Piero's Light

by Larry Witham

  It was placed in a gold-painted Renaissance-style frame. The painting, done with tempera on a poplar panel, had suffered all the normal trials of antique art, from splitting wood to discoloration, fading, and spots of erosion or flaking. Opinions of its quality varied, from those who said it was hard to enjoy due to its wear and tear, to others who delighted in its combined antiquity and luminosity. Nevertheless, as the years passed, it grew in familiarity and popularity with the English public who saw it at the National Gallery. It has been said that up to the twenty-first century, Piero’s Baptism has been a visiting public’s favorite at the gallery. As Eastlake had hoped, “The taste [became] a modern one.”

  The broader nineteenth-century philosophical debate over tastes in art and what constituted beauty was a different matter entirely. If a British parliamentarian could worry publicly that early Italian works of art might look like “trash” to the public, how was a modern culture to evaluate the nature of beauty? Which kinds of art achieved that goal? Do Piero’s paintings possess a quality known as beauty, even an ideal Beauty, and why or why not?

  Thanks to the British, this topic for works of art in general had been in turmoil for some time. During the Enlightenment, the likes of Shaftesbury, Locke, and Hume had laid out the two opposite possibilities: either essential beauty had a Platonic origin and was captured by an innate quality in the mind (Shaftesbury); or, alternatively, beauty was a matter of learned opinion (Locke), although some people can be public judges of true beauty based on a superior sensibility and training (Hume).

  When such a knotty English debate reached the Prussian philosophers, steeped as they were in the Platonism, idealism, and rationalism of the early Enlightenment, it was bound to produce a reaction of some consequence. This came in the work of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). From his outpost at Königsberg University, hard by the Baltic Sea (Prussia’s old capital, and now part of Russia), Kant wrote a benchmark work for modern debates on the judgment of beauty, which he, too, called the judgment of taste.

  Once a follower of pure rationalism—the belief that things can ultimately be proved with reason—Kant was awakened from those “dogmatic slumbers” by the radical skepticism of Hume, who said ultimate causes of things could not be proven by reason, or even known, and that humans operate primarily on passions and appetites, not logic. Although Kant jettisoned his earlier faith in pure reason in the face of Hume’s challenge, pure skepticism would be going too far for this truth-seeking German thinker.41 He wanted to find a middle way, recognizing the limits of knowledge yet giving the mind the power to know what is real. Judgments of beauty face the same dilemma, Kant said, so he wrote his Critique of Judgment (1790) to suggest how beauty could nevertheless be known. First of all, Kant defines the beautiful as an “object of an entirely disinterested satisfaction” (not too different from Shaftesbury).42 After that, Kant applies his theory about the categories of the human mind to explain how beauty is judged.

  In his wider philosophy, Kant said that the mind has a somewhat mysterious power to put sensory data into categories. His prime example is the mind’s ability to organize time and space, and he goes further to explain that the mind also has the ability to make scientific, moral, and utilitarian judgments (these are all things that don’t come from the senses, so must originate in a quality of the mind). In this, Kant is not too different from the way Nicholas of Cusa said the mind creates “conjectures” to organize the data of the world, since, as Kant acknowledges, ultimate reality (the “thing in itself”) eludes the power of reason. Kant famously applied this to traditional theological questions, arriving at the conclusion that religion was a matter of “practical” reason—it was morally helpful and useful—but in all ultimate questions about God, immortality, and the cause of the world, logic fell into contradictions. In the end, Kant said, he had to “deny knowledge in order to leave room for faith.”43

  Now, at the end of his career, Kant offered an explanation of how the mental category of beauty, or aesthetic judgment, seems to work in human beings. Parallel to his argument that a beautiful thing provides “disinterested satisfaction,” he added that such things in themselves possess the strange quality of “purposiveness without purpose.” This idea is essentially captured in the latter-day slogan “Art for art’s sake.” From this point, however, Kant seems to say that ultimately, beauty must be a matter of individual judgment, since nobody can rationally list its qualities. In common parlance, this is “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Every mind is free to arrive at its own opinion on beauty, Kant asserted. This is contrary, of course, to all the classical definitions of beauty, which have said it is characterized by flawlessness, proportion, brilliance, a unity of parts, and other such criteria.44

  At this point, however, Kant proposed a seeming contradiction: despite the ability of individuals to hold diverse judgments on beauty, he said, people will finally agree on what is truly beautiful. That is because the mental category for judging beauty, shared by all human minds, will tap into a kind of universal standard of what is beautiful. Reflecting this merging of personal opinion and universal agreement, Kant’s famously difficult philosophizing spoke of the “subjective universal.”45 When it comes to public sentiments about beauty, in other words, people make judgments that are both personal and tran­scen­dent. They agree on beauty in the end, even if rational definitions fail.

  What Kant has revived in his theory of judgment is the medieval idea of imagination and intuition, which in turn had been derived from the notion of Platonist Ideas. Medieval thinkers acknowledged that the mind creates its own “exemplary ideas” that have the potential to reflect tran­scen­dent Ideas, as either Plato or Christian theology would state the case. Because imagination creates art, then works of art can be seen as having both human and tran­scen­dent qualities, and it is the tran­scen­dental part that presumably sparks a common sense of beauty in the beholders of art. “Art involved an idea or image of beauty not found in nature,” the historian Umberto Eco explains. That medieval notion “was the beginning of a concept of the imagination which was in turn the basis for an aesthetics of intuition.”46 Kant has been the modern prophet of that intuition.

  Kant had called his era the “Age of Enlightenment,” and indeed deemed his own philosophical work—which focused on the intuitive categories and powers of the mind to know—a kind of second Copernican revolution. Even if that is true, Kant was working in the long Platonist tradition (called idealism in modern times), which had moved from a purely theological approach to one that now would become psychological.47 Even though Kant was mostly a lecturer in the natural sciences at Königsberg University, he never said where, physically, this intuitive and universal ability of the mind comes from; he simply proposed a logical bridge between the particular and the universal. He also furthered the secularization of the Platonist Idea, which has continued down to the present: intuition is the new natural mystery for the sciences.

  Although Kant actually said almost nothing about particular works of art, he did hand down two salient principles that would shape art theory thereafter. The first was his extensive discussion of “genius,” again a medieval idea (which once merely meant a “maker”).48 The second was Kant’s corollary assertion that artists of genius produce true art when it is something beyond nature; it obtains something superior by way of the artist’s idea, and free play of imagination, and mastery of a medium, coming together to produce an object of purposeless purpose and disinterested satisfaction. It is only at this level, Kant suggests, that we find true art and beauty. All the rest is merely pleasant. Over time, art historians would grapple with what to call the existence of a human “idea” in a work of art. It would be called “significant form” in the era of modern art, and another description was “symbolic form,” both drawing upon Platonist and Kantian traditions of mental forms. In art, this form was a kind of ill-defined, yet palpable, visual effect that worked powerfully on huma
n intuition.49 Having gone beyond nature, this form in art can aspire to authentic beauty.50 As the British connoisseur Clive Bell one day would assert, what ranks Piero alongside other superior artists in history are not his religious topics, physical materials, or painterly style: it is his achievement of significant form.51

  Kantian-style thinking would eventually have its day in the sun in the Anglo-American world. For the time being, in the nineteenth century, this kind of Germanic speculation was not exactly suited to the dry empiricism of the British soul. And yet as illustrated in Charles Eastlake, German writings on art and art history were not ignored. The question of beauty and aesthetic judgment was on the front burner, as indicated by Eastlake’s commentary on Goethe’s Theory of Color and his own aesthetic theory, which he called “specific style” or “distinct representation,” by which he meant that significant beauty, and superior artists, were known by a strongly identifiable trait (indeed, a trait he found in Piero by way of his color and volumetrics, not necessarily his perspective).52

  From Kant to Eastlake, everyone was in pursuit of the best definition of beauty, especially as a suitable standard for art appreciation in society. What seemed to work for everyone was a combination of Hume and Kant, both of whom gave compelling reasons for society to have capable people who could be judges of genius in the arts. This judge was the connoisseur. By cultivation or native talent, the connoisseur, who in practice was typically a collector or art historian, was increasingly upheld as making better judgments on art than ordinary people. Connoisseurship became a calling, and the connoisseur a profession. Knowledge of art history was essential to connoisseurship, as Lanzi had noted in 1795, and it was this kind of gnosis that would dramatically set figures such as Winckelmann, Lanzi, Eastlake, and Dennistoun apart from ordinary museumgoers. This line of experts began to know hundreds, if not thousands, of paintings close up and in exquisite detail. This often required journeys to see artworks in situ, that is, still in their original settings and context. In an age before photography, it also meant doing actual sketches of paintings, often crowded around with detailed notes on what the connoisseur was looking at.

  At the end of the Italian Renaissance, Vasari had begun to exemplify the role of an expert judge of the fine arts. Clearly, Vasari was a gatekeeper through which artists won recognition. This was supremely evident when the Venetians attacked him for his pro-Florentine choices. In his second edition of Lives, Vasari added many more names, especially from Venice. In that time, Vasari played the role of connoisseur, a position of superior judgment of beauty. In the modern age, Kant further justified connoisseurship. The connoisseur would even begin to claim a special intuitive power of interpretation. When it came to the products of past artisans, the connoisseurs of the world created not only the idea of “fine art”; they also firmly established the field of art history.

  It was through both these gates that an artist such as Piero had to pass to gain stature in the future.

  In his notes on the Baptism purchase, Eastlake had said that the work was “characteristic” of Piero and his age.53 That age was being called either “primitive,” or the age that came before Raphael. Surprisingly, though, as late as the 1850s, nobody was talking about it as “the Renaissance” with the implication that it was a distinct period or turning point in history.

  For centuries already, there had been some claims about the achievements of the era. This began with the way Petrarch contrasted his time—Italy in the fourteenth century—with the “barbarian” past. Vasari’s Lives would block off 250 years of Italian art for special treatment. Much later, the French Enlightenment figure Voltaire would speak of Vasari’s sixteenth century as a time when human reason began to awaken. The French term renaissance, which means “rebirth,” received its first formal use in 1855. In writing his multi-volume History of France, the romantic historian Jules Michelet titled volume seven Renaissance, which he defined as a rather dramatic break from medieval religion and “the discovery of the world and of man.”54 This was an apt definition of Renaissance humanism; but by now, European intellectuals were departing from the original Christian humanism represented by Petrarch early in the Renaissance, and later by Cusanus, Ficino, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the Renaissance Platonist who famously declared “the dignity of man” in 1486, a year before Piero wrote his last will and testament.55

  Chopping history into periods, turning points, and great epochs has been a human inclination for as long as the written record has been available. Following the Enlightenment, this approach had become more documentary, and thus presumably more “scientific.” Such a periodization of history would never escape controversy (especially after the twentieth century). But it remained the most viable way to tell a story. From Winckelmann through Lanzi and Kugler, the story of art history was told by various periods. And now, in the shoes of the German school, one cultural historian would assert that, when it came to the greatest periods of all, the Italian Renaissance was a very large notch above the rest.

  This was the claim of the Swiss art historian Jacob Burckhardt. In Berlin, he had become the prize student of Kugler and was co-author with him of some of the volumes in Kugler’s art-history Handbook. A native of Basel, Burckhardt was the son of a Protestant minister. In his first phase of university studies, he was persuaded that medieval history was the most significant crucible for the story of Italian art. During a stay in Rome, he further conceived of writing several short books on great periods in human culture, each one worthy of note for the ability to achieve a renaissance.

  Burckhardt gradually focused all his thoughts on Italy, producing a major work on the art of the peninsula. This was a summary of his travels presented as The Cicerone: A Guide to the Enjoyment of the Artworks of Italy (1855). Under Burckhardt’s pen, Piero would attain a rather minor status; Burckhardt continued the German tradition of believing that Piero had learned his craft in the northern Italian city of Padua, since his realistic style and use of perspective matched later developments there in the famous painting school of Francesco Squarcione (c. 1397–1468). Although this made Piero sound derivative, Burckhardt, the Swiss historian, at least christened him an “interesting master.” He noted the good preservation of some of Piero’s paintings and then, giving mixed reviews, described his works as both “naïve” and, when pointing travelers to San­sepol­cro, “very remarkable” as well.56 Burckhardt finally was persuaded that the Italian Quattro­cento was a crucial bridge in history, no longer medieval and yet not quite modern: it was a unique Italian event that planted the seeds of a wider Renaissance period across Europe. He was further persuaded of the Quattro­cento’s genius by reading a biographical collection of Renaissance figures, written by the Florentine bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci.57 Burckhardt had found his turning point in the modern world, and he made that case in his most significant work, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860).

  By now, Burckhardt was a professor of history in Basel and Zürich. After Civilization was published, the idea of a special period, the Italian Renaissance, began to take off in the Western imagination (reaching a much more elevated idea, for example, than the earlier British enthusiasm merely for things Italian). Burckhardt’s chief argument was that the age of political constraint and dictatorship in Italy had given rise, in reaction, to an ebullient individualism. This individualism produced new horizons of creativity in literature, art, manners, and political attitudes. He was aware of Michelet’s thesis, for Burckhardt titled one chapter in Civilization “The Discovery of the World and of Man,” but he pressed the point more thoroughly in the context of Italy.

  For a historian to make such sweeping claims was always to put his reputation at risk, and this may be why Burckhardt called his book-length Civilization a mere “essay.” In his day, there were still great limits on gathering documentation on the past, as continues to be the case for even our digital age. Future scholars would gleefully expose his errors, pick at his
sweeping conclusions, and challenge the very idea that any one period could mark the dawn of the modern world. Perhaps anticipating this, Burckhardt presented his book as his own speculation, “a different picture” from what others might see. His picture was that “the Italian Renaissance must be called the leader of modern ages,” and whatever his critics might say, that idea would become a pillar of Western thought.58

  A political liberal of his age, Burckhardt could travel, teach, and write in relative tranquility, supporting in principle the revolutions in Italy after the 1850s, but always from a safe distance. This luxury was not the case for one of Italy’s leading art writers, Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle. During his colorful life, Cavalcaselle had participated in the Europe-wide street Revolutions of 1848. When they failed in Italy, just as they did elsewhere, he fled for his life. Like many Italian expatriates, he landed in England. It was there that his fortunes improved when he crossed paths with an old acquaintance, the English writer and diplomat Joseph A. Crowe. The two had met in Munich in 1847 when Crowe, a sketcher and former war correspondent, had diplomatic duty in Prussia. In England, their first project together was a successful book on Flemish art, an expertise of Cavalcaselle. It was of special British interest since the art of the Netherlands, arriving well before Michelangelo and Raphael, had shaped the English land­scape and portraiture traditions.

  As the Flemish book appeared, the ever-active Charles Eastlake was casting about for someone qualified to produce an English-language correction of Vasari’s Lives of the Artists. Before long, Cavalcaselle came into view, and so the Italian writer began to work on Eastlake’s vision of an annotated Vasari. This, of course, was a project already under way in Italy in the Milanesi circle. In any case, working from London, the Cavalcaselle project proved futile. A more plausible plan was to return to Italy, where a successful revolution had quelled the former dangers, and to work with Crowe on something more original than a newly footnoted Vasari. Thus was born their authoritative three-volume History of Painting in Italy, published first in English from 1864 to 1866.