by Larry Witham
10.Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 7, 4.
11.See Herbert Weisinger, “The Attack on the Renaissance in Theology Today,” Studies in the Renaissance 2 (1955), 176-189. Between the 1930s and 1950s, the critics of the Renaissance heritage became a Who’s Who in theology: Emile Brunner and Karl Barth from Germany, John Ballie and Christopher Dawson from Britain, Étienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain from France, Nikolai Burdiev from Russia, and Reinhold Niebuhr and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen from America.
12.Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: Human Destiny: A Christian Interpretation, 1. Human Nature, 2. Human Destiny, one-volume edition (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964), 221, 68, 61.
13.For the Hellenism/Hebraism theme, see Roland H. Bainton, “Man, God, and the Church in the Age of the Renaissance,” The Renaissance, ed. Wallace K. Ferguson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962 [1953]), 87-96. The Renaissance legacy in modern religion is, of course, complex (as were the theological currents of Piero’s Quattrocento). For the theme of this book, it is worth noting that the three modern Christian approaches had roots in Platonist dualism and its epistemology of “intelligible” Ideas and the “sensible” world: liberal Protestantism, existentialism, and Kantian theology (adopted even by some Catholic theologians). Liberal Protestantism is perhaps the prevailing example of Platonist influence. This Protestant approach was born with the German theologian Friedrich Schliermacher (1768-1834), who had a “passion for Plato.” Rather than emphasizing doctrines, Schliermacher said religion is the “feeling of absolute dependence” on something higher, an idea that emphasized intuition. Like Cusanus, he found Platonist philosophy a helpful basis on which to generalize Christian thought, a pattern that lasted for the next century and blossomed into liberal, ecumenical Protestantism. See Friedrich Schliermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, ed. Richard Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), xvii, xi-xli; and Jacqueline Mariña, ed., Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schliermacher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 37.
14.Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971 [1962]), 302 n.61, 31.
15.When it came to authoritarianism, Popper overlooked the fact that the fascists and Nazis had ample sources besides Platonism. Mussolini built his ideology on the Roman Empire and the medieval Italian commune. The National Socialists in Germany drew upon pagan Nordic mythology and not a little social Darwinism. Even if Piero, some Renaissance artists, the Medici court, and the Camaldolese religious order leaned Platonist in their aesthetics and Christianity, this was hardly an invitation to totalitarianism. See Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies: The Spell of Plato, vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971 [1944). In volume 2, he argues that Aristotle’s thought is “entirely dominated” by Plato’s as well. Popper began writing the book in 1938 after Germany invaded Austria. In the acknowledgements, Popper thanks Ernst Gombrich for helping get the book published.
16.Regarding the idea that Piero has been endorsed by an elite art world, though presumably by no fault of his own, see Albert Boime, “Piero and the Two Cultures,” in Lavin, PFL, 256. Boime speaks of the “elitist concern,” and even the Christian antisemitism, of some admirers and advocates of Piero.
17.Two classic cases are the literary critic Susan Sontag and the painter Philip Guston, both of whom started on the radical left but later in life praised the old masters. Guston spoke of Piero as his favorite artist. Sontag, in her famous essay Against Interpretation, argued that a more traditional and descriptive appreciation of external art forms—in literature, but also paintings by implication—would help the modern sensibility far more than the endless, rootless, and over-intellectualized interpretation of art that had become fashionable.
18.Anthony Bertram, “Piero della Francesca and the Twentieth Century,” The Studio (1951): 120-23.
19.Quoted in Longhi, PDF, 263. This first volume of André Malraux’s Museum Without Walls was published in French in 1947.
20.Grendler, Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, vol. 5, 283. See also William Hood, “The State of Research in Italian Renaissance Art,” The Art Bulletin 69 (June 1987): 174-86.
21.Eugenio Battisti, Piero della Francesca, 2 vols. (Milan: Istituto editoriale italiano, 1971).
22.J. C. Robinson, “To the Editors of The Times,” The Times (London), June 9, 1874, 7.
23.Cited in Ross King, Leonardo and the Last Supper (New York: Walker, 2012), 274.
24.Tim Butcher, “The Man Who Saved The Resurrection,” BBC News, December 23, 2011 (www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16306893).
25.These art-restoration examples have been drawn from several sources, especially Piero Bianconi, All the Paintings of Piero Della Francesca, trans. Paul Colacicchi (New York: Hawthorn, 1962). For the “ingenious method,” see Bruce R. Cole, The Renaissance Artist at Work: From Pisano to Titian (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1983), 93-94.
26.See “The Crucifixion,” in Nathan Silver, ed., Piero della Francesca in America: From Sansepolcro to the East Coast (New York: The Frick Collection, 2013), 110.
27.Crowe and Cavalcaselle, quoted from 1864 in Bianconi, All the Paintings of Piero Della Francesca, 61.
28.See Caroline Boucher, “Restorers’ Subtle Touch Brings Piero’s Genius to Glorious Life,” The Observer (London), May 7, 2000 (http:www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2000/may/07/observerescapesection); and Ralph Blumenthal, “The Restoration of Piero’s Renaissance Masterwork,” New York Times, April 6, 2000, E1. The restoration was paid for by the Banca Popolare dell’Etruria e del Lazio, which also published a compendium of articles on the entire fifteen-year project.
29.Telephone interview with Frank Dabell, August 4, 2012. All quotes are from the interview.
30.James R. Banker, Death in The Community: Memorialization and Confraternities in an Italian Commune (Sansepolcro) in the Late Middle Ages (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1988).
31.Frank Dabell, “Antonio d’ Anghiari e gli inizi di Piero della Francesca,” Paragone 417 (1984): 73-94.
32.James R. Banker, “Piero della Francesca as Assistant to Antonio d’Anghiari in the 1430s: Some Unpublished Documents,” Burlington Magazine, 135 (1993): 16.
33.Philip Hendy, Piero della Francesca and the Early Renaissance (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 72. Hendy is protesting Longhi’s early date of the Baptism.
34.Banker, CSS, 136.
35.See the two articles by this German scholar: Christopher Frommel, “Francesco del Borgo: Architekt Pius’ II, und Pauls II’,” Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 20 (1983): 108-45; 21 (1984): 129-38.
36.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. Banker credits the antique writing expert Armando Petrucci with authenticating the traits of Piero’s handwriting in the Archimedean manuscript in the Biblioteca Riccardiana in Florence.
37.See the 2007 Biblioteca Riccardiana press release, “L’Archimede autografo di Piero della Francesca,” di Giovanna Lazzi: (http:www.riccardiana.firenze.sbn.it/allegati/2007-2_1.pdf). In cooperation with the World Digital Library, the Biblioteca Riccardiana has posted a digital copy of the entire Piero work at (http:www.wdl.org/en/item/10646/).
38.Banker, “Three Geniuses and a Franciscan Friar.”
39.Attilio Brilli, In Search of Piero: A Guide to the Tuscany of Piero della Francesca, trans. D. Hodges (Milan: Electa, 1990). See front matter.
40.Marilyn Aronberg Lavin. Piero della Francesca (New York: Phaidon, 2002), 116.
41.Carl Brandon Strehlke, “Urbino, Monterchi, Sansepolcro and Florence: The Piero Exhibitions,” Burlington Magazine 134 (December 1992): 821-23.
42.Ibid., 823.
43.The U.S.
consortium is documented in Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, ed., Piero della Francesca and His Legacy (Washington, D.C., and New Haven, CT: National Gallery of Art/Yale University Press, 1995). The leading European conferences for 1992 were held in Arezzo (October 8-11) and Sansepolcro (October 12). Their many authoritative papers on Piero are documented in Marisa Dalai Emiliani e Valter Curzi, eds., Piero della Francesca tra arte e scienza: atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Arezzo, 8-11 ottobre 1992, Sansepolcro, 12 ottobre (Venezia: Marsilio, 1996).
44.“Introduction,” in Lavin, PDFL, 10.
45.Banker, “Piero della Francesca as Assistant to Antonio d’Anghiari in the 1430s,” 16.
46.Banker, “Contributions to the Chronology of the Life and Works of Piero della Francesca,” in Arte cristiana, 92 (2004), 248. In this essay, Banker reviewed eight critical dates, questioning them and offering the most likely alternative interpretations.
47.Machtelt Israels, quoted in Machtelt Israels, “Piero at Home: The Art of Piero della Francesca,” lecture, The Frick Collection, New York City, February 13, 2013.
Epilogue
1.The legitimacy of comparing Platonism and neuroscience as both viewing the brain as seeking constants and essences is argued above in chapter 10, n.27. The brain’s desire for constants and essences is not in question; the debate is over the origin of that desire, material versus transcendental. Indeed, anti-Platonists frequently cite him as erroneous in the face of neuroscience. See Semir Zeki, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), and John Onians, Neuroarthistory: From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007).
2.On children and essences see Frank C. Keil, Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); Justin L. Barrett, Born Believers: The Science of Children’s Religious Beliefs (Free Press, 2012); and Paul Bloom, How Pleasure Works (New York: Norton, 2010), 14-18.
3.On intuitive dualism see Paul Bloom, Descartes’s Baby: How Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human (New York: Basic Books, 2004). See also Henry Wellman and Carl Johnson, “Developmental Dualism: From Intuitive Understanding to Transcendental Ideas,” in Psycho-Physical Dualism Today: An Interdisciplinary Approach, ed. Alessandro Antonietti, Antonella Corradini, and E. Jonathan Lowe (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), 3-36.
4.This fact surfaced during the widespread debates over the “new atheism” in the first decade of the twenty-first century. When asked for alternatives to religion, the “new atheists,” who often relied on brain science, cited such qualities as wonder, mystery, and the numinous. For citation of this irony, see Bloom, How Pleasure Works, 211-15.
5.The origins of the Scientific Revolution are much debated. In this context, Piero scholar James Banker ranks Piero as an important link on the way to Galilean science. See James R. Banker, “Three Geniuses and a Franciscan Friar,” lecture, The Frick Collection, New York City, March 20, 2013.
6.Wisdom of Solomon, 11:20; Plato, Timaeus, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961), 1182.
7.This emphasis on psychology and neuroscience excludes the postmodern trend that says “language” creates reality, and thus the study of our language—not our biology or psychology—will explain how we truly perceive reality. This has Platonist origins as well, as suggested by Ernst Cassirer’s argument that language was a kind of “symbolic form” that existed between the human mind and reality. This debate is fearsome today between the sciences and humanities, and in this book I have set aside this great linguistic debate, just as I have set aside debates on supernatural religion, to focus instead on science and Platonist philosophy as two dynamic solutions to modern questions.
8.Quite apart from religion, materialist scientists debate among themselves as to whether they can answer everything or whether there are limits to scientific methods. Some scientists warn against the ideology of “scientism,” preferring to recognize the futility of science’s aspiring to absolute knowledge. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines scientism as “an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science.” See also Philip Kitcher, “The Trouble with Scientism,” New Republic, May 24, 2012; Martin Ryder, “Scientism,” Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics (New York: Macmillan Reference, 2005).
9.The idea of the counterintuitive experience has been tied primarily to religion, but also is suggested in visual neuroscience in cases where the brain must resolve visual experiences that do not match its perceptual needs. For the “What and Where” analysis see Margaret Livingston, Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing (New York: Abrams, 2002), 50-52, 64-65. For counterintuitive theories of religion see Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained (New York: Basic Books, 2001), and Todd Tremlin, Minds and Gods: The Cognitive Foundations of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
10.See Huxley’s essay, “The Best Picture,” in John Pope-Hennessy, The Piero della Francesca Trail (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), 5-11.
11.Ibid., 7.
12.Mary Mothersill, Beauty Restored (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 374-75. She defines beauty as “notable pleasure,” agreeing with Kant that beauty must be something beyond the “merely agreeable.”
13.Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Free Press, 1979), 39.
14.The terms Realism and Idealism have had a complex pedigree in the history of religion, philosophy, and science. The important distinction is how they are used when talking about existence (ontology) or talking about human knowing (epistemology). On the first, Idealism means the existence of a god or universal mind that causes existence, whereas Realism, in effect, means there is only matter. In regard to epistemology, Idealism argues that “mind” is superior to the physical senses in creating perception; a Realist epistemology, at the same time, simply says that the physical world is real as separate from the mind (and the mind is a material product of that real physical world). In this “knowing” debate, connecting the mind to the world “out there” is the main issue. On one extreme, there is “naïve realism”—the belief that the physical senses know the physical world precisely. On the other Idealist extreme, the world is entirely elusive (or even does not exist!) without a spiritual mind to organize its infinite flux. The debate is interminably complex. Traditional Christianity, for example, is Idealist in ontology (God exists, therefore we exist), but both Idealist and Realist in knowing: that is, God created a world independent of the human mind; yet, for humans, a mind with divine origins—typically called the soul—is necessary to know, by intuition or “spiritual” sense, the nature and origin of the real Creation.
15.For arguments supporting the moderate and reasonable nature of Platonism, see John Wild, Plato’s Modern Enemies and the Theory of Natural Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953); Ronald B. Levinson, In Defense of Plato (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953); and Lawrence F. Hundersmarck, “Plato,” in Ian P. McGreal, ed., Great Thinkers of the Western World (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 27-28.
16.See Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: Norton, 2011), 262-63.
17.The Declaration of Independence speaks of the “pursuit of happiness,” a concern raised among the philosophers of morals in the Scottish Enlightenment. Most of America’s founding debate, however, was couched in terms of the “national happiness,” which suggested a concern to find a basis for freedom, order, and prosperity in a society, that is, the “public good,” which the founders decided to base on the balance of powers and on transcendent beliefs, such as “human rights,” a “Creator,” and “Nature’s God.” If the new American citizens were wise “philosophers,” said the Calvinist and Platonist (in metaphysics) James Madison, then a balance of powers would not be necessary. However, he said, “a nat
ion of philosophers is as little to be expected as the philosophical race of kings wished for by Plato.” Quoted in Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New York: New American Library, 1961), 315.
18.The American founders used, willy-nilly, a range of classical sources, primarily Roman, most of which had been recovered during the Renaissance. Although Thomas Jefferson was a “philosophical materialist,” the other founders worked from a Christian, and therefore Platonist, framework. Otherwise, the down-to-earth Jefferson found in Plato’s dialogues the “sophisms, futilities, and incomprehensibility” of a “foggy mind”; and while some founders at first cited Plato as a philosopher of “civil liberty,” their actual reading of the Republic, taking it as a kind of utopian fantasy, turned them away from Plato’s bizarre politics—though not away from the transcendentalism that Plato had endowed to Christianity. This explains the final agreement in the Declaration of Independence to base freedom in the reality of “Nature’s God.” The next great import of Platonism to American life came in the Transcendentalist movement in the decades before the Civil War. This religious and literary movement drew upon German philosophical Idealism (with its roots in Platonism). Abraham Lincoln was amendable to Transcendentalism, as evident, it has been argued, in his Gettysburg Address and his appeal to a transcendent good. In sum, the first few generations of American constitutional tradition were a mixture of European materialist ideology—stemming from the Epicurean Romans, Newtonian science, England’s David Hume, and the French Revolution—and a broad swath of Platonism, conveyed in Christianity (primarily Reformed-Protestant and Augustinian) and German Idealism. The first significant new development in American thought would be pragmatism, characterized by the philosophers William James and Charles Sanders Peirce (around 1900), who redefined “truth” as what is useful, and yet remained Platonist in presuming a transcendent “something more,” as James famously said. Still, today probably 90 percent of Americans believe in “something more,” and a sizable percentage of American scientists holds transcendental beliefs. See Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), Jefferson on Plato quoted, 24; Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New York: New American Library, 1961); Perry Miller, ed., The American Transcendentalists: Their Prose and Poetry (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957), 352-66; Gary Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (Simon and Schuster, 1992), 102-120; and Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).
