Piero's Light

by Larry Witham

  Piero also produces exotic effects. Often the colors he puts next to each other are of a similar luminescence, and this sets them up to flicker when, as in Impressionism, the What and Where sides of the visual system are dealing with edges of different shapes, and yet shapes with equal luminescent values. The other effect here, which is why Piero has been tied to Cézanne and Cubism, is the way his equally luminescent colors can at times flatten his painted world (just as his clever use of perspective lines can play “spatial games” with perception, making objects in a painting appear both far and near, depending on the distance at which a viewer is standing).44 A vibrating visual flatness (with no perspective to contend with) can be activated by close color values or by an arrangement of contiguous shapes, and these, in the parlance of modern art, can seem to be “pushing and pulling” on the surface of the painting (another way of talking about Fry’s plasticity).

  Piero’s other unusual effect is to freeze action, which assaults the brain with a thrilling anomaly. In real life, action is seen in glimpses; the eyes dart around constantly, catching instants of flux. All along, the brain sorts through the myriad data to build a constant picture of motion. To the contrary, Piero petrifies motion in a way anomalous to the brain: action is seen, but there is no flux before the eyes. Of course, this is a visual effect well known in stop-action photography. Back when Piero plied his brush, his inert imagery must have conveyed a compelling quality, as it still does. The stillness, when there should be motion, is taken by the mind as counter­intuitive. In this, the mind senses something abnormal—and “beyond normal” is one definition of a tran­scen­dent experience.45

  There are other ways that Piero’s art might trigger a tran­scen­dental experience. Studies of brain activity in subjects viewing artworks show that, once basic “feature detectors” are in action, paintings with narrative stories, human faces, or identifiable atmospheres move into the higher mental capacities.46 The visual cortex is pushed to its limits, and the What and Where systems have been brought into full awareness; beyond them, however, the mind must apply imagination, memory, and even intuition to find sense and meaning to it all—to find its essence. This process endows Piero’s works with their eerie, mystical, or Platonic feeling.

  The aforementioned experience applies almost entirely to representational painting, which requires the mind to interpret a complex story in addition to shapes and color. Neuroaesthetics argues that some representational paintings can give the mind an additional way to experience the search for essences. One example is the work of the Dutch painter Vermeer, who presents a realism that may nevertheless remain ambiguous in terms of what really is happening in the painting. Thus the brain fills in that vacuum with essences from its memory, and this presumably evokes satisfaction in the mind. Even though Piero might paint in visual clarity, the painting’s story can remain ambiguous. Who are those people, what are they doing, and why? In most of his works, Piero pursues what Alberti called historia—an evocative, perhaps well-known, story. Yet those same works can activate the fill-in-the-meaning part of mental perception, adding to their appeal.

  For those who find such neuro­aesthetic interpretations unsatisfying, perhaps the best single explanation for the many effects that Piero has on viewers comes from the connoisseur who simply declared that Piero is an “artist of unrivaled visual sensibility.”47 Yet there is one final type of essence in art that the mind can find extremely satisfying, and this not only applies to all painters, but would find few doubters as well. This essence is what psychologists call a knowledge of the back story. What is the story “behind” the work of art? Typically it is the story of a person who possesses an impressive skill, an enchanting personality, or an ability to pull off a virtuoso performance. When people know the back story, the impact on human perception is one of more fascination and more mental satisfaction.

  Knowing that a real person stands behind a work of art, thus establishing its origin, has defined the prices in art markets from time immemorial. A high price is put on an object by its authenticity, not simply by its perfect imitation or high quality.48 Fake Vermeers have looked exactly like the real ones but, when found out, they become valueless. There has never been a great controversy over an attempted fake Piero being floated on the market by evil­doers. However, during the nineteenth century, a number of would-be Pieros were bought by collectors or museums, such as the National Gallery in London and the Louvre in Paris, only to be traced finally to other early Renaissance sources. As predicted, those non-Pieros have not risen in fame, while the few real Pieros that reached the West—often in deleterious condition—are now viewed as priceless, even national treasures.

  In his own day, Piero’s patrons worked under the same psychology: they wanted his essence, not just a fine picture. Some of those patrons required that his “hand” alone produce the work. Even today, the few Pieros that may have a strong mark of his assistant’s or a follower’s hand are demoted in value, even when the non-Piero brushwork is done quite well. In art, it is the authentic story of the artist, in addition to the materials and the skill, that provides an irreplaceable sense of essence to a work.

  Piero’s story, in all its details, is unlikely to ever be fully told. But over the centuries a combination of new information and the old mysteries has created an “essential” Piero that has added to his appeal, and that is because the human mind seeks essences. At the end of the twentieth century, however, with the discovery of still more new information, the essential Piero was going to be added to again and his story slightly amended.

  CHAPTER 11

  A Celebrated Life

  In the long line of Piero investigators, the social historian James R. Banker may have been the most persistent. One day in the early 1980s, the American professor was again cajoling every bit of Piero information he could find from the modern-day San­sepol­crans. “I impertinently insisted that a fifteenth-century ‘Libro dei morti’ [Book of the Dead] be taken from its display case in the Museo Civico so I could study deaths other than Piero della Fran­cesca’s,” Banker recalls.1 No offense was taken. Banker was to become one of the great biographers of Piero. In time, he was made an honorary citizen of San­sepol­cro, where in academic retirement he would live eight months of every year.

  Banker had taken a new approach to Piero, reconstructing the environment and people around him to let him emerge as a person of his time. Importantly, Piero’s family and social context justified a date of 1412 for his birth, much earlier than once thought, thus situating Piero in an earlier generation of Renaissance painters. The evidence further showed that Piero had matured as a skilled painter well before his famous appearance in Florence in 1439, a date by which most scholars—especially Roberto Longhi—argued that Piero was a Florentine apprentice. For some time, says Banker, “scholars wished to conceive of Piero as a teenager in Florence in 1439 as a means of making him a child of Florentine painting.”2 To the contrary, now Piero could be viewed as a regional talent. He was a true outsider and innovator, not an acolyte of the glory-seeking Florentines.

  Beyond his art, Piero could also be seen as contributing to science and culture. For Banker, this was evidenced in Piero’s mastery of Archimedes. Piero achieved this even though he was not of university stock; he wrote almost entirely in the vernacular and managed a painter’s workshop. Nevertheless, Piero breached the barriers of the elite culture of the Renaissance by his work on mathematical manuscripts. His mathematization of geometry and his probable conveyance of Archimedes to others—most notably to Luca Pacioli and then Leonardo da Vinci—was a helpmate in the recovery of Greek science, even a prelude to the Scientific Revolution.3

  This new ranking of Piero as an important contributor to cultural history, both in the sciences and art, did not come quickly. The lost foundations of Renaissance history had to be cleared again in the mid-twentieth century, allowing for a new period of rigorous research. The nature of the Renaissance itself was bei
ng debated anew and, for the first time, a generation of English-speaking researchers seriously entered the fray of archival research and cultural interpretation. Naturally, Piero and his age were thrown open to new viewpoints and, indeed, to new technological interventions; cutting-edge art conservation would illuminate the material world of Piero in ways not possible before.

  Banker’s work on Piero was part of the historical ebb and flow of the American interest in the Italian Renaissance. From the nineteenth century, the Renaissance had a storied place in American literary—if not religious—culture, an echo of the English penchant for all things Italian in the time when the “primitive” art of Piero was rediscovered. It was not until after the Second World War, however, that the United States produced its own intrepid teams of Renaissance investigators, such that one historian could say “For about twenty years following the mid-1950s, [the surge of interest in] Renaissance history was a great success story.”4

  To make their mark, the Americans had to imitate their Italian predecessors. They had to scour the obscure, sometimes confusing archival materials in Italian vaults that still held secrets from the late medieval period and the Renaissance. Besides the various archives in Rome and the Vatican, the richest source was still the State Archives in Florence. That is where the American search for the Renaissance began.

  Among a small cadre of Americans who made this journey abroad—forming a vanguard of sorts—was the young scholar Marvin Becker, who was, in fact, Banker’s teacher at the University of Michigan.5 In tandem with the Marshall Plan, young Americans interested in European history began to travel to Italy in academic programs. A war veteran with a newly minted doctorate in medieval Italian society, earned in 1950 from the University of Pennsylvania, Becker began to seriously study the so-called “problem of the Renaissance” under a Fulbright scholarship. His teachers had been in the tradition that saw the real European renaissance in medieval times, even as early as the twelfth century. Nevertheless, in 1953, Becker headed for Florence to find out how that city, at the end of the Middle Ages, had developed as a commune pursuing liberty and economic cooperation, a significant step on a continent still dominated by feudalism, princes, and kings.

  The migration of German scholars to America had already shaped a general approach to the Renaissance. On the rigorous side, the German approach investigated the economic and political forces of the time, but then on the visionary side it interpreted the Renaissance as a source of humane values for modernity.6 For the Americans, caught in an era when democracy and totalitarianism were at loggerheads, both the rigor and the vision made good sense. They would find a German example, for instance, in the Renaissance scholar Hans Baron, an émigré sociologist, whose Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance looked at how Florentine tax policy created a communal system. More influential, though, was Baron’s argument that the Renaissance revival of classical sources produced a philosophy of “civic humanism” and thus a guiding light for liberal Western democracy.

  A young scholar such as Becker would echo this dual approach. He dug into the minutiae of old Florentine economic records to understand how that society had functioned and changed. For relief, perhaps, he also turned to a good deal of the émigrés’ more visionary literature, reading the works of Ernst Cassirer, Erwin Panofsky, and others such as the Italian philosopher Eugenio Garin, all of whom believed that art, culture, and philosophical trends had significantly shaped Renaissance society.7 Like others, Becker was swept along by the general search for the roots of liberal democracy, and not a few American scholars were taken by the idea that the humanism and rationalism of the Renaissance might hold clues to democracy’s future.

  This all seemed especially relevant as long as the Renaissance retained its identity. The idea of the Renaissance as a distinct period, and even—as Jacob Burckhardt had claimed—the “leader of modern ages,” had stood the test of time, even through the war years in Europe and the West. That premise, however, was beginning to look too simple, if not erroneous. Had the Renaissance really existed? And did it bode good, or ill, for the future of the West?

  A German historical tradition of looking for a turning point in modern Europe definitely bolstered Renaissance identity, but there were more popular buttresses as well to make the idea all the more palatable: the larger-than-life Michelangelo; the perennial interest in the plotting Medici; and, as lighter fare, the allure of Dante and late medieval romance. In England, the artistic heritage of the Italian Renaissance had always loomed large. This explains why, in the postwar years, an outpost such as the Warburg Institute, now merged with the University of London, would shape the Renaissance curriculum in all British universities and stand as a chief defender of its importance for Western history. This defense of the Renaissance, not surprisingly, was enhanced by London’s best-endowed art history center, the Courtauld Institute of Art, which soon was in close affiliation with the Warburg Institute, jointly publishing a scholarly journal.8

  Nevertheless, there was a growing worry that the Renaissance was becoming hard to define. This is one reason for the increasingly piecemeal approach that historians began to take to Italy’s past, as evident in the detailed documentary work done by Marvin Becker and other archivists. The American approach even began to limit its focus to be on just one city. In general, it became harder to make sweeping statements about the Renaissance, and much safer to produced detailed and limited arguments. This was a long-term drift in history writing, a drift toward a narrower specialization that one historian called “learning more and more about less and less.”9

  In the face of this, the German émigrés in America, and the Warburg/Courtauld alliance in England, continued to defend the Italian Renaissance as something more than its parts. As late as the 1960s, Erwin Panofsky fairly represented the pro-Renaissance diagnosis and remedy: “There is a growing tendency, not so much to revise as to eliminate the concept of the Renaissance—to contest not only its uniqueness but its very existence.” To defend its distinctiveness, Panofsky used the analogy of the physiognomy (physical shape or appearance) of a human individual. The specifics of a person’s life and influence can be elusive and debated, but the basic individuality cannot be denied. A large or small historical period, including the Renaissance, “may be said to possess a ‘physiognomy’ no less definite, though no less difficult to describe in satisfactory manner, than a human individual,” he argued.10

  There was more at issue than simply defining a historical period, however. For all the apparent liberalism of the Renaissance—communal town councils, celebration of individual achievement, and the embrace of worldly pleasures—there was also an authoritarian aspect, perhaps typified by the Renaissance strongman, or what Machiavelli euphemistically called “the Prince.” With this in mind, some commentators before and after the Second World War blamed the “worldly” Renaissance for some of the major ills of the twentieth century, chiefly the rise of totalitarian regimes in Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union. It was mainly a criticism from religious quarters, a prelude to the modern debate on the origins of “secular” humanism, and how it can unduly empower a police state of experts and bureaucrats, writ large in the social engineering of the Nazis and the communists. Amid the horrors of the twentieth century, the philosophy of Platonism was also blamed for inspiring totalitarianism. The ancient Greek musings were charged, and then indicted, with having been a handmaiden to the later philosophy of Hegelianism—a source for both Nazism and Marxism—with its sometimes brutal view of the march of history under powerful men and states.

  At a time when public theology was quite acceptable in the English-speaking world—from the 1930s to the 1950s—a number of Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Greek Orthodox thinkers were forced to look for the causes of modern tribulations, and this led them to assert that Renaissance humanism had gone awry. The focus on human powers had forgotten a history of spiritual wisdom, these theologians said, leading to a modern “crisis of faith” and a
“crisis of the West.”11 Whereas the Jewish intellectuals among the prewar Warburgians in Hamburg had believed that Renaissance humanism provided a tolerant and cosmopolitan culture, from an alternative Christian point of view, the Renaissance and its twin, the Enlightenment, had been seedbeds of human hubris. Gone to their extreme, these early modern visions of human utopia, based on a presumed human genius and power, had in the twentieth century borne season after season of bad fruit: the First World War, the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Holocaust, and finally the mass systems of the Soviet Union and China.

  A representative voice of the new criticism was the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, a liberal Protestant whose analysis contained both reason and prophetic judgment. The Renaissance was, in fact, “the chief source of toleration in modern history,” Niebuhr said. Nevertheless, it was also “the real cradle of that very unchristian concept in reality: the autonomous individual.” Taking that further, “the mistake of the Renaissance was to overestimate the freedom and power of man in history.”12

  For many of these religious voices, the alternative was a return to some kind of time-tested tradition. In Catholicism, this was the revival of the medieval synthesis of faith and reason, generally called neo-Thomism. For Protestants, it was the so-called neo-orthodox movement. Based on a doctrinal biblicism or a religious existentialism, this wing of Christianity argued that undue belief in science and political power—a kind of modern original sin—had dispelled faith; without a robust religious faith, the human conceit of tyranny had filled the vacuum.