Piero's Light

by Larry Witham

  24.See Wallace K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948); and Denys Hay, ed., The Renaissance Debate (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965). It has been said that, by the 1960s, the topic of “the Renaissance period” had become so contested and over-analyzed that no more summary books appeared; scholars turned instead to narrow, specialized case studies in Italy’s “early modern period.”

  25.Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (New York: Modern Library, 2002 [1860]), 11.

  26.Ibid., 385.

  27.See David Carrier, “Piero della Fran­cesca and His Interpreters: Is There Progress in History?” History and Theory 26 (May 1987): 150-165.

  28.John Pope-Hennessy, “The Mystery of a Master: The Enigma of Piero,” book review, New Republic, March 31, 1986, 40. A typical list of hard dates on Piero’s life amounts to about thirty, and yet most bypass the real signposts: his personal life, travels, places of residence, when he did his paintings, and who exactly were his patrons, fellow painters, or assistants.

  29.Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, “Piero the Painter Blended Geometry with Religious Art,” Smithsonian, December 1992, 123.

  30.James R. Banker, “The Altarpiece of the Confraternity of Santa Maria della Misericordia in Borgo San­sepol­cro,” in Lavin, PFL, 23.

  31.The early dating approach to Piero hinges on three matters: a birthdate in 1412, his working with Antonio d’Anghiari as early as 1431, and his beginning to paint the Baptism of Christ in 1438. These determinations are the work of two scholars, James R. Banker and Frank Dabell, to whom I am indebted. However, all speculations about the life of Piero that I make in this book are my own and do not suggest that Banker or Dabell agree with my portrayals. For the “early” approach findings, see Banker, CSS, 226-36; 253-56; James R. Banker, “Piero della Fran­cesca as Assistant to Antonio d’Anghiari in the 1430s: Some Unpublished Documents,” Burlington Magazine 135 (1993): 16-21.

  PROLOGUE

  1.There is no English-language biography of Milanesi. His later career is covered in Piergiacomo Petrioli, Gaetano Milanesi: Erudizione e Storia Dell’Arte in Italia e Nell’Ottocento (Siena: Accademia senese degli Intronati, 2004). Nor did Milanesi keep a memoir of his various discoveries. I have reconstructed his finding of the 1439 document based on published accounts and e-mail interviews with Marina Laguzzi of the Archivi Degli Ospedali e Conventi, Archivio di Stato, Firenze, and with Silke Reuther, biographer of Ernst Harzen (to whom Milanesi first conveyed his discovery).

  2.Petrarch, quoted in James Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin, eds., The Portable Renaissance Reader (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 121.

  3.Quoted in English in Piero Bianconi, All the Paintings of Piero Della Fran­cesca, trans. Paul Colacicchi (New York: Hawthorn, 1962), 11. In Italian see Eugenio Battisti, Piero della Fran­cesca, vol. 2 (Milan: Istituto editoriale italiano, 1971), 219.

  4.Before the discovery of this 1439 date for use in scholarship, the writings of Luca Pacioli and Giorgio Vasari had stated various facts, while one document dating Piero exactly was discovered in 1822 in Urbino, placing him in that city in 1468. As Longhi said: “In 1822 there appear the first authentic documents concerning the artist: the ones published by PUNGILEONI.” See Longhi, PDF, 220. Nevertheless, for defining Piero as a Renaissance painter, and providing the earliest date, the 1439 discovery is considered the first modern-day turning point.

  5.Florence dealer William Spence, letter to his parents in England, March 2, 1854, quoted in John Fleming, “Art Dealing in the Risorgimento II,” Burlington Magazine 121 (August 1979): 498.

  6.John Charles Robinson, “Pictures by Piero della Fran­cesca,” The Times (London), June 15, 1874, 12.

  7.John Charles Robinson to Henry Cole, May 13, 1859, quoted in Fleming, “Art Dealing in the Risorgimento II,” 507.

  8.John Charles Robinson, Italian Sculpture of the Middle Ages and Period of the Revival of Art (London: Chapman and Hall, 1862), xiii, 94.

  9.Robinson, “Pictures by Piero della Fran­cesca,” 12.

  10.Quoted in Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, Piero della Fran­cesca’s Baptism of Christ (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 166.

  11.Nathan Silver, Piero della Fran­cesca in America: From San­sepol­cro to the East Coast (New York: The Frick Collection, 2013), 117-21. This painting, titled Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Angels, was purchased in Florence in 1837 by Lord Walter Trevelyan and held privately.

  12.John Charles Robinson to Henry Cole, May 13, 1859, quoted in Fleming, “Art Dealing in the Risorgimento II,” 507.

  13.Ibid., 508.

  14.Richard Redgrave to Henry Cole, October 29, 1860, quoted in Fleming, “Art Dealing in the Risorgimento II,” 507. Redgrave wrote from Florence, and Robinson was traveling with him at the time.

  15.Noted in Luciano Cheles, “Piero della Fran­cesca in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Italianist no. 14 (1994): 244. The queen bought the work in 1853.

  16.Francis Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion and Collecting in England and France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976), 85 n.75. The first comment on Robinson is Haskell’s summary. The second is from an official report on Robinson’s 1867 dismissal from the South Kensington Museum (which would evolve into the Victoria and Albert Museum).

  17.For a summary of the mid-century Piero revival, as modest as it was—being contained among a fairly elite group of collectors and artists—see Cheles, “Piero della Fran­cesca in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” 218-19, 248-49.

  CHAPTER 1

  1.Banker, CSS, 190-91.

  2.On skill and geometry see Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 14-16, 86-102.

  3.For more on such revivals during the Italian Renaissance see Timothy Verdon and John Henderson, eds., Christianity and the Renaissance: Image and Religious Imagination in the Quattro­cento (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990).

  4.See Michael Baxandall, Words for Pictures: Seven Papers on Renaissance Art and Criticism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 134.

  5.Ghiberti, quoted in Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves, eds., Artists on Art from the XIV to the XX Century (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 30.

  6.Quoted from Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr., The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 4. For the papal bureaucracy see Peter Partner, The Pope’s Men: The Papal Civil Service in the Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).

  7.Pius II, quoted in James Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin, eds., The Portable Renaissance Reader (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 75.

  8.See C. C. Bayley, War and Society in Renaissance Florence: The De Militia of Leonardo Bruni (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961). The serious wartime bloodletting in Italy began with the French invasion with “modern” weaponry in 1494. See M. E. Mallett and J. R. Hale, The Military Organisation of a Renaissance State: Venice c. 1400 to 1617 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 1-4.

  9.See Samuel Y. Edgerton, The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry: Art and Science on the Eve of the Scientific Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 47-76; and John White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987 [1957]), 23-52.

  10.There is some dispute on Piero’s education. See Paul F. Grendler, “What Piero Learned at School: Fifteenth-Century Vernacular Education,” in Lavin, PFL, 161-74; and Banker, CSS, 57-92, who disputes Grendler (pp. 87-88). I have followed Banker.

  11.Menso Folkerts, “Piero della Fran­cesca and Euclid,” in Emiliani, PDFSA, 293.

  12.Ibid., 294. Piero cites Companus in his Five Regular Solids. This was still the age of manuscripts when it came to Euclid, for the
first printed book version of Euclid’s Elements in Italian came in 1543.

  13.For the story of Piero’s interest in Archimedes see James R. Banker, “A Manuscript of the Works of Archimedes in the Hand of Piero della Fran­cesca,” Burlington Magazine 147 (March 2005): 165-69. See a fuller treatment in the forthcoming James R. Banker, Piero Della Fran­cesca: Artist and Man (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). See also a full discussion of Piero and Archimedes in Marshall Clagett, Archimedes in the Middle Ages, vol. 3 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1978), 383-415.

  14.Pythagoras, quoted by the Greek Neoplatonist philosopher Iamblichus of Chalcis in Life of Pythagoras, c. 300 bce.

  15.Quoted in Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, eds., The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961), 1171. Most of Plato’s mathematical allusions appear in Timaeus, his dialogue on the natural world.

  16.The Pythagorean theorem states: In any right-angle triangle, the sum of the squares of the two legs (a and b) on the right angle is equal to the square of the hypotenuse, or third leg (c). As to its validity, the Pythagorean theorem would in time number up to ninety types of proof, perhaps the most-proved theorem in geometry. Although it is stated as finding squared shapes along the triangle’s sides, its ability to determine the length of the hypotenuse provided a simple way for surveyors to measure land, as Piero would have seen in his own day.

  17.See Stephen Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210-1685 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 96-97; David C. Lindberg, Roger Bacon and the Origins of Perspectiva in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), lxvii-lxviii; and Edgerton, The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry, 47-48.

  18.Banker, CSS, 135-36, 146-48.

  19.Cennino d’ Andrea Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook (Il Libro Dell’Arte), trans. Daniel V. Thompson (New York: Dover, 1960), 3.

  20.Keith Christiansen, Gentile da Fabriano (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982).

  21.Vitruvius Pollio, The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Morris Hicky Morgan (New York: Dover, 1960), 198.

  22.Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook, 3.

  23.Banker, CSS, 179.

  24.For Antonio’s biography and an account of Piero’s work with him see Banker, CSS, 173-201.

  25.Ibid., 174.

  26.Ibid., 195.

  27.Nathan Silver, Piero della Fran­cesca in America: From San­sepol­cro to the East Coast (New York: The Frick Collection, 2013), 60; Nathan Silver, “Piero della Fran­cesca: From Borgo San Sepolcro to the East Coast,” lecture, The Frick Collection, New York City, May 18, 2013. Silver points out that in Piero’s lifetime the old-style multi-panel polyptych would give way to the single large panel, making the altarpiece a kind of window or stage rather than flat icon.

  28.Quoted in Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, “The Great Theory of Beauty and its Decline,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 31 (1972): 168. For a much lengthier survey see Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, trans. Hugh Bredin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002 [1959]).

  29.Aquinas, quoted in Ekbert Faas, The Genealogy of Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 72.

  30.For a history of the philosophical literature available on art, theology, and beauty see Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages. Most of these written materials would have survived only in monasteries, some universities, and the private libraries of princes or popes. Despite the rich variety, Eco notes that: “Despite the fact that they connected the artistic with the aesthetic, the Medievals had only a scant understanding of the specifically artistic. They lacked a theory of the fine arts. They had no conception of art in the modern sense, as the construction of objects whose primary function is to be enjoyed aesthetically, and which have the high status that this entails” (p. 97).

  31.Piero, quoted from his On Perspective in Baxandall, Words for Pictures, 152. The Italian is in Piero della Fran­cesca, De prospectiva pingendi, ed. G. Nicco Fasola (Florence, 1942), 98.

  32.Denys Hay, The Italian Renaissance in Its Historical Background (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 48.

  33.Quoted in Bruce R. Cole, The Renaissance Artist at Work: From Pisano to Titian (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1983), 52.

  34.Rucellai, quoted in Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, 2.

  CHAPTER 2

  1.Banker, CSS, 197.

  2.Bruni, quoted in James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, vol. 1 (New York: E. J. Brill, 1990), 50.

  3.The dukes of Burgundy had domains that included central France and the Netherlands, and it was the French and early Flemish artists in these territories from whom the dukes commissioned works of art. French realism also arose from the maturing of French manuscript illumination. In Italy, too, Fra Angelico first learned his realism as a manuscript illuminator, then moved on to frescos and panel paintings.

  4.Timothy Verdon and John Henderson, eds., Christianity and the Renaissance: Image and Religious Imagination in the Quattro­cento (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 52, 64-65.

  5.Traversari, quoted in Dennis F. Lackner, “The Camaldolese Academy: Ambrogio Traversari, Marsilio Ficino and the Christian Platonic Tradition,” in Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy, ed. Michael J. B. Allen and Valery Rees (Boston: Brill, 2002), 19.

  6.See Franco Borsi, Leon Battista Alberti, trans. Rudolf G. Carpanini (New York: Harper and Row, 1977); and Franco Borsi, ed. Leon Battista Alberti: The Complete Works, trans. Rudolf G. Carpanini (New York: Electa/Rizzoli, 1989).

  7.Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. Cecil Grayson (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 60.

  8.Banker, CSS, 224.

  9.For all we know, the Franciscans may have asked Piero to finish Antonio’s failed altarpiece, though Piero did not do so. The Franciscans’ ultimate solution was to recruit the reputable Sienese painter Sassetta. The Franciscans contracted with him in September 1437. Starting from scratch, Sassetta’s workshop in Siena built a new structure and he began to paint its sixty panels. It became a famous work by Sassetta in San­sepol­cro.

  10.Banker, CSS, 234-42.

  11.Pliny the Younger, The Complete Letters, trans. P. G. Walsh (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 114.

  12.For the history of Piero’s workshops in San­sepol­cro see James R. Banker, “The Second ‘Casa di Piero della Fran­cesca’ and Hypotheses on Piero’s Studio and his Role as Builder in Borgo San Sepolcro,” in Mosaics of Friendship: Studies in Art and History for Eve Borsook, ed. Ornella F. Osti (Firenze, Centro Di, 1999), 151-53.

  13.The question of whether Piero ever met Alberti is not resolved by any surviving documents. The most likely place, however, does seem to be Florence. Both Piero and Alberti were in Ferrara, Rimini, Urbino, and Rome in a similar nexus of years, but specific dates available suggest that they may have missed each other completely. There is no record of whether Piero read Alberti’s On Painting early in his career, when, indeed, there were surely only a few handwritten manuscripts around. For the possible influence of Alberti on Piero see Borsi, Leon Battista Alberti, 298-99.

  14.The late-Roman statesman, writer, Christian Platonist, and mathematician Boethius coined the Latin term perspectiva as a translation of the Greek term “optics.”

  15.Kim Williams, Lionell March, and Stephen R. Wassell, eds., The Mathematical Works of Leon Battista Alberti (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2010), 153 n.2.

  16.See David C. Lindberg, Roger Bacon and the Origins of Perspectiva in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 116-21; and David C. Lindberg, ed. and trans., John Pecham and the Science of Optics: Perspectiva Communis (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970). Like
the Franciscan Pecham, Witelo was a Platonist. His book, simply titled Perspectiva, had a section on Platonist metaphysics.

  17.On religion and sermons related to Renaissance optics see Samuel Y. Edgerton, The Mirror, the Window, and the Telescope: How Renaissance Linear Perspective Changed Our Vision of the Universe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 30-38; and Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 40-55. For the way light changed from a spiritual to a material concept in early Renaissance painting see Paul Hills, The Light of Early Italian Painting (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987).

  18.Quoted in Edgerton, The Mirror, the Window, and the Telescope, 39. See also Creighton Gilbert, “The Archbishop on the Painters of Florence, 1450,” Art Bulletin 41 (1959): 75-87. In the early 1400s, Antonino Pierozzi was prior of San Marco Church, where he supervised Fra Angelico’s painting of devotional murals. He became archbishop of Florence in 1446. Franciscan preachers could draw upon the new “Franciscan optics,” which was distinctly Platonic. Sermonizing Dominicans, whose spiritual guide was Thomas Aquinas, could employ the Aristotelian idea of “species” of each existence being conveyed to the eye. For Christians, this included the spiritual species of divine things. With this in mind, some early Renaissance painters added little gold dots to show where species—like a divine visual ray—were conveyed from God or angels to human figures, such as the Virgin Mary.