Piero's Light

by Larry Witham

  Although the new and rising modernist approach to painting would defy such Renaissance features as looking through a window, linear perspective, or the single viewpoint of a spectator, Piero seemed to obtain a foothold in modernity by his color, form, and geometry. Modernist art had also taken cues from the historical use of the term “primitive” as it was now being liberally applied to interpretations in art history. During Piero’s revival in the mid-nineteenth century, “primitive” meant early Renaissance painting. At the turn of the twentieth century, under the formalist doctrines of “plasticity,” it came to mean having the appearance of simple archaic art, such as that from ancient Egypt and Assyria, or contemporary Africa and Oceania. With the writings of Roger Fry and other modernists, Piero was able to play both sides. He could win praise for being primitive under two different definitions, one as pre-Raphaelite and the other as archaic.

  As the modern connoisseurs and critics were finding both modern and enduring elements in the early Renaissance paintings of Piero, more about his actual life and his treatises was also being uncovered.

  A fairly solid list of Piero’s surviving works had been formed—and it was not large, just about sixteen works or sets of works—yet there was plenty of room for enhancing his biographical chronology. There was discovered, for instance, a ledger entry showing that Piero had been partly paid for his Misericordia Altarpiece in 1462, giving it some firm dates for the first time. It also pointed to Piero’s habit of long procrastinating projects. Then, a disputed 1451 date on Piero’s Rimini fresco—Sigismondo Malatesta before Saint Sigismondo—was confirmed as valid by a second documentary source. The discoveries continued. In 1909, a document surfaced on Piero’s stay in Rimini in April 1482, his retirement years. Down in Rome, construction workers stumbled upon the covered-up remnants of Piero’s frescos in Santa Maria Maggiore; that ceiling had become a storage room in the much-rebuilt basilica. Presently, Piero’s last will and testament, written in 1487 in his own vernacular hand, was found. This proved that he had not gone prematurely blind, as Vasari had claimed. Similarly, a notation about Piero having a power of attorney in San­sepol­cro in 1473 gave historians one more data point on his whereabouts.19

  Most stupendously of all, perhaps, an account book of Pope Pius II was found. It stated that on April 12, 1459, Piero was paid 150 florins for “certain paintings he is making in the room of His Holiness Our Lord Pope.”20 This established, beyond Vasari’s general hearsay, the time of Piero’s trip to Rome, a turning point in his life. The Rome trip would thereafter be a fulcrum in any Piero biography, a place to try to balance out all the conflicting claims on the dates and stylistic formats of his paintings.

  Next to the Roman question, the history and authenticity of Piero’s treatises, now being identified with some rigor, loomed large once again. This search for authenticity had begun in the previous century, and one of its central figures had been Girolamo Mancini. As a young man in the 1860s, Mancini had fought in Italy’s wars of liberation. Then, as a scholar and parliamentarian, he wrote on the humanists of the Renaissance—Alberti and Lorenzo Valla, but also the painter Luca Signorelli—and ended up being a groundbreaking researcher on Piero as well.

  Mancini is credited with several important discoveries about Piero, including the finding of a sheet of paper on which Piero, in his vernacular handwriting, had instructed a notary on the exact wording for his last will and testament.21 This sample of Piero’s handwriting would become crucial in trying to determine which surviving copies of Piero’s treatises were “autographs,” that is, written down or annotated with notes by Piero himself. Mancini found a kind of code-breaker: the peculiar way that Piero wrote his “e,” which looked like a “z.” Mancini identified other patterns in Piero’s handwriting, and Piero’s concise diagrams also provided clues that linked him from one manuscript to another.

  With these tools of the manuscript detective, Mancini authenticated for the first time—this was around 1917—an autograph copy of Piero’s Abacus Treatise, before then never identifiable in the miasma of countless anonymous abacus works from the Renaissance centuries, layered and combined chaotically in modern-day collections of antique texts.22

  Piero’s unusual “e” was just the beginning of the detective work. The quirks of his handwriting and finesse of his diagrams one day would lead to a stunning new hypothesis: that Piero himself had copied, from Latin to Latin, a full manuscript by the Greek mathematician Archimedes. This manuscript was held out as evidence that, by the end of his life, Piero had mastered reading and writing Latin well enough to thoughtfully copy it, though he probably could not write original works in that classical humanist language.23

  Whenever Piero’s treatises became a topic, meanwhile, there was no escaping Vasari’s ancient claim that Luca Pacioli had plagiarized him and stolen his glory. Over the centuries, Vasari’s claim was increasingly viewed as baseless. Pacioli had allies. He had been defended by his fellow Franciscans. Having founded modern-day accounting, Pacioli also had become a mainstay figure in books on the history of mathematics. Naturally, the prestigious 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica was inclined to summarily dismiss Vasari’s plagiarism charges. Whenever the mathematical profession even recognized Piero della Fran­cesca, it was as an artist who had merely dabbled in math and who had codified an arcane book on perspective.

  Piero’s true mathematical prowess was hard to interpret because his original manuscripts, so few in number, were difficult to find, and authenticity was always a difficult question; then, when actually located, they were laborious to read. Not that they weren’t found on occasion, and then compared to Pacioli’s books. On his cursory reading of Piero’s Five Regular Solids in Urbino in the mid-nineteenth century, the Scottish collector James Dennistoun felt that Pacioli had been honorable since, after all, he had praised Piero. Around the same time in Germany, the collector Ernst Harzen entered the debate. In 1856, he reported finding a Latin copy of Piero’s On Perspective in Milan’s Ambrosiana Library, where it was listed incorrectly under “Pietro Pittore di Bruges.” Comparing it to Pacioli, and considering the dates of the two men, Harzen suggested that not only was Pacioli innocent, but Piero actually might have borrowed from him. Then, in 1880, the German scholar Max Jordan’s sleuthing in the Vatican Library turned up the Urbino copy of Five Regular Solids (the one seen by Dennistoun). Jordan compared its mathematics to Pacioli’s De divina proportione. The verdict: Pacioli had indeed tacked on Piero’s Latin work (now poorly translated into Italian) as the third book of Pacioli’s treatise.24

  The full rehabilitation of Piero as a significant and original mathematician, however, did not begin until the early twentieth century. The plagiarism debate was reopened at a more sophisticated level by Giulio Pittarelli, professor of descriptive geometry at the University of Rome, who made Piero and Pacioli his topic at the 1908 International Mathematical Congress meeting in that city. Pittarelli, too, had compared the Vatican’s original Five Regular Solids to Pacioli and announced that Pacioli, famous now in the history of mathematics, had undoubtedly attached Piero’s work to his own. Being conciliatory, though, Pittarelli argued that in the Renaissance, such borrowing without attribution was common enough at the time (and not condemned as plagiarism in the modern sense).25

  As the surviving Piero manuscripts were gradually located and their antique verbiage penetrated, Piero could no longer be ignored. Modern book versions appeared of his On Perspective in 1899, Five Regular Solids in 1916 (by Mancini), and, last but not least, the Abacus Treatise as late as 1970.26 From the grave, Piero was forcing mathematicians to think about Renaissance painting and goading art historians to think about mathematics. After 1920, histories of mathematics began to mention Piero as an important mathematician, innovative beyond Euclid, as even Piero himself had said: filled with Quattro­cento self-confidence, Piero had written that he had re-done Euclid “newly expressed in arithmetical terms,” which meant the novel application of algebra to prob
lems in geometry.27

  One European scholar, Leonardo S. Olschki, would go even further in linking Piero to scientific achievements and developments. Of Prussian extraction, Olschki set up a publishing firm in Italy and specialized in antique works. This sent him back to the natural sciences in Italy pre-Galileo, and the result was a two-volume work on the history of modern scientific writings. In the first volume, The Literature of Technology and the Applied Sciences: From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (1919), he drew a straight line from Dante and Alberti to Piero, Pacioli, Leonardo, and Dürer. They had paved the way, he said, for Galilean science, an idea he further popularized in his later work, The Genius of Italy (1949). Olschki practically overlooked Piero as an artist. He ranked him as having closed the age of empirical geometry, begun by Brunelleschi and Alberti, a necessary stage in history before Galileo could move on to modern scientific theory.28

  As Piero was being pulled into modernity, it was the Grand Tours in Italy that would first tether him to the United States. By the end of the nineteenth century, several notables of the Gilded Age had visited Italy, and, with agents in the field, they began to buy Renaissance art. American writers also had begun to cite Piero, but it was the artifacts that made the difference.29 Touring Americans had two major vistas on Piero’s work: first was the Brera Gallery in Milan; after that, the Arezzo frescos, which had undergone two modern restorations, first in 1858 and again in 1915.

  One American to take notice was Isabella Stewart Gardner of Boston. She traveled through Italy in 1892, stopping in Arezzo. She was also thinking about building an art collection in her great mansion. She relied upon a fellow American, Bernard Berenson, the Harvard-trained art connoisseur living in Italy, to alert her to opportunities to make a Piero purchase. When, in 1903, Piero’s Hercules fresco came up for sale, Gardner enthusiastically bought it for $40,000, although it took five years for her to get it past customs to Boston.

  In time, the demand for Piero’s works exceeded supply. The prices rose exponentially, from Gardner’s $40,000 at the turn of the century to a Rockefeller purchase of a much smaller Piero in 1929 for $375,000.30 The very few available works were being liquidated by three kinds of sources: the modern heirs to the Franceschi family; royal collections that had owned works by Piero for generations; and dealers who had invested in them, waiting for the hour of profitable resale. Over the next four decades, a handful of rich Americans—Philip Lehman, Robert Sterling Clark, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Helen Clay Frick—bought a total of seven Pieros. After these arrived in American collections (the last being in 1950), they amounted to the largest national grouping of Piero’s works outside of Italy. Except for the Hercules, they were all panel paintings, five of them small, cut out of the Saint Augustine Altarpiece that Piero had completed in San­sepol­cro.

  Increasingly, Piero had gained legs internationally. He had also come down off the museum wall and assumed the weighty profile of a historical figure. The number of documents showing his presence in history had grown, and his role in the history of math and science was given serious consideration. This all, of course, took place in Italy, where such original sources were to be found. It was only natural, then, that other experts on the Renaissance, especially art experts in Italy, would catapult Piero into higher levels of aesthetic appreciation as well.

  The first of these Italian figures was actually an American whose life as an art connoisseur stationed in Italy nevertheless made him something of an Italian legend. This was the dashing and multilingual Bernard Berenson (1865–1959). He had begun to work in Italy in 1888 and then took up permanent residence there. By his exposure to public and private collections, Berenson became an influential authority on Renaissance art. He also became rich by dealing in the discovery, authentication, and sale of such works. As if holding a permanent Renaissance seminar, Berenson became host in Italy to three generations of visiting art historians, collectors, and dealers, basing himself at a grand villa, I Tatti, outside Florence. More than Fry’s unheralded lectures on Piero, Berenson’s outspoken writings would boost Piero’s stature at the end of the nineteenth century. Berenson did this by boosting the status of central Italian painting, long neglected in the shadows of Florence, Rome, and Venice.

  Berenson made the case in his book, The Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance (1897), which he updated with authoritative lists about a decade later. He recognized that Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle and Joseph A. Crowe had covered many of these artists, including Piero, in their mid-century History of Painting in Italy. But Berenson, eager to eclipse past critics, dismissed their tepid enthusiasm for the central Italians as “sawdusty appreciations” at best. Connoisseurs in general, he suggested, had unjustifiably disregarded the painters of central Italy—from Siena, the Marches, Umbria, and the Tiber Valley—putting them “under the hard ban of Academic judgment.”31

  Berenson set out to lift the ban. He described the central Italians as a bridge between the medieval and the modern, being “not only among the profoundest and grandest, but among the most pleasing and winning Illustrators that we Europeans ever have had,” and by illustration he essentially meant narrative story-telling. Head and shoulders above most others on Berenson’s list was Piero, a judgment with which he presumed the “most cultivated public” would agree. “He was perhaps the first to use effects of light for their direct tonic or subduing and soothing qualities,” Berenson said. No other painter “has ever presented a world more complete and convincing, has ever had an ideal more majestic, or ever endowed things with more heroic significance.”32 Berenson’s effusive literary style, which would influence the style of many critic-connoisseurs to come, was obviously in full swing.

  Piero was not perfect, of course. His use of perspective and geometry could make his paintings “clogged by his science,” said Berenson, not citing particular works, but probably referring to something like the Flagellation of Christ with its hyper-perspective. And yet when Piero’s “science” worked, that architectonic feeling was a key to Piero’s accomplishment: he accomplished a feeling of impersonality, a quality that avoids distracting emotions and presents pure phenomena, the “essential significant facts and forces” (and here Berenson may have been thinking of the more monumental Arezzo frescos). Although this Pieroism may come across as “impassive, that is to say unemotional,” Berenson continued, this was precisely Piero’s distinguishing virtue: “The grand figures, the grand action, and the severe land­scape … exercise upon us … their utmost power,” an aesthetic experience in the viewer to be sure, but nebulous enough as a “power” or emotion to defy description (and, indeed, Berenson provides none).33 A half century later, around 1950, Berenson would return to writing about Piero, surprised at his growing popularity in the twentieth century. He again attributed it to the mute power of his unadorned stillness, a quality that now he would call “the ineloquent in art.”

  By “ineloquent,” Berenson again meant paintings that avoided the ornament, flourish, or melodrama that distracts from a primordial sense of an art object. Piero was an antidote to the “over-expressive” art of the past, and especially of the present too, when artists competed with cinema. “In the long run the most satisfactory creations are those which, like Piero’s and Cézanne’s, remain ineloquent, mute, with no urgent communication,” Berenson said. “If they express anything it is character, essence, rather than momentary feeling or purpose. They manifest potentiality rather than activity. It is enough that they exist in themselves.”34

  More than even Berenson, however, it was the native Italian art historian Roberto Longhi who raised Piero’s profile. Longhi had launched his career as a young art historian just as the Italian Futurists were in Paris, around 1912, issuing their manifestos in competition with the Cubists and, in England, as Fry was making the Cézanne and Seurat connections. The son of teachers, Longhi hailed from north Italy. He was naturally enthused by Italy’s own modern trends in art, taking a close interest in t
he Futurists and the so-called “metaphysical” painters. But having seen the ancient classics all around him, he became a specialist in Renaissance art. At the University of Turin in 1911, his dissertation was on the Italian baroque painter Caravaggio. Longhi’s teacher had studied under the noted art historian Adolfo Venturi, also a northerner, and Venturi had become chair of medieval and modern art history at the University of Rome. So as like attracts like, Longhi headed south to study at Venturi’s School of Advanced Studies in Art History.

  Venturi was the living master of Italian art history. As Gaetano Milanesi had developed the science of art-historical research in Italy, Venturi elevated art history to a university field of study. He brought it under the purview of Italian academia. He achieved this in large part by producing his multi-volume History of Art, of which volume seven (1911) gave a full treatment of Piero della Fran­cesca.35 Longhi followed the interests of his new mentor and taught art history in high schools and contributed to Venturi’s journal L’Arte. Inevitably he became enamored of Piero, launching one of the boldest theses ever attached to the Quattro­cento artist.

  Longhi presented his argument in a 1914 article for L’Arte: “Piero Fran­cesca and the Development of Venetian Painting.”36 In sum, Longhi suggested that Piero’s aesthetics—his mastery of perspective, color, and form—had guided the two most important early Venetian artists. Piero had thus shaped the very foundations of the Venetian style. Longhi arrived at this conclusion, he later said, by a close study of chronology and stylistic analysis of the two Venetian painters in question, Antonello da Messina and Giovanni Bellini. They had reworked their styles, Longhi argued, “on the basis of Piero’s in the period 1475–80.” This link between Piero and the two Venetians no less than explained “the origins of the new Venetian painting,” Longhi said. “The perspectival, and in a certain sense Classical, underpinnings of Bellini’s painting … are thus clarified, as regards both their origins and their consequences, which reach all the way to the chromatic classicism of Veronese,” a late Renaissance painter who shared his fame alongside Titian and Tintoretto as part of a supreme triumvirate of Venetian painters.37