Piero's Light

by Larry Witham

  This talented duo gave remarkable coverage to Piero, even if they could not break from convention. They inevitably portrayed him as a Florentine, something that Vasari did not say but which now seemed proved by the 1439 date of Piero’s presence there. Residing in London, the two authors studied two of Piero’s imported works, the Baptism and the Nativity, the former in the National Gallery and the latter in the private collection of the eccentric bootmaker scion Alexander Barker.

  Drawing on new material plus their travels in Italy, Crowe and Cavalcaselle situated Piero more clearly in the world of Quattro­cento painting, improving on Lanzi and Kugler. In Italy, a few more Quattro­cento painting contracts with Piero had been found. Moreover, a relative of Piero in the Franceschi Marini family—who married an Englishman—had also compiled information from family records. In this period, the bitterness against monarchy that drove the revolutions of Europe remained with the two authors, especially Cavalcaselle, and it led them to comment on the evils of tyranny, in this case Renaissance tyranny; they noted how it was “truculent soldiers, known as faithless leaders of armies, or guilty perpetrators of dreadful crimes” who nevertheless patronized the best architects and artists, “spending the fruit of their depredations” on beautifying churches and courts.59

  By comparison, Piero came away completely untarnished, “a man of a rare type, endowed with great penetration and powers of reflection, able to fathom the problems of abstruse science, and capable of searching and coordinating the secrets of nature.” His masterpieces were enough to prove this, the authors said. “He was, in a word, an artist enjoying a happy conjunction of the talents which adorned the van Eycks and Leonardo da Vinci.”60

  To support such praise, Crowe and Cavalcaselle made several connoisseurial claims about Piero’s concrete accomplishments. Echoing Lanzi, Piero had influenced central Italian painting, quite apart from Florence. His impact appeared in the future styles of the Ferrara painters. Comparing him favorably to Michelangelo and Raphael, the two authors credited Piero with painting the first classical nude in the Renaissance and with marking the transition from tempera to oil in Italy. Against the backdrop of what painters had accomplished in Florence, Piero added “something like perfection to the system” of naturalism and perspective. He treated the human figure like the ancient Greeks, often “as a mere geometrical unit.”61 Just as Rembrandt and the Flemish painters had their distinct look—chiaroscuro and bright color contrasts, respectively—Piero had his own singular effect: a clarity of parts and their unity with the whole.

  For all the accolades that Crowe and Cavalcaselle showered on Piero, however, they did not say he was modern. That suggestion would require the dawn of the twentieth century.

  CHAPTER 9

  Piero and Modernity

  Once Piero had been entombed on the abbey grounds in San­sepol­cro, a mere two years would pass before his first chronicler would call him “modern.” This came from the mathematician Luca Pacioli in 1494, though Giorgio Vasari would downgrade that superlative a bit later. Vasari positioned Piero instead as having “enabled the moderns,” those of the High Renaissance who perfected naturalistic painting.1

  On his way to true modernity, however, there was nothing yet for Piero like the suggestion made by the English art critic Roger Fry at the turn of the twentieth century. He looked at Piero’s paintings and declared: “What strikes me so much here is the modernness of Piero’s attitude.”2 Perhaps like no other painter in memory, Piero was about to become a patron saint of modern art. It would be one of the more beguiling aspects of his legacy in the twentieth century. Modern connoisseurs had already linked Piero to the archaic sensibility of the Greek past, but now he was to be associated with a new futurism, this being due to the silent and spare look of his paintings, and also to a growing awareness that he had, indeed, been a Platonist mathematician in addition to being a master of color, geometry, and form.

  The modernizing of Piero began in late nineteenth-century France, a national cauldron for the next revolution in art, which pitted the modern spirit against the classical past. France had laid claim to classicism in the form of academic neoclassicism. But when a new generation of modern French painters began to visit Italy, something equally new began to happen. This was manifest in the life and influence of Puvis de Chavannes, whose two journeys to Italy put him under the spell of Piero’s frescos at Arezzo. He became so familiar with Piero, it has been said, that when the Louvre bought and displayed a portrait claiming to be by the same, Puvis protested that it could not be by the hand of the Quattro­cento master (and he was proved correct). His opinions mattered because, in time, Puvis became one of France’s most famous national painters. He retained a classical and fresco-like look to his paintings—much in the spirit of Piero—and yet was a predecessor to the revolution toward Impressionism and later Cubism, all of which took hold in the late 1800s.3

  If some of the Pieroesque spirit was carried from Italy back to France by Puvis, outsized samples of Piero’s actual works would also begin to show up in Paris. At this time, the new style of Impressionism was openly challenging France’s neoclassicism (and thus France’s link to the Renaissance), so one defender of tradition decided to take counter-measures. He was the prominent French art historian and administrator Charles Blanc. Blanc’s plan was to open a Museum of Copies at the École des Beaux Arts, presenting Renaissance examples of what he believed to be the legacy of France’s own “National Art.”4 Once the museum initiative was under way, teams of French artists put their shoulders to the task. They replicated Raphael’s work in the Vatican, the prophets and sibyls of Michelangelo, the swan of Leonardo, and frescos by Masaccio, Ghirlandaio, Mantegna, and Andréa del Sarto.

  Blanc also commissioned copies of two of the major panels in the Arezzo frescos by Piero. The copies were painted by Charles Loyeux, a skilled copyist. A copy of the Battle of Heraclius and Chosroes was begun in early 1872 and shipped to Paris in October. The Discovery and Proving of the True Cross was commissioned in February 1873 and arrived at the museum in August of that year. Both of the painted facsimiles were done at their original large size from the Arezzo church wall, about 11 feet by 24 feet each.5

  At some point, Blanc himself traveled to Italy in preparation for a book he was writing on The History of Italian Renaissance Art (1889). In this, too, he emphasized the primitives and praised Piero. The primitives were important, the preface said, because although everyone knew Michelangelo, his predecessors were being lost. Blanc’s History described Piero as a “singular genius who strangely combined the qualities of an artist with the geometrical exactitude of a scientist.” Well acquainted with the Arezzo church’s bad repair, Blanc openly worried about the frescos’ rapid deterioration. At least, he said with wise diplomacy, “they have escaped complete loss thanks to the beautiful copies that have been made by the French government.” Loyeux’s excellent work, in fact, made him a hero in Arezzo, now a relative backwater in Italy that appreciated any commercial attention it could get, especially from tourists on the Grand Tour.6

  Blanc’s effort to revive early Renaissance art as an example for France’s national culture did not succeed. The Museum of Copies was dismantled just before the copies of Piero’s Arezzo frescos could be installed. The Impressionists rose and rose. Nevertheless, Piero did survive: since the entire enterprise had been so expensive, the copies of the Arezzo frescos and others in the project were instead placed high on a wall in the chapel of the École des Beaux Arts, still visible enough to make an impression on visitors, it seems (and still there today, according to an account from the 1990s). It was on that chapel wall that another young painter, Georges Seurat, open to all the influences of his era, saw Piero’s monumental style.

  An art student since he was fifteen, in 1878 Seurat qualified to enter the École at age eighteen. He embraced the school’s classical training and became an admirer of Puvis’s mural style. Although Seurat would become famous for his
experiments with color, the framework on which he proceeded was the kind of monumental classicism typified by Puvis and Piero. In the latter case, he must have surely viewed, and contemplated, the copies of the Arezzo frescos at the École.

  Seurat made his debut as a young painter with two now-famous paintings that reflect this Pieroesque aura. The first was Bathers at Asnières, completed in 1883. At a time when the Impressionists did not use rigorous composition, Seurat employed a highly classical, even rigid, scheme. The Bathers was too innovative to be accepted by the official government salon exhibition of 1884. Even so, it was a success at the rival Salon des Indépendants later that year, both for its use of color and the monumental treatment that Seurat gave his figures and land­scape. In Seurat’s next large canvas, La Grande Jatte, worked on from 1884 to 1885, he created an even more geometrical world of human figures in a park by a river, all of them well defined by light and shadow. It was an idealized world. Whatever Seurat’s sources might have been, Bathers at Asnières and La Grande Jatte presented the distinct impression of the light-filled, geometric, and tranquil atmosphere of a work by Piero.

  Obviously, Seurat had tried to use color in a totally different way from his predecessor colorist. Whereas Piero applied evenly spread fields of color and was inclined toward cool tones and pastel hues, Seurat used the primaries in little dots to model forms, believing that the tiny applications of pure color would keep their richness, even in the shadow areas of a painting. Regardless, both Piero and Seurat produced a similar effect of classical solidity in their figures and a luminescence of color in their atmospheres, making them kindred spirits. The two painters were similar in other ways.7 They both were interested in the mathematics and science of their day. They were meticulous in applying math, and, as a result, their works have been subjected to searches, by art historians, for underlying mathematical formulas. For subject matter, they both liked large scenes of spectacle with groups of people and individuals in sumptuous and interesting clothing and costumes. They showed their figures clearly: side, front, or back. Their works exuded a sense of stillness, light, and space. Clearly, they both liked classical monumentality.

  The other young painter who would have walked past the copies of Piero’s Arezzo frescos at the École was Paul Cézanne. While not a formal student like Seurat, Cézanne visited the art academy and other art haunts in Paris. The evidence of the Piero effect on Cézanne is circumstantial and stylistic, based primarily on a painting that he would do around 1886, just as Seurat was moving beyond his experiments with the successful La Grande Jatte.8 This was Cézanne’s painting View of Gardanne, a hillside scene filled with geometrical buildings. In treatment and color, it looks very much like Piero’s rendering of buildings on a hillside in the Arezzo fresco Discovery and Proving of the True Cross, which at the time covered nearly 260 square feet in the École chapel.

  The son of a banker, Cézanne began studying law, but gave up its logic-chopping world for art. Nevertheless, Cézanne’s eye still was geared to quantification. It was this kind of geometric solidity that he doubtless saw in Piero. Cézanne also felt that he was coming out of the classical tradition. Before his death in 1906, he wrote that his goal had been to repaint the French neoclassical history painter Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) according to nature. By wanting to repaint Poussin, Cézanne aimed to take classicism back to the rudiments of nature, which he defined as being made up of the “cylinder, sphere, and cone.”9 Piero could not have agreed more.

  Chavannes, Seurat, and Cézanne—all three conspired with their painterly skill to create compelling effects on the visual senses. They all found roots for this in an early Renaissance tradition and, similarly, evoked what is luminescent, geometrical, still, and monumental in the tradition of Piero. There is no direct connection to be proved, of course, but the strong association of influence has always been a fascination among art historians. Just for example, if Cézanne had used Piero directly for his View of Gardanne land­scape, then it may also have been View of Gardanne that Cubist founders Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque had in mind—perhaps after seeing it at the first Cézanne retrospective in Paris in 1907—when they produced their first simplified, geometrical land­scapes in 1908.10 This sort of speculation begins the tangible link between Piero and modern art.

  Among European connoisseurs, it was the British painter, art historian, and critic Roger Fry who first built the case for a more than casual connection between Piero, Puvis, Seurat, and Cézanne.11 An expert in Renaissance art, he began visiting Italy in 1891, eventually writing a major work on Giovanni Bellini of Venice. He was familiar with Piero’s panel paintings in the National Gallery but, on his first visit to Arezzo in 1897, he was bowled over by the frescos, writing home that he admired Piero “almost more than any other early Italian painter,” noting further that “he certainly comes nearer to the Greeks than any other Italian.”12

  Fry had first studied natural science at Cambridge, giving him a flair for categorizing species and classes of things, which surely groomed a talent for doing likewise with the disparate world of antique paintings. On his first foray to New York City, his impressive mastery of such topics earned him the job of curator of painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was prone to making visual statements about historical connections. When he organized the Met’s exhibit of early Italian art, he purchased a large Puvis canvas, The Shepherd’s Song, to serve as a kind of modern link and centerpiece.

  Earlier still, however, Fry had begun to sort out his feelings, and his taxonomy, for Italian painters. He performed this sorting through a series of public lectures he began giving at the Cambridge University extension program. His best known series was about the painters of Florence, and his lecture on Giotto in 1900, when published as a small book, did much to acquaint the British public with that thirteenth-century pioneer of Renaissance realism. The next year, Fry decided to make Piero an honorary Florentine by presenting two lectures on him and his Renaissance style. If Fry had published these two as a small book, Piero’s fortunes in the English-speaking world would have certainly risen more rapidly than they actually did.

  Fry’s lectures, in which he cites the “modernness of Piero’s attitude,” were an early sign of his growing preference toward a method of art analysis called “formalism,” which essentially placed all emphasis on the painted forms, shapes, colors, and proportions in a work. Formalism valued paintings that eliminated all nonessentials. Fry had been reared a Quaker and thus may have been inclined toward liking unadorned clarity. But in the parlance of the day, he referred to such clarity as the “plastic” dynamic—that is, the power of visual shapes—in any work of art. “Piero’s imagination was for the most part purely plastic: he conceives his subjects in terms of plastic forms,” Fry told his audience.13 At this time in Fry’s assessment of Piero, he was connecting him to the modern world not through the so-called Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood avant-garde, but through Puvis, an accomplished painter who had truly come under the spell of early Italian frescos. “Artists in England were too pre-Raphaelite to look much at Raphael’s precursors and had not begun to realize the importance of Piero’s work,” Fry said, displaying his dry wit. “It is, perhaps, partly through Puvis de Chavannes that we have come to see the extraordinary qualities of Piero’s art.”14

  Fry spoke of Piero as a “scientific realist” in his painting; yet it was not really perspective or geometry that excited him. Fry was instead enamored of Piero’s unparalleled color combinations, having achieved a “supreme power as a colourist.”15 At the time of his Piero lectures, Fry was not yet the “apostle of formalism” that he would later become, and, as part of that transition, he would move beyond associating Piero with Puvis. When the time became right, he linked Piero to Seurat and Cézanne, two figures who had ridden the cresting wave of what Fry would call Post-Impressionism.

  All of this transpired after Fry’s famous falling-out with the trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, at w
hich time he returned to London to organize the first major exhibits of painters in Cézanne’s generation. To pull this off, he coined the term Post-Impressionism, mounting exhibitions in 1910 and 1911 (with an old-masters exhibit in between). In his writings and lectures around the Post-Impressionist Exhibitions, Fry presented Piero as a kind of proto-modernist. Being the first English-speaking advocate of Cézanne—“he is incomparably greater than I had supposed”—Fry naturally began to link Piero accordingly, and not without good stylistic reasons (being that Piero, Seurat, and Cézanne had a common affinity for solid, geometric shapes).16 The evidence was that the “mood” of Seurat’s paintings echoed Piero’s “monumental and motionless groups,” and that Cézanne’s “great monumental quality” had similar roots.17

  A small band of mid–nineteenth-century connoisseurs, those around Charles Eastlake, for example, had already decided that there was something perennial about Piero. Now Fry shepherded the Piero revival into modern art criticism, and indeed into such storied circles as the Bloomsbury group of literary bohemians, of which he and his wife were a part. During his early lectures on Piero, Fry seemed to balk at the impersonality of his style. All resistance to Piero’s eerie stillness was gone by 1913, when Fry wrote from Italy: “I’ve no doubt that Piero della Fran­cesca is the greatest artist of Italy after Giotto, incomparably beyond the men of the High Renaissance.”18 Now that this cultural gate was open, it was easier for everyone writing about new trends in modern art to point to the geometrical and abstract similarities of the gang of four: Piero, Chavannes, Seurat, and Cézanne.