Piero's Light
Page 1
Piero’s
Light
In Search of Piero della Francesca:
A Renaissance Painter and the Revolution
in Art, Science, and Religion
Larry Witham
Contents
Preface
Prologue: Discovering Piero
PART I
CHAPTER 1The Renaissance’s Apprentice
CHAPTER 2Florentine Crossroads
CHAPTER 3A Platonic Painter of Light
CHAPTER 4Strange Legends in Fresco
CHAPTER 5Piero Goes to Rome
CHAPTER 6The Aging Geometer
PART II
CHAPTER 7After the Renaissance
CHAPTER 8Piero Rediscovered
CHAPTER 9Piero and Modernity
CHAPTER 10The Eyes of Science
CHAPTER 11A Celebrated Life
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Image Gallery
Illustration Credits
Notes
Index
Preface
Piero della Francesca first crossed my path when I was a college art student in the early 1970s. Like a Michelangelo, Raphael, or Leonardo, “Piero” was presented on a first-name basis. He was clearly not as famous as the big three. Among the Renaissance painters, though, Piero stood apart. His imagery looked strangely ancient and modern at the same time. More recently, Piero attracted my attention once again. After two decades of writing on the topics of religion, science, and philosophy, it occurred to me that the life of Piero offers a window on a broader topic: the roles of art, religion, and science in how we perceive the world.
As a rule, individual artists do not change the course of human history. Only with the rise of mass media in the twentieth century have artists of the past appeared to be such titanic figures, shaking the world in their own time (when they actually did not). Nevertheless, artists have held a special place in our imagination as markers along the road of great cultural transitions. As a child of the Renaissance, Piero is such a figure. A painter of religious topics, he was also the “painter-mathematician and the scientific artist par excellence” of his time, says one historian of mathematics.1 Transcending his time in history, Piero’s legacy allows us to understand the precipitous change in art, religion, and science that began to take place during the Renaissance and has affected the Western world ever since.
Piero’s story begins in the early Quattrocento, the 1400s on the Italian peninsula. It was a time when there actually was no modern Italy, but rather a mosaic of city-states, from Florence and Milan to Venice, Perugia, and Rome. In Piero’s day, many of the barriers we have now erected between art, religion, and science did not exist. This was the so-called “medieval synthesis,” and Piero was its product. He was in the artistic stream of the late medieval craftsman: a painter of religious topics and an innovator in mathematics and geometry. In his lifetime, the synthesis of the Middle Ages was being added to by the Renaissance’s revival of the classical past: the arts and letters of Greece and Rome. Art returned to an imitation of nature. Religion revived Platonist thought. And in science, there was a growing fascination with mathematics, optics, linear perspective, and the physical structure of the heavens.
On the whole, Piero della Francesca is a figure who represents a kind of integration of the aesthetic, spiritual, and intellectual aspects of human life during his time in history. He was part of a cultural consolidation that perhaps was uniquely achieved in the late Middle Ages as a prelude to the Renaissance, and it is one that, in the modern world, we are still very interested in experiencing. For people of the Middle Ages, “Life appeared to them as something wholly integrated,” the Italian historian Umberto Eco says in his essay Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages. “Nowadays, perhaps, it may even be possible to recover the positive aspects of their vision, especially as the need for integration in human life is a central preoccupation in contemporary philosophy.”2
The story of Piero allows us to explore this bygone vision and see its continuing relevance. To assist in that goal, a second theme of this book will be that one of the revivals of the Italian Renaissance—namely, the philosophy of Platonism—had provided an integrating framework for Piero and others. Piero lived and worked within a Christian Platonist tradition that was maturing during the Italian Renaissance. It was an intellectual subculture that was attempting to reconcile Greek philosophy and science with Christian belief. He was introduced to the Platonist revival by the religious movements and humanist scholars around him, and, while not university-trained, Piero had ample opportunity to absorb the new thinking. In his own right, he edited, transcribed, or illustrated at least eight physical manuscripts on mathematical topics, some of which reflected the Platonist interest in ideal shapes and numerical proportions.3
It was the early-Renaissance enthusiasm for antiquity that prompted Italian book hunters to collect and translate many Greek texts. Among these were the writings of Plato. Eighteen centuries earlier, in Greece, Plato had been the student of Socrates and the teacher of Aristotle. To speak of Platonism, however, is to speak of the Western world’s first wide-ranging debate about the nature of things. In his twenty-five dialogical texts, Plato does not necessarily declare his own view; rather, through the many dialogues, he reveals the intellectual duels among Greek philosophers. At bottom, though, one Platonist doctrine comes through more strongly than all others: reality is dualistic, made up of a physical realm and a transcendent realm, a world of physical perception (the sensible) and one of mental transcendence (the intelligible).4
Although the Platonic dialogues explain how difficult, even impossible, it is to perfectly apprehend either the physical or transcendent worlds, Platonism presents both pursuits as worthwhile and basic to human life. The transcendent world offers ideals or essences that are deemed worthy of contemplation and explication. In turn, the physical world is in constant flux, vast and elusive and yet knowable by a process of critical thinking and reflective experience. And as Platonists have consistently argued, this world of flux mysteriously yields to the power of mathematics.
Piero was not the originator of such mathematical concerns during this transition from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, but he applied mathematics to his art, innovated in arithmetic and geometry, and wrote extensively on these topics. The mathematical features of Platonist thought would eventually contribute to the Scientific Revolution, and Piero was an important benchmark on the way there. Going further, it could be argued that even the artistic innovations of the Italian Renaissance helped shape a new scientific view of the world.
Platonism is not the only big idea that emerged from the Renaissance. That period in history perpetuated a number of philosophies that are still with us: individualism, humanism, skepticism, Epicureanism, scientism, political cynicism, the occultism of the perennial New Age, and certainly the striving for fame, wealth, and glory. Yet amid these many streams of thought, Platonism has proved to have much broader implications about the nature of reality and human perception, and thus an enduring ability to integrate the ideas of visual beauty, spiritual or mental transcendentalism, and scientific progress. Accordingly, the second part of this book, which follows Piero’s legacy down to the present, will also explore the Platonist legacy.
Because art and religion are both forms of human perception, they finally are based on our understanding of the human brain and the powers of the mind. It is no surprise, therefore, that the final science to challenge the transcendent nature of aesthetic and spiritual experience is neuroscience, which presents the case that all human experience can be reduced to neurons and modules in the brain. I
n this book, Platonism and neuroscience will meet in surprising ways. But in the end, the jury will still be out on whether brain science can fulfill its claim to “explain away” transcendental experiences such as God, beauty, or the desire for Platonist essences in a world of change.5
The jury is still out on the nature of the Italian Renaissance itself, too, surprisingly enough, and this further complicates any story about Piero and his significance in history. Some historians view the Renaissance as no more than an extension of the late medieval world, rejecting the idea that it was the chief moment of European “rebirth.” Even more skeptical of its existence, other historians have called the Italian Renaissance a fiction created by later generations, a kind of romantic hindsight.6 At any rate, for our purposes, this book takes the conventional view that the Italian Renaissance was a distinct period of change. It was by no means an idyllic time, to be sure. “Good and evil lie strangely mixed together in the Italian States of the fifteenth century,” the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt wrote accurately enough.7 Still, Burckhardt pegged the Italian Renaissance as a turning point, a period that “must be called the leader of modern ages.”8 In making this claim, Burckhardt was astute enough to acknowledge that he was presenting a very personal “picture” of the Renaissance based on his own modes of research and analysis.
This book shares Burckhardt’s basic confession that any broad interpretation of a trend in human history and thought must be simply a picture for readers to consider, nothing more. When it comes to Piero’s life in particular, many approaches could be taken.9
Biographies of Piero virtually require an interpretive viewpoint to fill in so many empty spaces and missing pieces. Given the paucity of documented dates in Piero’s life, one art historian has concluded: “With Piero the essential truth must, in the end, be elicited from the [art] works themselves,” of which about sixteen survive.10 Piero’s works also include his three treatises on arithmetic and visual geometry, revealing his thoughts in page upon page of procedural explanations and mind-numbing numerical notations. Yet as another Piero scholar says, with nearly perfect accuracy, “In the hundreds of pages of his own writings there is not one remark of a personal nature” (though he does, in fact, show a bit of piety or wry humor here and there).11 In summary, “Nothing involving Piero is simple or straightforward,” says James R. Banker, a Piero scholar who should know, having been in pursuit of him for two decades.12 Thanks to Banker’s research in Italy, where he has lived in Piero’s home town, something like an alternative consensus has emerged on dating Piero’s life. Its central feature is to give Piero an earlier birthdate of 1412, a rejoinder to the often-used date of 1420. This book will adopt the early-dating approach, which offers a significantly altered view of Piero.13
Despite Piero’s elusive presence in history, it is a testimony to his acclaim that his story has extended far beyond his lifetime: this has been called the “search for Piero.” Following his death, his memory was briefly chronicled. Then he was virtually forgotten until the nineteenth century, when there was a kind of Piero revival in Europe, bringing him to the attention of the English-speaking world. The universal quality of Piero was recognized again in the twentieth century. This was the century not only of modern art, which in itself put a new lens on Piero, but of the era when physics and biology provided a firm foundation for the mechanistic sciences. These included neuroscience, and thus a final challenge to belief in the transcendent Platonist ideals of the Renaissance.
In the following pages, Piero’s life and legacy will be explored across these three epochs, following the twists and turns of art history, science, and religion—and their indebtedness to Platonism—down to the present. For our modern day, the nearly-forgotten Piero della Francesca was “discovered” in the 1850s, and the mood on the Italian peninsula, as our story begins, was one of revolution.
PROLOGUE
Discovering Piero
The great European insurrection was widespread but brief. What historians call the Revolutions of 1848 first erupted in Sicily against the imperial rule of the French empire. Soon Paris itself was up in arms. Like falling dominos, street uprisings against monarchic regimes swept across fifty countries in Europe and Latin America. Then, after several months and several thousand dead, the rebellions collapsed, leaving the monarchies of the day still in firm control. On the Italian peninsula, however, the rumblings for liberation continued, especially in Florence.
In that fabled city of the Renaissance, the brewing political changes of the 1850s became the backdrop for two very different men—an Italian and an Englishman—to achieve one common goal. Amid those tumultuous days, they recovered the memory of a long-lost Renaissance painter: Piero della Francesca.
The Italian was Gaetano Milanesi, a linguist by training.1 Milanesi was a native of Siena, about forty miles south of Florence, and he frequently visited Florence for his archival research on art history. Milanesi was there in 1855 as the Austrian troops, sent by the Habsburg Empire to restore order in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, were pulling back from their occupation of the city. Many Italians were calling for independence. The slogan in the streets was risorgimento, or resurgence. The goal was a unified modern Italy.
For Milanesi, recovering Italy’s art history was an equally patriotic pursuit. At age forty-two, he was an expert in interpreting antique Italian language, deeds, and contracts. He had studied law, but his love of art redirected him into research on Siena’s rich pictorial history. He and his friends had founded the Fine Arts Society. The society had published a new commentary on the single most important source on Renaissance art history, Giorgio Vasari’s second edition of his Lives of the Artists (1568). With precocious zeal, Milanesi and his cohorts corrected many of the mistakes in Vasari’s massive work, which chronicled 124 Italian artists over 250 years, including a somewhat vague entry on Piero della Francesca.
By 1855, Milanesi’s full attention had turned to new developments in Florence. Despite the political tumult of the decade, the Habsburg-appointed Duke of Tuscany had decreed that the historic Uffizi Palace be turned into an art museum and a vast state archive; it was Tuscany’s first centralized repository of historical documents. In a year, Milanesi would be hired as a staff member at the State Archives. Until then, he was casting his research net widely. This included the archives of one of Florence’s famous establishments, the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, a great monastery complex that had been a Renaissance pioneer in medical services and in patronage of the arts.
To reach Santa Maria Nuova, Milanesi traversed the narrow cobblestone streets of Florence, avoiding soldiers and pamphleteers at every turn. From the center of the city, with its great Renaissance cathedral and tower, he crossed several more city blocks to find the hospital, known by its ornate classical façade. Despite the Grand Duke’s call to centralize Florence’s historic documents, the hospital had kept its own small archives, made up mostly of leather-bound account books—a type of Renaissance artifact that had survived in abundance. During the Renaissance, Italy had been an economic power, a bookkeeping nation. No less a person than Petrarch, an early humanist literatus, noted that the young talents of that day “employed themselves in preparing such papers as might be useful to themselves or their friends, relating to family affairs, business, or the wordy din of the courts.”2
The Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, too, had had its share of bookkeepers. During the Renaissance, the business of the hospital was not only religion and medicine, but also to seek funding from businesses, guilds, or wealthy patrons for decorative and devotional artworks in its buildings. On arriving at Santa Maria Nuova, what Milanesi found were the Renaissance-era ledgers that recorded the contracts for these artworks. They were the doorway to much lost art history, for the contracts provided names, dates, descriptions, and amounts of money. They suggested the rank of the artist, or how large a project had been.
On this particular day, Milanesi conti
nued his probing through the ledgers. From the cramped shelves of the hospital archive, he took down one of many volumes dated 1439, a significant year in Florentine history. It was the year of the great Council of Florence, the last great effort of the Latin and Byzantine (Greek) churches to overcome their differences and unite as one Christendom. For much of 1439, the council had submerged Florence in ceremonial pageants and lavish spending. Milanesi surmised correctly that it had been a year of many local art commissions as well. From the archive shelf, Milanesi chose volume forty from that year and, after setting it on the table before him, he leafed through it page by page. Only an expert could read the archaic, often obscure hand-written notations, and Milanesi had the patience and an eye for such detail.
After reviewing page ninety-four, he turned to its reverse side. In the last entry at the top of the page, a date leaped out: September 7, 1439. On that date, Santa Maria Nuova had paid the painter Domenico Veneziano to produce a series of frescos for the hospital. Resembling an afterthought, the entry also said: “Pietro di Benedetto from Borgo a San Sepolchro is with him.”3 In the calm manner of a bibliophile, Milanesi felt the thrill of discovering something not known before. The ledger proved that Piero, son of Benedetto, had traveled from his home town of Sansepolcro to Florence, the center of the artistic revolution.
Here was the most significant document yet found on Piero della Francesca. The scribbled note provided the earliest date known for Piero’s career. The discovery was a small revolution toward understanding that enigmatic Renaissance figure.4
The other man who walked the streets of Florence in that decade of Italian revolutions was a visiting Englishman, John Charles Robinson, a frequent visitor to Florence around this time. As Milanesi was documenting Piero’s life, and the Grand Duke of Tuscany was opening the Uffizi archive, Robinson was among the elite band of British buyers and collectors on the prowl in Italy for Renaissance antiquities.