by Larry Witham
The Golden Legend was compiled by the thirteenth-century Dominican friar Jacobus de Voragine. He collected every version of the saint stories he could find. When he compiled these according to feast days, they could be read or meditated upon on various dates. Piero had no doubt read from the Golden Legend as a schoolboy, and when he painted his St. Jerome panels, he may have referred to that saint’s story in this text. The extensiveness of the Arezzo project invariably sent him back to the Golden Legend to brush up on the true-cross legend, told in two feast-day entries. It went like this:
At Adam’s death, his son Seth, his third child after the death of Abel at the hands of his brother Cain, took a sprout given to him by an angel and planted it on his father’s grave. It would grow and endure as a great tree on the hills of Lebanon. There, Solomon discovered it and brought the tree to his Temple. When the Queen of Sheba visited his temple, she sensed the wood’s prophetic qualities. Feeling threatened, Solomon disposed of the tree, but it was unearthed again by the Jews when they dug a water pit. The wood was later used for the cross on which Jesus was crucified.
The wood surfaced again in the Christian era, an epoch opened by the Roman Emperor Constantine (after 325 c.e.). He Christianized the empire after he won his battle against the rival emperor Maxentius. The victory, in turn, had followed Constantine’s nocturnal vision of the sign of the cross. His Christian mother, Helena, then gathered the wise men of Jerusalem to discover the whereabouts of the true cross. This was known by a reluctant Jew, who was thrown into a pit until he finally divulged the location. Helena took pieces of the cross back to Rome. Other pieces were exalted in Jerusalem.
Then in 615, the Persian king Chosroes II conquered Jerusalem, taking its remnant of the cross back to his palace to put among the pagan artifacts of his conquests. The Byzantine emperor Heraclius responded by defeating the Persians in a battle and duly returned the true-cross fragment to Jerusalem, where its veneration would continue. Over the many centuries of this adventure, the cross produced several marvels and made converts of non-believers. One line in the story says “The virtue of the cross is declared to us by many miracles.”4
To squeeze this complex story onto the church walls, Piero and his patrons had to utilize only some of the events, omitting others. The Franciscans and the Bacci family had probably chosen many of these by the time Piero arrived. Even so, he surely had some power to arrange the composition and add or subtract events. For example, Piero may have added the picture of an Annunciation, the story of Mary visited by an angel with news of her divine pregnancy; this was not mentioned in the true-cross narrative. But whoever had the final word, the genius of Piero was to arrange one entire, knit-together scheme.
Italian mural painting had already existed for a thousand years. Its advocates had used a variety of solutions to arrange a linear story across church walls, many of those walls irregular or extended into domes, vaults, and niches. Piero had a fairly square room to fill, even with its pointed arches at the top of the three walls. He adopted one of the earliest-used church formats. The story began at the top of the right wall, went downward, jumped to the bottom of the opposite wall, then continued up to the top, a direction quite opposite to reading a Western manuscript.
Whatever the order, most worshippers would know the big events in the true-cross story and pick them out. Adam comes first in time, then Solomon of the Old Testament, then the Annunciation of the New Testament, and later still Constantine of Christian history. Finally, the cross returns to Jerusalem. The Golden Legend provided churches with dates for feast days. In May and September, the Franciscans celebrated two specific events in the true-cross saga, now known in Piero’s painted scenes as the Discovery and Proving of the True Cross and Exaltation of the Cross. He might have painted those two scenes first to accommodate the ongoing life of the congregation, which carried on actively, celebrating their feast days and skirting around his painter’s encampment.5
To arrange his mural stories, Piero divided the side walls of the choir (left and right) into three tiers. The top tiers are in a pointed lunette shape. Below are two rectangular spaces, one above the other, each about 11 feet tall by 24 feet wide—giving him six large areas, as if giant canvases on which to paint. On the front wall, facing northeast and dominated by a window, he divided up small spaces for cameo stories. In the six large side areas, Piero used a common format. He painted a continuous background of landscape and architecture, and then in the foreground he featured two or three different stories. All six scenes have a low horizon line and a big sky. Against this depth, Piero did not place his human figures deeply. The characters line the wall as if in an Egyptian or Roman frieze at the visual forefront.
Piero also echoed themes from one picture to another. On the front wall, he painted two cameos of angels making announcements: the Annunciation and the Dream of Constantine. In the latter of these, Piero mastered a night-time chiaroscuro well before Leonardo, Caravaggio, or Rembrandt. The side walls are similarly harmonized. The top lunettes convey the start and end of the great story. The middle tiers both show queens recognizing the Christian faith as true, and the bottom tiers contain battle scenes.
One other effect seems to unify everything. The frescos are a world of frozen human action, all of it suspended in an atmosphere of cool, pale colors. The stillness presents a distinct optical effect, and this is particularly evident in the battle scenes. Their action is frozen into more detail than the eye could possibly see in a real human event. As neuroscience would suggest in the future, the brain associates action with flux and glimpses, not perfect stillness, and this is why the brain finds something unusual—either counterintuitive or transcendental—in the kind of stop-action imagery that Piero was putting up in the Arezzo choir.6 In Piero’s time, all that could be said was that his paintings created a strange, idealized imagery. His images brought unchanging things into worldly, physical forms, revealing their higher Platonic essences in geometric qualities and harmonious proportions.
An experienced fresco painter by now, Piero must have employed a large team. They built the scaffolding on which Piero stood, prepared the wet plaster, and did some of the painting as well. There are three theories on how the project unfolded, and, depending on which one you care to believe, Piero finished the project in a few years or over more than a decade.7 Fresco was done top-down, since its watery elements dripped. By this same logic, the scaffolding was erected to do the uppermost areas first. Then it was built downward. In the simplest theory, this was Piero’s procedure: he worked top-down and completed the project over a few concentrated years. A noticeable difference in Piero’s painting styles would have been normal over such a period, perhaps stiffer at the top but, as he warmed up, working downward, the scenes became more integrated, the modeling rounder, and the color more sophisticated. The work of assistants around Piero, moreover, could explain a certain unevenness of quality everywhere in the murals.
A second theory views Piero as having worked down one side with the scaffolding, taking a long break, and then returning to do the other side. Thus he set up the scaffolding twice. This view may explain the difference in colors on the two sides. The first side is cooler and, to one discriminating eye, “more exquisite and more personal.”8 In this view, Piero did the second side later, giving it a warmer cast and sharper architectural images. The presumption is that Piero took a major break in the fresco to travel to Rome between 1458 and the cusp of 1460, having been invited to paint for the papacy.
The third theory is a combination: Piero took up the frescos even as the elderly Bicci fell ill, and he began painting at the top on both sides. Then, along the way, Piero departed Arezzo frequently for other projects. His style thus changed under different outlying events and inspirations. For example, his top lunette on the death of Adam is organic; it is about individuals and their emotions. Right below that, the gears switch: a geometric look prevails as Piero presents the emotionless elegance of
a royal court with the Queen of Sheba. Later, when he did the battle scenes, he focused on portraiture. This theory also acknowledges Piero’s trip to Rome as a crucial break. By implication, he returned with a better knowledge of painting architecture, not to mention a deeper affection for idealized Platonist shapes.
How much the contents of the narrative story on the walls changed in the time Piero painted them—a process of five years or fifteen years—is not certain. Additional theories say that the influential Aretines, knowing the mural’s potential for propaganda, persuaded Piero to alter scenes, put in special faces, or massage other elements as religious and political events of the day evolved.9 Still, the core narrative must have been in place from the start. The first thing Piero painted, it seems, was the end of the story—the return of the cross to Jerusalem. In this scene he included many of his famous tall, flaring hats. With that personal touch, he began the monumental project.
During the Arezzo project, the papacy had summoned Piero to paint in Rome (of which more later). His stay would be brief, however, lasting from 1458 to 1459 and ending when his mother died and he chose to return to Sansepolcro. After this sojourn at home, Piero would undertake two major altarpiece projects, and their unique qualities would reveal the latest developments in his work.
In 1454 in his home town, Piero was commissioned to paint a polyptych that, as it turned out, would be his largest altarpiece done for Sansepolcro. It was for the monastery church of St. Augustine, and thus the name of the work as it comes down to us today: the Saint Augustine Altarpiece. Despite its size, the altarpiece had all the conventional limitations of a medieval design. Piero’s challenge was, once again, to turn the commonplace into something extraordinary.
The commission originated with local resident Angiolo Giovanni Simone Angeli, who ran a prosperous mule business. At the time, the monastery church of St. Augustine, located at the west of the walled town, was busy with improvements. Like all the church buildings of such mendicant orders, this one, too, was like a great auditorium. Spiritually, the Augustinian monks were just as Platonist in their piety as the Camaldolese and the Franciscans, in effect following Augustine’s motto that, when it came to the philosophical side of faith, including God’s creation by Ideas and the existence of the soul, “There are none who come nearer to us [Christians] than the Platonists.”10 Quite apart from such intellectual matters, town residents supported the religious mission of the monks and the church by paying to decorate it with banners, frescos, chapels, tombs, and shrines. The church had probably erected a screen with icon pictures that bisected the great open space of the sanctuary. A stained-glass window had just been installed. All that was missing was a great altarpiece.
Accordingly, Piero was duly hired “for painting and decorating and gilding [the altarpiece] with those images, figures, pictures, and ornaments” that suited the patrons. They were especially eager to have gold and silvery colors, after the medieval fashion.11 Piero’s payment came not only in florins, but also in a piece of cultivated land.
Large altarpieces were not common in Sansepolcro, and the story of the St. Augustine project illustrated how materials—such as altarpiece structures—often were saved, revised, or reused. In this case, the Augustinians had acquired from the Franciscans the still-barren wooden altarpiece structure that Piero had prepared for Antonio many years before, but which Antonio had failed to begin. Piero had prepared that structure to be painted on the front and back. Now he would use just one side—which still bore some twenty-six images—since the polyptych would thankfully stand against the wall behind the altar.
The center of the Saint Augustine Altarpiece inescapably featured a madonna and child (a panel now missing). No less striking were the four large saints arrayed on either side of the Virgin. The saints were among the most solid and voluminous of Piero’s human figures, like great weighty statues. They seemed to echo the painted statuary that Piero had seen around town his entire life. Each saint stood in his own tall panel with a semicircle top: St. Augustine, Michael the Archangel, John the Evangelist, and a friar-looking figure said to be St. Nicholas of Tolentino, an Augustinian made a saint in 1446.
All the altarpiece’s saints are somber and remote, but their garb is enchanting, their brilliance enhanced by Piero’s selective use of oil paint along with the traditional tempera. The great frock of Augustine, painted in black and gold, is filled with miniature stories of remarkable detail and coloration, achieved by Piero with oil as a supplement to his tempera (for in this transitional stage of Renaissance painting, oil was often used experimentally with tempera or fresco). The saint, in his almost-Technicolor frock, has been called “one of the first examples in Italy of the use of the new technique of oil, of a decisively Flemish character.”12
Not to be outdone, the other compelling figure in the altarpiece is St. Michael the archangel. He is a cherubic-looking young man—a typical Piero angel—with breastplate armor, sword, beheaded dragon, and wings modeled on those of a swan. Michael had resonance in Sansepolcro. For some time already, the most popular pilgrimage for Sansepolcrans had been to a distant mountain shrine in honor of the archangel. In Piero’s hands, and right downtown, the citizens now had another rendition of this fearsome protector. Piero’s St. Michael projected an eerie mix of a sweet-looking youth and the razor-edged wrath of God, for the inscription says “Emissary of God’s Power.”
More than in any other painting to date, the Saint Augustine Altarpiece offers countless passages of light reflecting off different materials, hard and soft, textured and shiny. This was the wonder of oil paint, which Piero was now using in greater fullness. Only part of the St. Augustine image was done in oil—his flamboyant cape—and that is why St. Michael, painted entirely in oil, has been heralded as the first total oil painting by an Italian.13 By the time he applied his brush to St. Michael, Piero had ended the old practice of a green underpainting, and instead adopts the brown undermodeling of the Flemish technique. His Flemish-type glazes, however, are used merely to deepen shadows or enhance a passage of color, for he retains the pastel-type tones seen in his tempera works and which would characterize most of Piero’s oeuvre (as compared to the heavy, dark glazing of a Leonardo da Vinci, for example). Piero’s achievement was to apply oil painting to full-bodied human figures, a departure from the overly detailed, but anatomically awkward, visages typical of the Netherlanders.
These were transient times for Piero. He was at the peak of his powers artistically, and he was forever on the road, apparently being in high demand in central Italy. Through the early 1460s, he was rarely in the city, the two surviving dates being summer 1462 and early 1464. Then in 1466 Piero was homebound with an illness, and at this time he probably worked on the Saint Augustine Altarpiece. In these years he was also in nearby Arezzo, where he painted a St. Mary Magdalene fresco inside the Arezzo cathedral (and much else in Arezzo, according to the chronicler Vasari, a native of that town). Whatever the chronology, Piero had painted the saints in the Saint Augustine Altarpiece in different-enough styles to suggest gaps in time. It may have been a fifteen-year project, at least according to the payment dates that survive in documents.14
At this point, it may be proper to ask whether anything peculiar about Piero’s approach to his artworks turned them into such long, drawn-out enterprises. One theory is that, as a mathematician, Piero spent an inordinate amount of time preparing a work. Arguably, the preparation shows: Piero’s strokes in his panel paintings tend to match his underdrawings precisely, suggesting that there was no need for corrections, thanks to his careful, drawn-out, methodical planning. Evidence also suggests that Piero prepared cartoons that he could later reuse, which required a certain amount of mathematical scaling before he drew them. For example, the head of one saint in the Saint Augustine Altarpiece is exactly the same as the head of a king in the Arezzo frescos, just scaled to a different size. According to the chronicler Vasari, Piero made clay models tha
t he draped fabric over to study the proper rendering of the folds in clothing and other draperies, yet another way to spend time getting his drawings just right.
Whether his patrons appreciated such prolonged preparation is uncertain, but in Sansepolcro this seemed to be beside the point: they were patient with Piero, one of their own. The Saint Augustine Altarpiece was not the only project the Sansepolcrans had given Piero from 1454 onward, but it would turn out to be unique in Piero’s legacy. Being made of several small panels, the polyptych, in later centuries, would be separated into pieces, each panel sold as an individual painting, finding homes in collections around the world.15
This was justified because so many of the panels were remarkably splendid in their own right, including the smallest scenes, located in the section below the main picture area. This was the well-known predella common to all polyptychs. The scenes in the predella were often done by a master painter’s capable assistants. In the Saint Augustine Altarpiece, one surviving image is surely by Piero’s hand: a full-blown landscape with figures, the Crucifixion. Albeit a very small panel, the painting conveys a remarkable composition with strong lines, solemn figures, heraldic banners, and bright colors jostling against each other in mesmerizing clarity and detail.
It was features such as these, no doubt, that prompted Vasari, a century after Piero’s death, to speak of the entire Saint Augustine Altarpiece as a “thing much extolled.”16 Over the centuries, its various extollers dismantled the work and dispersed its many panels. All four of the saint panels survived, as did the small Crucifixion. That, along with one large saint and three other small peripheral panels, eventually found homes in the United States, passing through private collections to final resting places in museums. In effect, the Saint Augustine Altarpiece would provide America with five of its seven original Pieros, a national grouping of Pieros that would be second in number only to Italy.17