Piero's Light

by Larry Witham

  The Saint Augustine Altarpiece had anchored Piero in San­sepol­cro during the 1460s, at least off and on. Local patrons had plenty of other requests for Piero’s works. This may have also delayed the altarpiece project further. And, of course, there were commissions away from home—such as in Perugia.

  As an apprentice, Piero may have studied in Perugia, a commercial hub in the lower Tiber Valley. It was a city that his father, as a merchant, must have dealt with often. Now, probably in the later 1460s, Piero returned to negotiate a major painting project. Perugia was somewhat legendary for its Renaissance tyrants, but its religious life was no less vibrant. Around 1455, the nuns of Sant’ Antonio delle Monache had opened their convent. Drawn from a pool of wealthy, well-connected noblewomen, these pious ladies had taken Franciscan vows of poverty. Still, they naturally wanted an altarpiece worthy of renown, and so it came to pass that they appealed for public support to have Piero produce a new and elegant polyptych for their sanctuary.

  To complete what became known as the Saint Anthony Altarpiece, Piero did not need to start from scratch.18 The convent’s patron saint, Anthony of Padua, was designated as needing to appear somewhere in the work, and the nuns had furthermore decided on a traditional central theme, the Madonna and child enthroned. Then they obtained a wooden structure that was by no means conventional. Towering more than ten feet high, it was not very wide, giving it the feeling of a monolith, or even a medieval rocket ship. It was presented to Piero as a blank, with a little gilt on it. Piero would do each of the polyptych’s distinct paintings on separate panels, then attach them to the structure, allowing him to work just about anywhere, even back in San­sepol­cro. In his capable hands, it would become one of his most complex visual experiments.

  The polyptych would feature Mary twice. In the central band this would be as a seated Madonna, resplendent in a blue cape and red-and-gold dress. She is also holding her child, and it is here that Piero was also developing something of a pattern. Piero’s surviving works feature just five images of the Christ child. Compared to other Quattro­cento painters, his infant Jesus is unusually “grave, poised, portentous, no less than the adults,” according to one art historian.19 For the Perugian nuns, he presented a perfect example of this serious little boy, his tiny hand raised in admonition.

  On her throne, Mary has other company as well. On either side stand the saints. To the left are Anthony of Padua and John the Baptist, and to the right St. Francis and Elizabeth of Hungary, a Franciscan saint canonized in Perugia. Behind the human figures, Piero combines flat spaces of gold leaf and also his distinctive faux variegated marble, and with these flat colorations he nevertheless creates an illusion of deep space, making the figures seem round and solid. The altarpiece might have simply looked like a medieval throwback with its pointy shape, its Madonna theme, and its gilt of gold; Piero makes it strangely modern instead by modeling the figures and adding some extreme touches of linear perspective.

  This is especially evident at the very top, where Piero introduces the second image of Mary in a strikingly different venue. The story is of the Annunciation. A surprised Mary is being visited by the angel in the sunlit cloister of a convent. Piero builds the scene with a hyper-architectural perspective. Eleven archways, supported by Corinthian columns, recede into the background, a linear pattern that verges on an optical illusion. In one modern 3-D analysis of the complex architectural perspective, Piero has actually made the angel figuratively “invisible” to Mary—though they seem to face each other—by placing columns between their lines of sight.20

  Across the entire altarpiece, Piero has abandoned some of the love of decoration he had showed in his youth. The faces, gestures, and clothing of the figures are irregular, and thus more real in their physical presence. At first glance, the polyptych seems a mosaic of disparate parts, much as if the owners had cut and pasted different altars together. As modern research would show, however, it was indeed built as a single structure and painted by one hand, mostly Piero’s, with assistants working on some images in the predella. One of Piero’s predella images illustrates the stigmatization of St. Francis, and in this he employs the same kind of nocturnal chiaroscuro—a dark night illumined by directional light—that he virtually pioneered in the Dream of Constantine in the Arezzo frescos. The altarpiece also features Piero’s charming roundel portraits of saints Clare and Agatha, two women who renounced their wealth to be early followers of St. Francis.

  Knowing human nature, we can plausibly assume that the death of Piero’s mother was a significant moment in his life (as would be the death of his father not too many years later). Working for the nuns may have given him some motherly assurances, if such were needed. However, if Piero ever had a truly significant turning point in his life—spiritual or familial—it has never been documented. Nor would it be easy to detect such a time in any of his paintings. Doubtless, though, he was changed by his experiences, and between the Arezzo frescos and his work for the nuns in Perugia, one event stands out—Piero’s trip to Rome to paint for the papacy. After his time in that great city, a venue of history, theological controversy, humanist learning, and urbanity, Piero’s intellectual life was presumably never the same.

  CHAPTER 5

  Piero Goes to Rome

  Rome was becoming a magnet for early Renaissance artisans. The city had always had its native talent, but at the start of the Quattro­cento, others from across Italy traveled there to view the ancient ruins, carrying home visions and stories of ancient days. With the return of the papacy, a more permanent patronage was put in place. The various popes began to commission painters to come to Rome to decorate the Vatican and artistically revive many broken-down churches in the city. Masaccio of Florence and Gentile da Fabriano of Venice both ended their days in Rome, and Fra Angelico, the Dominican monk, worked intensely there from 1447 to 1451. His ultramarine skies, filled with glittering stars, seemed to take over the fresco look of the city’s chapels.

  Piero’s invitation came around 1458, most likely with the election of the new pope, Pius II.1 Piero’s name may have come to the papal household’s attention through the strong Franciscan connections that existed between Tuscany and Rome; or it may have been at the advice of Piero’s cousin (once removed), the papal scribe, cleric, and architect Francesco da Borgo (Francesco da Benedetto Bigi), who worked in Rome, where the papal favorite, Leon Battista Alberti, was supervising all architectural projects. What is more, Piero may have had a Rome contact through Arezzo: the Bacci family, patrons of the Arezzo frescos (and not to be confused with the Arezzo painter Bicci di Lorenzo), had one of its members high in papal circles.2

  Pius II was the latest of the popes to support the humanities. The papal treasury was now paying for translations of Greek science, and it underwrote an expanding papal bureaucracy, a culture of learned scribes and translators. A former poet laureate himself, Pius had loved the classical past and the fame of the worldly life—until he became a monk. During his promiscuous days, he was known by his humanist name, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini. After his spiritual reform, he famously wrote: “Reject Aeneas and accept Pius!”3 Under his tenure, humanists, natural philosophers (i.e., scientists), and architects expanded their roles under the patronage of the Church.

  In this sort of cultural atmosphere, Piero would stretch his own intellectual horizons. Rome must have given him his most robust encounter with Platonist thinking, and in Rome he may have been more fully initiated into the Greek science of Archimedes. An earlier pope, Nicholas V, had commissioned a translation of Archimedes’s works into Latin.4 Historically, a basic corpus of Archimedes combined in one manuscript his seven basic tracts: On the Sphere and the Cylinder; On the Measurement of the Circle; On Conoids and Spheroids; On Spirals; On the Equilibrium of Planes; On the Quadrature of the Parabola; and The Sand Reckoner. Once this translation was done, it became a well-thumbed manuscript available in the Vatican Library.

  The Archimedean compendiu
m fascinated Rome’s Platonist churchmen, and at some point a copy came into the possession of Piero’s relative Francesco da Borgo. Having his own library collection, Francesco seems to have had this Archimedes in Latin transcribed into more copies for himself. For all his extraordinary talents and his once-trusted role as a Vatican bookkeeper, Francesco was addicted to collecting valuable works. He also pilfered money from the papacy, for which Pope Pius II had him executed in 1468. Well before these macabre events, however, Francesco probably had shown the Vatican’s Archimedes to Piero. This goes far toward explaining Piero’s future interest in the Greek science of the polyhedra. Indeed, Piero may have obtained (in Rome or later) a copy of Archimedes in Latin from Francesco for copying it into Latin (which Piero was gradually learning to write, apparently). To this replication Piero then added his own careful illustrations.5

  More than Archimedean polyhedra, however, it was Greek philosophy itself that was stirring debate in Rome. Piero must have been attentive to this as well. The theological question of the hour was the proper Christian attitude toward Greek pagans such as Aristotle and Plato. This dispute began in Florence but had now moved to Rome, finding its natural orbit around the two great Hellenists in Vatican circles, the German cleric Nicholas of Cusa (known as Cusanus in Latin) and Basilius Bessarion, the Greek churchman who had joined the Roman Catholic confession. By the time Piero arrived in Rome, both Cusanus and Bessarion had obtained high ranks in Church affairs (and both had perused the Archimedes manuscript). As if leaders of Christian Platonist salons, both of them had city villas that were gathering places for clerics, humanists, and artists.

  Bessarion had settled in Rome much earlier than Cusanus. Following the Council of Florence, he had returned to Constantinople. A vociferous wing of the Greek clergy had assailed him for capitulating to Rome, and this offered the opportunity for Bessarion to follow his own inner lights: he converted to the Catholic Church. Bessarion himself had been a papal candidate—though, by the time of Piero’s arrival, he had become the dean of the College of Cardinals and a venerable right hand of sitting popes. Pius II made him protector of the far-flung Franciscan order, which included its mission in Oriental lands. Having failed to unite the Latin and Greek churches and thwart the Turks, Bessarion nevertheless would succeed in promoting a revival of classical studies, and this included all the ways that Plato could be reconciled with Christianity.

  It would be hard to argue that Platonism, as a topic of study, was for the common man. At least Aristotle had called for activity in public life, and allied with a Roman orator such as Cicero (a philosophical Stoic), Renaissance writers found in them a basis for their ideology of liberty and civic duty, especially where communes, with their town councils, governed. This democratic idealism did not last, however. Even the leaders of communes—with the Florentine Medici as indicative—turned into autocratic dukes and princes. Soon it would be the age of Machiavelli’s The Prince. This cultural change in Italy was an opening for Platonism, which, in Plato’s Republic, did advocate an elite rulership over the citizenry. More significantly, Plato argued that the highest calling was one of contemplation, not worldly ambition. When Platonism took on its more formal characteristics in Italy—such as a so-called Platonic Academy in Florence—its goal was cultivation of the mind. Virtue was located in learning per se, not in the ancient Roman ideals of Cicero, who gave up personal interests to serve in the raucous body politic.

  For Bessarion’s part, this Greek churchman was particularly attuned to the practical power of Platonist thinking in the world of ecclesiastical politics. The Council of Florence was testimony to how the hard-edged logic of Aristotelian scholasticism lacked the flexibility to resolve insoluble differences on beliefs. A Platonist approach relied as much on intuition as logic. It allowed for degrees of ambiguity. On the whole, for its Christian partisans, Plato’s metaphysical vision of a universe seemed to be far more spiritual than that of Aristotle. Apologists for Plato knew well enough of the many outrages against Christianity in his dialogues, especially in the Republic. These included the transmigration of souls, the sharing of wives, euthanasia, and allusions to homosexual practice.6 One way around these was to argue that Plato was often being ironic, or that his dialogues were simply a wild clearinghouse of fantastical Greek opinion, since the texts always pitted various arguments one against another and Plato’s own viewpoint was not always clear.

  Bessarion was a master at navigating these disputes. His approach was to elucidate the more obvious and acceptable areas of Plato’s Socratic wisdom (since the dialogues often gave voice to the irenic Socrates), and to focus on Plato’s larger metaphysics, which had a strong doctrine of Creation and the individual soul. These two doctrines were not always welcomed by the revival of Greek thought; the Aristotelian movement that dominated the Italian universities—called the Averroists (followers of the Aristotelian Arab Averroës)—denied both beliefs.

  From the days of the Council of Florence, Bessarion and Cusanus had known each other as supporters of the Latin and Greek union. Such ties may have paved Cusanus’s way to Rome, where he would become a leading theologian. Reared in Germany, Cusanus had been nurtured in its devotio moderna, a culture of lay piety and classical learning. He also found a guiding light in Meister Eckhart (1260–1327), the German mystic. However, at age seventeen Cusanus went to Padua, the center of worldly Italian humanism. This profound experience pulled him in the direction of natural science and spurred his interest, rare among theologians, in mathematics and astronomy.

  Cusanus also adopted the humanist predilection for book-hunting and collecting of ancient manuscripts, and this allowed him to achieve an uncommon mastery of Platonist thought.7 There seemed to be no end to these lost works of antiquity. What soon became apparent was this: the past offered a confusing abundance of Platonist writings. Most valuable, of course, were Plato’s original dialogues. Then, in early Christian times, Platonist theologians such as Origen, and in part Augustine, penned volumes of material. Next came the “secular” Platonists in the last stages of the Roman Empire: Plotinus and his student Porphyry. Later still was Proclus, who had a student too, the Syrian Christian mystic Dionysius (erroneously thought to be the New Testament’s Dionysius of the Areopagite council in Athens). All together, this medley of thinkers produced volumes on pure Plato and on their own derivations, to be known as Neoplatonism.

  A figure such as Piero, depending on the degree to which he joined humanist circles to discuss Platonism, would have been introduced to the world of its many interpretations. According to later historians of Platonist thought, Plato’s dialogues and their later interpretation by Neoplatonism were different in two ways. While Plato emphasized the dualism of the sensible and intelligible, Neoplatonism emphasized the dialectic between the One and the Many (as found originally in Plato’s Parmenides). Second, while Plato vaguely said that objects in the world “participate” in their tran­scen­dent forms (or Ideas), the Neoplatonists developed an elaborate scale, or ascending ladder, by which reality emanates from the One, and by which the human soul ascends back to the One. This was an idea that was adopted by some of the early Greek monastics and that was still alive in the tradition of Camaldolese spirituality, which had a strong influence in San­sepol­cro and the life of Piero and his family.

  The belief in such metaphysical scales and ladders in the universe materialized in the physical vision of the Great Chain of Being, an ordering of all of life—from God and souls down to insects and brute matter—which gained in popularity in the Middle Ages.8 Study of the physical chain of being was part of speculative science in the Renaissance, and it continued up to the time of Charles Darwin’s theory of biological evolution (which presented compelling new arguments against a natural order that is hierarchical).

  As best as Piero could tell, this world of Neoplatonist speculation was an amalgam that tried to preserve many strains of ancient Greek thought and science.9 Through all the Neoplatonist fog, it w
as still possible for Piero to grasp the essentials of a Christian Platonism. This was an outlook that acknowledged the role of number and proportion in the universe, and it also espoused the dualistic doctrine of the intelligible world of Ideas and the sensible world of material objects. This was relevant to Piero’s mathematics, to his paintings, and to his acceptance of basic beliefs about God, the soul, and a spiritual and physical realm.

  Piero was only an amateur in such Platonist matters, and, as the opportunities arose, he no doubt looked on in silence when the more scholarly humanists probed ways to reconcile ancient thought with the Christian faith. An expert in this task was someone like Cusanus, who was eleven years older than Piero and from a very different world: the environs of German mysticism, priestly ordination, and the Italian university.

  Cusanus had begun his path to Rome as a young scholar enthusiastic about church reform. He supported the idea of the papacy’s sharing authority with the councils. Disheartened by the Council of Basel’s bitter disputes over this topic, he swung to the papal side. When it became time for the pro-papal party in Basel to invite the Greeks to a unity council, the erudite Cusanus was sent to Constantinople as the Latin ambassador. Later “at sea en route back from Greece” in winter 1437–38, he had a deeply religious experience. This would shape his novel Platonist theology, expressed in the most important of his several written works, On Learned Ignorance (1440).10