari’s chapter on Piero. While not directly correcting Vasari errors, and not yet knowing of Piero’s presence in Florence in 1439, this first Milanesi edition updated new sources: it quoted Luca Pacioli, cited data divulged by the Franceschi Marini family (modern heirs to Piero), drew upon the writings of Lanzi,
and gave a few hitherto unknown dates for Piero’s works in Rimini and Urbino.31

  Eventually, Carlo and Gaetano moved permanently to Florence, where in 1852 the Grand Duke had decreed that an official State Archives be established. Carlo was hired there first, followed by Gaetano. In the meantime, Gaetano continued to follow his leads. One of them led to the archives of the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence. It was here that he found the 1439 account-book entry in which Domenico Veneziano was paid for doing frescos in the choir of the hospital’s Sant’ Egidio Church. The notation said that Piero “is with him.” With all the artists on the Milanesi plate, one more fact about Piero was not grounds to rush anything into print. It reached the printed record by way of a correspondent of the Milanesi brothers, the German collector and amateur art historian Ernst Harzen.

  In his work as an art sleuth, Harzen was most excited about his own discovery regarding Piero. At the Ambrosiana Library in Milan, he found a Latin copy of Piero’s On Perspective, a copy that Piero had illustrated. Harzen’s 1856 article on the discovery bore a headline suggesting that Pacioli’s “supposed” plagiarism was untrue. Even more significantly, Harzen announced the 1439 date found by Milanesi (who later put the date in notes to his second edition of the Lives, published in nine volumes from 1878 to 1885).32 Harzen did not make a great deal of the 1439 date. But for a small but growing band of Piero scholars, Piero’s being in Florence changed their image of the painter from San­sepol­cro. To be a Florentine painter was, in the eyes of the new connoisseurs, to have been shaped by its great figures, from Brunelleschi and Alberti to Masaccio, Fra Angelico, and Uccello.

  The new attention being given to Piero seemed to be peaking in 1858, when a number of forces conspired in his favor. The British explorer Austen Henry Layard, the discoverer of Nineveh and aficionado of Assyrian art, was praising Piero in a major article on public art education in the Quarterly Review (presumably because Piero had the archaic look of the Assyrian and Egyptian past).33 Publisher John Murray’s popular Handbook for Travelers in Central Italy was just out in a fourth edition (since 1843), mentioning even more about Piero’s works and their locations. Eastlake was again touring Italy, this time taking detailed notes on Piero and attempting (unsuccessfully) to buy the Flagellation of Christ in Urbino. In Arezzo, the first restoration of Piero’s frescos was taking place; and with the political instability of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and Florence, more European collectors and buyers than ever were in Florence to spirit away—at a goodly price, as this high-demand market dictated—as much early Italian (that is to say, pre-Raphaelite) art as possible. In a year, the Grand Duchy would be swept away, and Florence would become the temporary capital of the emerging Kingdom of Italy.

  It was into this historical maelstrom that the English museum collector John Charles Robinson, a frequent visitor to Italy in the late 1850s to buy Italian art, returned to fulfill a kind of destiny, at least in hindsight: he was to purchase Piero’s Baptism of Christ and bring it to England. As Eastlake had observed, some very good Renaissance paintings were often hidden away in churches (still the most common repository of historical religious art), though invisible to the Grand Tour, which tended to follow a beaten path to a few major cities in Italy and, once there, the most monumental of the palaces, cathedrals, and museums. Piero’s Baptism was not entirely unlucky in this, as evidenced by reports about it through the 1830s. The family of Piero heirs, the Franceschi family, had boosted the painting by having its history annotated in a family reprint of Piero’s chapter in Vasari’s Lives, and the 1832 Italian guidebook for art in the Tiber Valley, Istruzione Storica-Pittorica, noted the Baptism as among Piero’s “excellent” works in San­sepol­cro.34 But if the touring Lady Trevelyan called the Baptism “very pretty” in 1837, when Eastlake saw it in the late 1850s, situated in an eclectic altarpiece in the dimly lit cathedral, despite his growing admiration of Piero, he described the painting with an unremitting candor: it was “almost ruined by sun & damp … [with] almost colourless silvery flesh.”35

  Perhaps the managers of the cathedral of San­sepol­cro were feeling about the same way in the 1850s. They were trying to update the Gothic church with neo-baroque styles, and the vicar general had put the Baptism of Christ on the art market, first trying to sell it to the Tuscan government as a cultural legacy, but then turning to the active network of art dealers, based especially in Florence, where Robinson had his best contacts. In 1858 and 1859, Robinson was visiting Florence in search of Italian sculptures for London’s South Kensington Museum, where he was head of art collections.

  Traveling the Tuscan valleys with a fellow art buyer, Robinson had arrived in San­sepol­cro in early 1859, and, not personally being in the market for paintings, he wrote the National Gallery in London to see if they wanted to buy the Baptism. No reply came, so Robinson probably urged a wealthy collector friend in England, whose collection Robinson was shaping, to obtain the Baptism—this was the British merchant and railway director Matthew Uzielli, a member of the Burlington Fine Arts Club in London, which Robinson had helped found. Robinson successfully offered the cathedral four hundred pounds for the Baptism, a move that surely reflected his own interests more than those of Uzielli (who did not otherwise collect early Italian paintings).

  The Robinson purchase had to go through church and government channels, since it finally needed an export permit. Along the way, the local fine-arts assessor told the cathedral it was getting a very good deal in its sale. “You should be reassured and not allow this good opportunity to slip through your hands,” the assessor said.36 The new owner, Uzielli, allowed the Baptism to be exhibited in the Kensington Museum for the next two years. Then, in 1861, Uzielli put his art collection on the auction block at Christie’s in London.

  By now, Piero was known on the Italian art collectors’ circuit for his side-profile diptych of Federico and Battista Montefeltro at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, and for madonna-and-child images in general. Therefore, early Italian works of similar composition were often attributed to Piero. Six such would-be Pieros ended up in British collections in the nineteenth century, doubtless by the machinations of unscrupulous art dealers, but surely by a good deal of confusion on the authorship of early Italian paintings as well. On the collectors’ side, the motive was often simply to own an early Italian Renaissance specimen, not necessarily a Piero. Of course when Queen Elizabeth bought a painting of Duke Montefeltro, she did believe it was by Piero (though it was actually by Justus of Ghent), as did the National Gallery believe (wrongly) it had real Pieros when it bought two side-profile paintings of Italian ladies. The Louvre bought two inauthentic Pieros as well.37

  The rarity of an authentic Piero was becoming evident in the second half of the nineteenth century, and it was perhaps this realization that fixated English attention on a single work that had generated a good deal of ambivalence, namely Piero’s Adoration of the Child (The Nativity). Piero’s heirs had put this panel painting on the market through a Florence dealer in 1859, the year Robinson had traveled through there to purchase the Baptism of Christ. Before Robinson fled Italy in that hour of political overthrow, he was offered the Nativity for seventy pounds, but found it to be in too ruined a state. “It was, in fact, the merest wreck and shadow of a picture—a thing of the past, ruined beyond all redemption,” he recalled fifteen years later, somewhat chastened for not buying it as the Italian revolution boiled over. “Nevertheless, it was a venerable relic, and it possessed in certain respects special interest and importance, and the only thing to be done with it was to leave it untouched, inasmuch as the particular interest which still attached to it would be completely destroyed by any attempt to ‘restore’—in other words, to ‘repaint’—the picture.”38

  For better or worse, however, that sort of repainting is exactly what would happen to the Nativity when the eccentric British collector Alexander Barker, the son of a wealthy bootmaker in London, obtained the work in 1861, giving it a home in a privat
e English collection. Barker’s having the panel touched up with paint was one of the great “restoration” controversies of that time. The controversy was compounded when, at the auction of the Barker collection in 1874, the National Gallery was willing to pay the extraordinary price of 2,415 pounds to obtain the work, and this at the urging of the once and future Tory prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli. (The National Gallery removed all the restoration painting, and in 1888 it put on display as authentic an original of the work as possible.)39

  As Barker was directing his agent to purchase Piero’s Nativity in Florence in 1861, Charles Eastlake—head of the National Gallery—was in London turning his attention once again to Piero’s Baptism of Christ, which was going on the auction block at Christie’s to liquidate the late owner Uzielli’s collection. Despite Eastlake’s earlier low opinion of the Baptism—perhaps because he had been yearning to buy The Flagellation of Christ from its Urbino owners at the time—he began to see the Baptism differently, having gained a good deal of advance notice that it was coming up at auction. For six months he anguished over whether to buy the Baptism, for it was in “a very ruined state” (a choice of words that today’s National Gallery experts categorize as exaggerated).40 Eastlake further wondered whether he should buy it for his own collection, or for the National Gallery. On April 13, 1861 he bid for the painting, and took it home—to the National Gallery.