by Larry Witham
10.See the boldest such statement of this Piero-Cézanne linkage to Cubism (“… this very composition by Cézanne inspired the first true Cubist landscapes …”) in Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, “Piero the Painter Blended Geometry with Religious Art,” Smithsonian, December 1992, 126.
11.See Elam, Roger Fry and the Re-Evaluation of Piero della Francesca, 9. In making these connections, Fry was an “unrecognized player” in the Piero revival, Elam persuasively argues.
12.Quoted in Ibid., 22.
13.Quoted in Ibid., 38.
14.Quoted in Ibid., 24-25.
15.Quoted in Ibid., 27, 33.
16.Fry, quoted in Frances Spalding, Roger Fry: Art and Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980), 118.
17.Fry, quoted from 1910 and 1911 in Roger Fry, Transformations (London: Chatto and Windus, 1926), 191; and Roger Fry, A Roger Fry Reader, ed. Christopher Reed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 91.
18.Quoted in Elam, Roger Fry and the Re-Evaluation of Piero della Francesca, 46.
19.For examples of early-twentieth-century discoveries about Piero see Longhi, PDF, 236-51.
20.Quoted in Kenneth Clark, Piero della Francesca (London: Phaidon, 1951), 37.
21.Mancini’s discovery of the will draft is cited in Longhi, PDF, 187.
22.On Mancini see Margaret Daly Davis, Piero della Francesca’s Mathematical Treatises: The “Trattato d’abaco” and “Libellus de quinque corporibus regularibus” (Ravenna: Longo, 1977), 22. In particular, Mancini found the Piero original in the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence, where it had ended up after being part of the manuscript collection of Lord Ashburnham in London, who had earlier bought much of the collection from Guglielmo Libri, the Italian mathematical historian and manuscript collector.
23.See James R. Banker, “A Manuscript of the Works of Archimedes in the Hand of Piero della Francesca,” Burlington Magazine 147 (March 2005): 165 n.2.
24.See Ernst Harzen, “Über den Maler Pietro degli Franceschi und seinen vermeintlichen Plagiarius den Franziskanermönch Luca Pacioli,” Archiv für die zeichenden Künste (Leipzig, 1856): 231-244; on Jordan see Davis, Piero della Francesca’s Mathematical Treatises, 99.
25.See Florian Cajori, book review, The American Mathematical Monthly 23 (January-December 1916), 384, which cites G. Pittarelli in Atti del IV. Congresso dei mathematici, tom, III, Roma, 1909. For a discussion of the charge of plagiarism against Pacioli, or pro-Pacioli commentators who questioned Piero’s ability at mathematics, see herein chapter 7, n.7.
26.The following list of Piero originals and their modern published book forms is provided by Davis, Piero della Francesca’s Mathematical Treatises, 1: Trattato d’abaco (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS. Ashb. 280/359-291); Libellus de quinque corporibus regularibus (Rome, Biblioteca Vaticana, MS. Vat.Urb.lat. 632); and De prospectiva pingendi (Parma, Biblioteca Palatina, MS. 1576, in Italian; Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Cod. Ambr. C. 307, in Latin). Their modern published forms are: Trattato d’abaco, ed. G. Arrighi (Pisa, 1970); L’opera “De corporibus regularibus” di Pietro Franceschi detto della Francesca usurpata da Fra Luca Pacioli, ed. G. Mancini (Rome, 1916); De prospectiva pingendi, ed. C. Winterberg (Strassburg, 1899); De prospectiva pingendi, ed. G. Nicco Fasola, 2 vols. (Florence, 1942).
27.Piero, quoted in his preface letter to Five Regular Solids as translated in Judith V. Field, Piero Della Francesca: A Mathematician’s Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 350-55. See also Mark A. Peterson, “The Geometry of Piero della Francesca,” The Mathematical Intelligencer 19 (Summer 1997): 33-37.
28.Leonardo Olschki, Geschichte der neusprachlichen wissenschaftlichen Literatur vol. 1 (Leipzig/Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1919); and Leonardo Olschki, The Genius of Italy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949).
29.American writers who significantly unveiled Piero included W. G. Waters in his Piero della Francesca (1901), which presented forty black-and-white plates of Piero’s work, and Egerton Williams in his travel guide, The Hill Towns of Italy (1904).
30.For this account see Nathan Silver, Piero della Francesca in America: From Sansepolcro to the East Coast (New York: The Frick Collection, 2013), 20-22. One work went to Rockefeller in 1929 for $375,000 and another to the Frick Collection in 1936 for $400,000.
31.Bernard Berenson, The Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance, second edition (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909 [1897, Italian]), iii.
32.Ibid., 16, 69.
33.Ibid., 69, 70, 71, 72.
34.Bernard Berenson, Piero della Francesca, or the Ineloquent in Art (New York: Macmillan, 1954 [1950]), 5, 6, 7 (italics in original).
35.Adolfo Venturi, Storia Dell’ Arte Italiana, vol. 7 (Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint Ltd., 1967 [1911, Milan]), 432-486.
36.Roberto Longhi, “Piero Francesca and the Development of Venetian Painting,” L’Arte (1914): 198-221, 241-56.
37.Longhi, PDF, 244.
38.German critic, quoted in Longhi, PDF, 245.
39.Aldofo Venturi, Piero Della Francesca (Firezne: Presso Giorgio and Piero Alinari, 1922), 67.
40.Longhi, PDF, 245.
41.Ibid., 256.
42.Ibid., 245.
43.Ibid., 244-45, 44.
44.Ibid., 144.
45.André Lohte, La Nouvelle Revue Française (January 1930), quoted in Longhi, PDF, 256. Longhi notes that the Lohte article “exhumed” an earlier one by art historian Leon Rosenthal, director of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, who had claimed to find the golden ratio in the Death of Adam lunette of the Arezzo frescos.
46.For example, Frank Jewett Mather, A History of Italian Painting (New York: H. Holt and Co., 1923) associated Piero with Manet; Albert Barnes, The Art in Painting (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1937), linked Piero to Puvis, Picasso, and others.
47.Longhi, PDF, 272. At the end of his career, Longhi still was trying to clear the air on the Cubism issue and is worth quoting from the 1962 edition of his book: “The names which do turn up in my book, and most forcefully, are those of Cézanne and Seurat” (267). The era of Seurat and Cézanne had been “hermetically sealed off” from the Cubist and abstract era (272). Longhi’s most important assertion is that “Seurat’s ‘Synthetism’ was derived from Piero, by way of his more than probable acquaintance” with copies of the Arezzo frescos (262).
48.Longhi, PDF, 272.
49.Berenson, Piero della Francesca, or the Ineloquent in Art, 25.
50.Heinrich Wölfflin, The Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, trans. M. D. Hottinger (New York: Dover, 1950 [1932, 1915]), 237, 11, 13, 277. In the categories of beholding, artists of various periods swung between opposing styles: linear or painterly, clarity or complexity, flatness or depth, multiplicity or unity, closed or open form (14-16).
51.Croce, quoted in Udo Kultermann, The History of Art History (New York: Abaris, 1993), 176; Wölfflin, The Principles of Art History, 230. For the contrast between Wölfflin and Croce see Kultermann, The History of Art History, 176.
52.See Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic: As Science of Expression and General Linguistic, trans. Douglas Ainslie (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1970), 8-15; and Croce, quoted in Angelo A. de Gennaro, The Philosophy of Benedetto Croce (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), 39.
53.The facing-off of metaphysical idealism with positivism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been a common theme in intellectual histories. This has been the case especially in histories that explain the idealist resurgences seen in five areas: in figures such as Henri Bergson and Croce; in idealist and religious reactions to materialist Darwinism and Marxism; in the return of Hegelian vitalism in science; in natural philosophy; and in the re-emergence of transcendentalism with the neo-Kantians.
54.Kul
termann, The History of Art History, 176.
55.See E. H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London: Phaidon, 1986), and E. H. Gombrich, “Aby Warburg: His Aims and Methods: An Anniversary Lecture,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 62 (1999): 268-282.
56.Warburg’s Rome lecture, quoted in Gombrich, “Aby Warburg: His Aims and Methods,” 275.
57.A. Warburg, “Piero Della Francescas Constantinschlacht in der Aquarellkopie des Johann Anton Ramboux,” in Aldolfo Venturi, L’Italia e l’arte straniera: atti del X Congresso Internazionale di Storia dell’Arte in Roma (1912), Roma 1922. In this paper, Warburg cites the details available in the watercolor copies of the Arezzo fresco by Ramboux. This Warburg paper was republished in 1922 along with reproductions of Ramboux’s work.
58.Cassirer, quoted from dedication page, Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963).
59.Ibid., viii, 15, 10.
60.Edward Skidelsky, Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 60.
61.For Cassirer’s interest in Einstein see Ibid., 81-82.
62.For a biography of Panofsky see Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984).
63.Ibid., 23.
64.Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1991 [1925]), 41, 68.
65.Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Harper and Row, 1962 [1939]), 14, 8.
66.William Hood, “The State of Research in Italian Renaissance Art,” Art Bulletin 69 (June 1987): 174-86. Hood surveys several directions in modern research, but sees the main split between empirical “social history” and the iconological approach of Panofsky. He appeals for a return to an older speculative approach with unifying themes, not just mounds of disparate empirical data. See his conclusion, 185-86.
67.Kenneth Clark, Piero della Francesca (London: Phaidon, 1951). Clark makes no fewer than twenty-five references to “beauty” in Piero’s work.
68.Ibid., 40.
69.Ernst H. Gombrich, “The Literature of Art: Piero della Francesca,” book review, Burlington Magazine 94 (June 1952), 177-78.
70.Kenneth Clark, “Stories of Art,” New York Review of Books, November 24, 1977, 36.
71.Wölfflin’s terminology was influential in twentieth-century art history with words such as “schema,” the “eye,” “modes of vision,” and other references to physical and visual psychology. Gombrich naturally uses many of the same terms in his own theories. However, Gombrich, mirroring his friend Karl Popper, rejected Hegelianism root and branch, eventually calling all such “ready-made paradigms” (by Hegel, Wölfflin, Panofsky, or others) as unhealthy for discussing art. He instead argued for a “pluralism” in approaches. See Ernst Gombrich, “A Plea for Pluralism,” American Art Journal 3 (Spring 1971): 83-87.
72.Gombrich, “The Literature of Art: Piero della Francesca,” 178.
73.Ibid., 177-78.
74.Clark, “Stories of Art,” 38.
75.E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art (New York: Phaidon, 1966 [1950]), 190.
76.The most recent work on the Darwinian origins of art is Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008). He adopts the sociobiological (or cognitive-psychology) approach. In this late-twentieth-century debate, evolutionists such as Stephen Jay Gould, however, argued that art is simply an accidental byproduct that did not relate to adaptation for survival. The third approach, also included in Dutton, is to see art related primarily to sexual selection: females looking for fit males (who display colorful skills) for reproductive survival.
77.For his “schema and correction” and “mental sets,” see Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion, second edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961 [1960]), 60-62, 313. For his “logic of fashion,” see Ernst Gombrich, “The Logic of Vanity Fair: Alternatives to Historicism in the Study of Fashions, Style, and Taste,” in E. H. Gombrich, Ideals and Idols: Essays on Values in History and in Art (London: Phaidon, 1979), 60-92.
78.For this view on Gombrich see John Onians, “Gombrich,” in John Onians, Neuroarthistory: From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 159-77.
79.Ibid., 161-63.
80.Ernst Gombrich, “From the Revival of Letters to the Reform of the Arts: Niccoló Niccoli and Filippo Brunelleschi,” Essays in the History of Art Presented to Rudolf Wittkower, vol. 2, ed. Douglas Fraser, Howard Hibbard, and Milton J. Lewine (London: Phaidon, 1967), 80.
81.Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 101; and E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Arts (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 12, 114.
82.Quoted in E. H. Gombrich, A Lifelong Interest: Conversations on Art and Science with Didier Eribon (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993), 133.
83.In the twentieth century, most of the “modernist” alternatives were applied by Protestantism, since the papacy officially condemned “modernism” at the turn of the twentieth century. In general, however, modernist Christianity everywhere tried to revise Bible interpretation and historic doctrines based on the findings of science (such as cosmology, human origins, and Darwinian evolution). With the rise of totalitarianism, moreover, Protestantism especially turned to revelation, existentialism, psychology—and even an argument for “secular Christianity”—as ways to retain the relevance of religion in a world of new intellectual political forces. While both Protestants and Catholics frequently turned to revivals of past traditions, now updated, even the Catholics drew upon modernist resources such as Kant and existentialism to explain faith in the modern world. See the leading Catholic theologian Karl Rahner’s “transcendental Thomism,” for example.
84.For Tillich’s collected essays on art and theology, see Paul Tillich, On Art and Architecture, ed. John Dillenberger (New York: Crossroads, 1987).
85.Although scientists tend not to call themselves transcendentalists, many have rejected the old scientific conceit—now called scientism as well as positivism—that scientists are supremely rational, disinterested, and accurate finders of truth. Instead, a new generation of scientists (and sociologists of science) concedes that science can be as irrational (even as mystical) as any human enterprise, influenced by personal, cultural, and political biases; the main difference being that science must use rigorous methodologies to test its claims about reality to verify their truth as a “theory” (which is tentatively “true” until proven inadequate by new theories and testing). For an even-handed cultural approach to science, and how not only “facts” but “themes” shape its findings, see Gerald Holton, Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought: Kepler to Einstein (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973).
86.Plato, quoted in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961), 1178.
87.Rudolf Wittkower and B. A. R. Carter, “The Perspective of Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 16 (1953): 295.
88.Bruce Cole, “Piero della Francesca: The Flagellation by Marilyn Aronberg Lavin,” book review, The Burlington Magazine 115 (November 1973): 749-50. Lavin has perhaps written the largest number of English-language books and journal articles on the art of Piero. The books include her general overview and work on the Baptism of Christ and The Flagellation. Her art-historian husband, Irving Lavin, in turn, was a close associate of Erwin Panofsky; thus, iconology was a prevailing interest in the Lavins’ academic studies.
89.John Wilton-Ely, “The Fortunes of Piero della Francesca in Britain and the United States of America,” in Emiliani, P
DFSA, 562-63. Wilton-Ely notes that the last significant English-language articles proposing empirical dates for Piero’s works came in 1941 in journal articles by Creighton Gilbert on the Montefeltro diptych and by Millard Meiss on the Saint Augustine Altarpiece. After that, iconographical interpretations prevailed, “since firm dates and biographical documentation in Piero’s career remain comparatively scant.”
90.Creighton Gilbert, Change in Piero della Francesca (Locust Valley, NY: J. J. Augustin, 1968).
91.For advocacy of “theory” in Renaissance historiography see James Elkins and Robert Williams, eds., Renaissance Theory (New York: Routledge, 2008). This book includes a survey of the “interpretative strategies” taken in academic publications on art history from the 1930s to 2000; the dominant spikes since the 1970s and 1980s, in order of intensity, are feminism, psychoanalysis, semiotics, and the Lacanian “gaze” approach. See p. viii.
92.Laurie Schneider, “The Iconography of Piero della Francesca’s Frescos Illustrating the Legend of the True Cross in the Church of San Francesco in Arezzo,” Art Quarterly 32 (1969): 23-48; and Laurie Schneider Adams, Art and Psychoanalysis (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), 107-14, 230-31.
93.Quoted in Longhi, PDF, 187.
94.Hubert Damisch, A Childhood Memory by Piero della Francesca, trans. John Goodman (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007).
95.Carlo Ginzburg, The Enigma of Piero: Piero della Francesca, new edition, trans. Martin Ryle and Kate Soper (London: Verso, 2002 [1985]).
96.John Pope-Hennessy, “The Mystery of a Master: The Enigma of Piero,” book review, New Republic, March 31, 1986, 40.
97.Cole, “Piero della Francesca: The Flagellation by Marilyn Aronberg Lavin,” 749-50.
98.Longhi, PDF, 253.
CHAPTER 10
1.Piero, quoted from his On Perspective, in Michael Baxandall, Words for Pictures, 152. The Italian is in Piero della Francesca, De prospectiva pingendi, ed. G. Nicco Fasola (Florence, 1942), 98.
