Piero's Light

by Larry Witham

  Gentile was the apostle of a style that would later be called International Gothic, which he brought to a peak. His use of rich, dark colors was a quite noticeable departure from the subdued tones of Byzantine and Gothic paintings. To this he also added glittering ornamentation and an almost literal description of nature, objects, and human characters. He further led a revolution against using too much gold in the backgrounds of pictures, which had amplified the flattened look of the medieval Byzantine style. In its place, he painted vivid scenery with flora, fauna, and urban vistas. These backdrops were crammed with crowds and buildings and, still not using perfect perspective, odd and enchanting viewing angles.

  Gentile would die in 1427, just as Piero began his apprenticeship. But his busy and decorative style had set the stage for newcomers. Even in his absence, Gentile might have been significant in shaping Piero as a painter, since some of Gentile’s best students would be known to work with Piero after he left San­sepol­cro. In ways such as this, Gentile would become the last strong influence in Italian painting before the rise of a new kind of visual revolution in painting—the use of linear perspective, with its emphasis on the geometrical forms underlying the visual world.

  The use of linear perspective as an illusion for depth had ancient roots, and in this sense it has Roman origins. In 1414, for example, when Piero was around two years old, the humanists had recovered the ancient Roman work De architectura, written by Vitruvius Pollio before 27 b.c.e. From this, it was clear that illusionist perspective had been used in ancient times. Vitruvius marveled at the artistic “deception” in Roman theater scenery: “Though all is drawn on a vertical flat façade, some parts may seem to be withdrawing into the background, and others to be standing out in front.”21

  Before a work like the one by Vitruvius was uncovered, Italian painters had derived their sense of perspective by looking at samples in ancient art. In Florence, this kind of observation was pioneered by Giotto. Rounding his figures with light and dark, and using a more correct optical geometry, he revived a pictorial realism in early Renaissance painting. The same had been happening among a select group of painters in Rome. When Giotto’s followers and the Rome painters converged in Assisi to paint inside the great Franciscan church, for the first time in centuries a true and correct geometrical perspective began to emerge. In all, from Giotto to Gentile, and passing through the Lorenzetti workshop in Siena, painters were attempting to create visual naturalism.

  This combination of Gentile’s brightness, Giotto’s solidity, and ancient Roman perspective was hard to resist for a young painter like Piero, who probably was getting secondhand accounts of the new trends during his apprenticeship. Wherever that training had taken place, it would have followed the kind of priorities put down a generation earlier in Cennini’s Handbook, which taught that “the basis of the profession, the very beginning of all these manual operations, is drawing and painting.”22 Much remained to be mastered, as the Handbook further outlined: the application and sanding of gesso, tooling with stamps and punches, working with cloth, applying gold leaf, and transferring drawings to a surface. The painter’s life was a highly material world, requiring knowledge of egg tempera for wooden panels, charcoal and ink for drawings and underpaintings, oils for binding paints, and flakes of gold for gilding. There was a whole range of pigments, many problematic or unstable, and some that were extremely expensive, such as the royal blue produced from crushed lapis lazuli stone. The most complex and heavy-duty task was making frescos. This required putting up wet plaster, rapidly applying watery paint, and then touching up after the plaster has dried.

  When Piero returned to San­sepol­cro, presumably with many of these skills under his belt, he still had to start out small. He painted the candle for the confraternity in 1341, and perhaps for the first time was paid as a painter. In that decade, however, the painting business in San­sepol­cro—thanks to a new culture of patronage among a burgeoning middle class of bankers and merchants—was in for a surprising boom time.

  In the previous few centuries in Italy, the lay people who donated money to religious orders, monasteries, and churches had typically designated it for the poor. That was changing in Piero’s century. The patrons of his day were more likely to leave bequests to build chapels and tombs, decorated with art, after their deaths. In San­sepol­cro after the 1420s, bequests such as these allowed the religious orders and the lay confraternities to generate major art commissions.

  One such case brought Piero’s life to a fortuitous crossroads. In San­sepol­cro, the Franciscans had received a donation hefty enough to hire a carpenter to make a large wooden altarpiece. The structure had several panels (known today as a polyptych) that needed to be painted. After that, it would be placed in the Church of San Francesco, a block from the town square. The Franciscans liked the late Gothic style already known in San­sepol­cro, so they were in search of a master painter with “knowledge, art, and industry” in that milieu, someone skilled enough to paint “figures and narrations as it seems and are pleasing to said Friars.”23 San­sepol­cro had no master painter. So when they looked beyond the town, they found a painter named Antonio Anghiari.24

  As his name suggested, Antonio was from Anghiari, a smaller city just five miles to the south on the road to Florence. He arrived in San­sepol­cro in 1430, bringing with him a large family. It could be said that Antonio made the shortest possible journey to San­sepol­cro because, in fact, the flat valley road that connects the two towns is virtually a straight line. Antonio immediately found enough work to borrow money, acquire two houses, and open a workshop on a narrow street. As fate would have it, Antonio had arrived when the political turmoil of the region (in addition to local patronage) was generating a host of new projects. Most of the political turmoil was an extension of the big changes taking place in Rome, a city about a hundred and forty miles south.

  When Piero was about eight years old—around 1420—the papacy had returned to Rome after more than a century of being elsewhere. For most of that period, from 1309 to 1377, the popes had been Frenchmen, prompting them to keep the papal court in Avignon, France, a stretch of time that has become popularly known as the “papal exile.” After that exile ended, furthermore, the Great Schism (1378–1417) was thrust upon the papacy, a time when three popes claimed leadership. A single heir to St. Peter’s throne would finally take up residence in Rome with the election of Martin V. His rule coincided with the death of the head of the Malatesta clan in Rimini, and therefore the governance of San­sepol­cro was relinquished by the condottieri, coming back into direct papal jurisdiction. Now Piero, and Antonio Anghiari, would see a small bit of history in the making.

  On April 1, 1430, the regional bishop arrived in Piero’s town, and the first order of business was visual. He paid to have Pope Martin V’s coat of arms painted on the four gates of San­sepol­cro.25 This was a job for Antonio. And as Antonio’s workshop became busier, the talented young Piero was drawn into its orbit. When, in September 1431, San­sepol­cro held its annual festival, complete with horse race and civic pomp, Antonio painted the flags and banners; Piero is on record as fastening the horse-race flags to wooden poles.

  By the end of his first year in San­sepol­cro, Antonio had clearly taken on more projects than he could handle. The commission that seemed to never get done, in fact, was the very altarpiece for which the Franciscans had recruited him. As his loyal assistant, Piero had done the preparatory work. Once the carpenter had built the polyptych, a solid but rough wooden structure, Piero coated it with layers fit to receive paint. The enemy of all paintings—on panels or walls—was moisture that soaked through the backing. Painters used everything from reeds to old tablecloths as insulation under coats of gesso, a durable white medium of lime mixed with glue that provided the final surface.

  In this task, Piero used a coat of charcoal—a carbon barrier—as the insulation against moisture. The charcoal coating had been standard in religious statu
ary, and Piero may have worked on such sculpted objects, both wooden and terra cotta, putting a layer of carbon on them and then painting the faces and colorful garb.

  It was in late 1431 that Piero had probably begun to prepare, with charcoal and gesso, the Franciscans’ altarpiece to be painted by Antonio. About this time, many of the town confraternities also began to show up at Antonio’s workshop door. First off, the Confraternity of San Bartolomeo hired Antonio to paint a “seven labors of mercy” mural on the façade of its building on the public square. Then the Confraternity of Sant Antonio, whose men practiced flagellation, recruited him to decorate their chapel at the south end of town. As requested, Antonio topped it with a lovely blue sky, a difficult enough task, since blue paint reacts to the lime in wet fresco plaster (gradually turning greenish). So Antonio may have painted the blue on dried plaster, which made it more susceptible to peeling off over the years. At any rate, Piero watched and learned. To follow was the Confraternity of Santa Maria dell Notte. After seeing Antonio’s work on the piazza, this group contracted to have paintings done on the façade of its Palazzo Laudi, a building next to the abbey. When Antonio put up frescos in its interior chapel, Piero worked at his side.26

  Although Antonio was the designer of these projects, and he painted the dominant figures, Piero was beginning to show his hand. On this occasion, he probably painted a good deal of the background and some auxiliary figures. As a person adept at geometry and observant of town life, Piero began to think how he would design his own paintings. The day would come, in fact, when he would begin to change the look of his home town, filling it with his art, a type of local influence unusual for notable Renaissance painters. Piero would paint at least three major altarpieces for San­sepol­cro, and while it was hard to depart too radically from the medieval tradition, he always seemed to add an innovative feature. By one interpretation, he translated his vision of so much religious statuary in the town into a pictorial realism of statue-like figures in his paintings. And over time his use of rectangular pictures with half-circle lunettes—like great windows on the world—would alter the aesthetics of his tradition-bound city.27

  For the time being, as an apprentice in the early 1430s, he could not veer from Antonio’s style or direction. By the same token, Antonio could not veer from the tastes of his patrons who commissioned such projects. The contracts were drawn up in excruciating detail, setting sizes, fees, and dates. There was always room, though, for a patron to say something about wanting a “beautiful” end product.

  For centuries, beauty had been defined by the classical and Christian philosophers as “proportion and brilliance.”28 The knowing of beauty, moreover, was presumed to be an innate power of the human mind, for, as the medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas said, “A thing is not beautiful because we love it; rather we love it because it is beautiful.”29 With the help of a Platonist tradition that defined Beauty as a tran­scen­dent essence, Christian thinkers had combined theological views with classical ideas, and the end result was a Renaissance belief that beauty is a quality that is rational, objective, and based in metaphysics.30 Such medieval writing on beauty was a rich body of material; but, granted, it was all in Latin and typically ensconced in the monasteries, universities, or wealthy courts that collected ancient books. Piero learned about beauty by observation and intuition.

  For their part, the patron class of merchants and church leaders saw beauty in practical terms. For them, beauty was the use of royal blue pigment and gold leaf. Although Piero had to follow the tastes of his patrons, workshops of artists like himself had some written sources to stimulate ideas. These were the popular devotional works, some of which implied descriptions of what is beautiful in the sayings of St. Francis on the Creation, for example, in the Meditationes de Vita Christi, a devotional handbook in which painters found descriptive stories they could try to paint.

  The most scientific approach to beauty in the Middle Ages had arisen in the attention to physical “optics,” including the nature of the biological eye. Such writings on optics had begun to circulate in humanist circles in Piero’s time, and much later in life he would write down his own barely scientific version of what he had read, such as: “[The] eye, I say, is round and from the intersection of two little nerves which cross one another the visual force comes to the center of the crystalline humor, and from that the rays depart and extend in straight lines.”31

  Such Pieroesque optics was for another day, however, so, as he worked in San­sepol­cro with Antonio, Piero’s earliest musings must have been theological in nature; he was wondering at how beauty was perceived by the soul. Whatever beauty was, in painting it seemed to be evoked by optical effects, and the most obvious of these caught Piero’s attention. The seeing soul, for instance, was taken by strong contrasts of color and brightness. Some color combinations, moreover, were pleasing beyond words. Others followed a law of opposition—such as the power of yellow and blue on a banner, or green and red in a garment. We can only imagine what Piero made of afterimages (when, after the eye sees bright light, it then sees dark, or upon looking at red a long while, it sees green). Piero also found that certain proportions among shapes were unusually satisfying, and, with his aptitude for mathematics and geometry, he began to think that exacting numbers were behind this kind of aesthetic power. All of this prepared him for the day, perhaps, when he would be exposed to the doctrines of beauty and proportion that filled the Latin texts of the classical and Christian philosophers.

  For the time being, though, Piero first had to focus on the more material demands of his career, which meant sufficiently mastering the effect of beauty in paint, for to please a patron was to acquire a reputation and gain more interesting and profitable work. Pleasing patrons also required knowing the popular theology of the day, to which most of them subscribed. The painter’s daily bread was the rendering of biblical stories, theological themes, and the holy figures that were known to the public, or that the public needed to learn about. Every successful painter thus became a quick study in religious iconography: the signs, symbols, and colors that stood for personages and beliefs of the Christian faith.

  Every city, in turn, had favorite saints. Each had a history and symbol. The citizens of Ferrara would expect to see the patron St. George in their murals; in Ravenna, St. Apollinaire. Anthony of Padua could be known by his lilies or bread, St. Agnes by her repose with a lamb, and Bernardino of Siena by the three bishop’s miters at his feet. Blue was the color of heaven, and it was always the color of the Virgin Mary’s robes, whereas touches of yellow (hope), red (the martyrs), and brown (humility) were variously used along with many others. In Piero’s San­sepol­cro, the pilgrim founders Arcanus and Aegidius and their favored patron, St. Leonard, were a perennial topic, as was St. John the Baptist, patron saint of San­sepol­cro, Florence, and not a few other cities.

  Italy had become a veritable land of saints. Between 1200 and the mid-1500s, more than two hundred Italian saints would be canonized, twice the number from lands such as France and Spain and elsewhere combined.32 Patrons were quite particular about the treatment of such figures, both local and historical. A guild of bakers who worshipped at Santa Barbara Church in Siena, for instance, required that its painter produce an altarpiece with two flying angels, “showing that they are holding the crown over the head of St. Barbara.”33

  Behind such amicable religious concerns, the entire world of Quattro­cento patronage was actually a theological controversy in itself. This was because of usury, a lending of money for profit that the church deemed a sin. Merchants, bankers, and civic leaders profited under such a system, as did Piero’s father in his own small way. The Renaissance offered an unspoken solution: paying for art in the church was suitable penance. The Florentine wool merchant and banker Giovanni Rucellai said that he commissioned paintings “because they serve the glory of God, the honor of the city, and the commemoration of myself.”34 He was also assuaging guilt. Patronage of the arts
in Florence was particularly robust in this respect.

  The day would come when Piero would look for patrons like Rucellai. To make the best of his career, he had to seek commissions from the courts of the great and the wealthy. As Antonio and Piero were painting small-time banners and chapels, the great and wealthy were meeting up in Florence, where the papacy had just arrived in a cloud of political turmoil. It had arrived in the person of Pope Eugenius IV. The events around his sixteen-year reign (1431–47) would have an impact on the next stage of Piero’s life in San­sepol­cro, and on the development of his art and his way of thinking as he began to travel beyond his native surroundings.

  CHAPTER 2

  Florentine Crossroads

  Florence was not just the largest city near Piero’s home town: it was one of the largest cities in Europe, and its traditional alliance with the papacy would be a great benefit to Eugenius IV, the new pope. The 1431 papal conclave that elected Eugenius had taken place in Rome, a sign that the Italian papacy had truly returned. And as ever, a new papacy had a domino effect on the peninsula.

  In San­sepol­cro, the city directed Antonio, its master painter, to change the papal insignia, a friendly-enough switch from red to blue on the papal chevron. In Rome, however, Eugenius’s welcome was quite the opposite. The old families, such as the Colonna, could not stomach a pope born in Venice, so in 1434 they led an armed insurrection. Disguised as a Benedictine monk, Eugenius IV fled the city. He took a rowboat down the Tiber and eventually was met by a vessel from friendly Florence.

  Safe in Florence, Eugenius still had to worry about Milan, which continued its bid to be the dominant power in the north. Milan’s condottieri had been harassing northern towns that showed papal loyalty. In the most recent foray, these Milanese had penetrated the Upper Tiber and taken control of San­sepol­cro, no doubt stripping away the papal insignias as part of the insult. Eugenius took his time, but, backed by his Florentine allies, he finally mustered his own army. In early 1436, it expelled the Milanese and brought Piero’s town back into papal jurisdiction. It was decreed that the city should again paint the papal emblem “above the four gates.” Antonio was back on the job. He was paid to also make “six banners placed upon the fortified towers of the walls.”1