by Larry Witham
Through the 1460s, Montefeltro still offered his services as a condottiere, assembling armies for various republics or the papacy. At home, his concern was to build a dynasty. This required that he produce a male heir. That family drama was filled with romance and tragedy. Having fathered no legitimate male heirs, Federico negotiated with the house of Sforza, which ruled in Milan, and in 1460 entered marriage (his second) with the fourteen-year old Battista Sforza, daughter of the Sforza lord of Pesaro. She was an exemplar of the humanist education of women in the Renaissance. So skilled was Battista that during her husband’s absences, she ruled his fiefdom, drawing praise for her abilities in the memoirs of Pope Pius II.
Over eleven years of her marriage to Federico, Battista gave him nine children, the last being a son. It was early 1472, and that spring Montefeltro was called away: the Florentines hired him to put down a rebellion in nearby Volterra. In his absence, Battista, weakened by childbirth, was struck by pneumonia. He returned to her side just before she died. She was twenty-six. Federico’s remorse changed some of his priorities, but not most. Now in his fifties, with only a decade more of life, he lived as intensely as ever—as a humanist patron and a political calculator. Part of that was to commission Piero to commemorate himself and Battista with a rare double portrait. Federico’s learning that Piero could paint in oil, still viewed as cutting-edge in Italy, undoubtedly secured the duke’s choice.
The common problem of royal portraiture was to have a prince sit quietly for sketches or even a final work. Piero may have persuaded Montefeltro to sit for a time. He had seen Battista in life, but as he began to conceptualize portraits of the two, he most likely turned to her death mask and a marble sculpture that already had been made. Piero chose a side profile of Federico and Battista. This was a precedent from ancient Rome and the new trend in Quattrocento Italy of bronze medallions. Piero had another reason to choose a profile, of course. Federico had lost an eye in a jousting tournament in 1450, and had a large gouge in the bridge of his nose as well. Once again, Piero was mindful of Flemish innovations. They had begun to put portrait subjects against a full landscape in a new way, making it look as though the person was standing on a mountain, the distance receding dramatically. Piero would do the same for the first time.
Piero painted the dual portraits of Federico and Battista on separate panels, but facing each other with a continuous landscape in the distance. Federico wears a red coat and hat and Battista a bonnet and jewels. Working with oil—and in contrast to his simple Senigallia Madonna—Piero adds immaculate details: pearls and embroidery catch the light; small boats cast their reflections on a distant lake. He has added a theoretical touch as well. Whereas the Flemish oil painters might casually simulate glitter and highlights on jewels or pearls, Piero painted it according to a truly accurate analysis of reflected light.9
On the back of the same two panels, Piero continues his pictorial narrative, now in miniature, painting a vision of Federico and Battista in a parade of their personal “triumphs.” In the previous century, the Italian humanist Petrarch had inaugurated a tradition of poems, the Triumph of the Virtues, and by Federico’s day the themes in this work were being employed by painters and poets to flatter patrons.
Petrarch’s Triumph is a vernacular allegorical poem in the medieval tradition of the soul’s journey from young passion to maturity and union with God, reflecting very much Petrarch’s own Augustinian and Platonist leanings. He parades his story and its characters before Laura, a married woman toward whom he felt unrequited love. Though the Triumphs, Petrarch’s most popular work, would be a future model for court literature in Italy, critics through history would often say that the inventive storytelling did not quite equal the moral and poetic inspiration of Dante’s poetic epics, also written in the vernacular. Be that as it may, Petrarch composed his Triumphs in six parts—Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time, and Eternity—and Italian writers and courtiers ever after turned to these as a catalog of famous persons and lists of worldly vanities.
For his painting of the duke and duchess of Urbino, Piero turned to such allegorical lists of virtues as well. His choice in this may reveal a personal interest in reconciling Christianity with classicism. For the viewing public, such visual storytelling was a kind of benign propaganda. It educated the public on the virtues; it also added prestige to the Montefeltro name by linking it to the Roman past and to Christian and classical morality. Piero put this into a single visual saga, for the most part sincere. Indeed, the regal Battista did insist on the simple burial of a Franciscan nun.
Allegorically portrayed, Federico and Battista sit on triumphal chariots, which are more like field wagons. The wagons carry the duke and duchess toward each other along the edge of a cliff. Behind them is a far-off landscape of great detail. In his Arezzo frescos, the soft blue backgrounds often gave the impression of aerial perspective (a sense of distance created by bluish vapor in the air), but in the vistas of the Montefeltro triumphs, Piero has employed it with technical panache, using oil paint’s ability to produce subtle gradations by glazing. Otherwise, the landscape still has a similarity to the one painted in his Baptism of Christ so many years before.10 As always, Piero’s landscape is part Tuscan, part generic, and a bit fantastical.
Piero’s tastes in furniture for his paintings had, from early in his career, turned toward frequent use of the Roman field chair. In these he placed kings, saints, and madonnas. Now it is Federico and Battista who are poised on these imperial, yet practical, seats as they ride on chariots, in his case drawn by white horses, in hers by unicorns. They are each surrounded by allegorical figures. For the duke, this human coterie symbolizes the four cardinal virtues. Seated in front of Battista are the three theological virtues, while other virtues stand behind. At the bottom of the two panels, as if the Latin wording has been chiseled into a stone plaque, both duke and duchess are praised in a text suited to the flowery triumph tradition of Petrarch:
He rides illustrious in glorious triumph[,] he who as he wields the scepter with moderation, the eternal flame of his virtues celebrates as equal to the great generals.
She who observed restraint in success flies on all men’s lips, honored by the praise of her great husband’s exploits.11
Federico finished out his eventful life during the reign of one of the Renaissance’s most wily popes, Sixtus IV. Though Sixtus was the pious head of the Franciscan order when elected, he had no qualms in behaving like any other rapacious Italian prince. He increased the privileges of the Franciscans, perhaps to the chagrin of other religious orders, and practiced nepotism openly. As part of his desire to give relatives positions of power, in 1478 he was a party to the attempted overthrow of Lorenzo de’ Medici, who survived an assassination attempt while he worshipped at a church in Florence. This drew Sixtus into a fruitless two-year war with Florence, relying on his military alliance with King Ferdinand I of Naples. No sooner had that conflict petered out than Sixtus was enticing Venice to attack rebellious Ferrara, in the middle of which he changed sides. By the end of his reign, Sixtus’s duplicity had rallied most of the princes of the Italian peninsula against him. At the high point of his machinations, he needed allies, and one of the more reliable for the papacy had been Montefeltro in Urbino.
Sixtus had an attractive side to him as well, and perhaps this quality is why Federico saw himself as a humanist prince helping a humanist pope. Sixtus had finally changed Rome from a medieval to a Renaissance city. He built the Sistine Chapel (1473–81), invited artists and scholars to Rome, promoted medical studies, opened the Vatican Library to general scholarly use, and established the Vatican archives. Observant of this pope’s glory, Federico dreamed of negotiating a marriage between one of his own daughters, Giovanna, and a member of the papal household, a papal nephew named Giovanni della Rovere (who was not, by the way, one of the six nephews whom Sixtus IV had made a cardinal).
For such a delicate matter, Federico traveled to R
ome, arriving in May 1474, about two years after the death of Battista. Pope Sixtus welcomed him, but the College of Cardinals was mildly scandalized, since Federico had previously led forces against Pius II. The hour was dire, however. The cities in Umbria were in rebellion, and, by the summer of 1474, Milan and Florence were coming to their aid. The pope needed a military leader. Federico agreed to rally a force of two thousand. By August the rebels had sued for peace, and in September Federico was marching through Rome’s gates in a triumphal procession. Naturally, the cardinals approved the marriage of the pope’s nephew to Federico’s daughter.
All at once, honors seemed to shower down on Federico, and not only from the pope, who made him general of a new Vatican league. Ferdinand of Naples decorated Federico with the Royal Order of the Ermine, and the King of England extended to him that nation’s highest military honor, the Order of the Garter. In the darkness of conspiracy, though, it was not Federico’s finest hour in every respect. When the pope had conspired with Florence’s Pazzi bankers and the bishop of Pisa in 1478 to overthrow the Medici, Federico apparently had promised to have a small army outside the city of Florence, ready to take it over in the name of the Pazzi and the pope, a would-be Renaissance coup that failed to transpire in the end.12
The annals of history would tell of Federico da Montefeltro’s good and bad sides. Piero’s job was to present him as he saw him, and this would be manifest in two versions. His first portrait of Federico (opposite Battista, and with the triumph themes on the back) was unsparing in its detail, including his broken nose, wiry hair, and the blemishes on his skin—a portrait that would, in fact, become a kind of icon of the Italian Renaissance. Now Piero’s task, in a second portrait, was to present Federico as mourning husband and knight of honor, and this was a far more delicate project.
The second portrait is known today as the Brera Altarpiece for its museum location in Milan. It is a full-scale altarpiece on the model of the patron kneeling before Mary and the saints. They are gathered in what was called a “sacred conversation.” Piero had done something like this with the Misericordia Altarpiece, with eight local donors before a towering Mary, and with the fresco of Sigismondo Malatesta, who knelt before his patron saint. With Federico, Piero, now in his sixties, would take this motif to new heights.
The painting was presumably to be placed above Federico’s tomb. For such a setting, Piero seems to be striking a balance of visual symbolism: Federico as soldier and as Christian humanist. Too gaudy a presentation of his military honors would destroy that balance, so in the end Federico appears as a pious knight of old. Piero keeps the shiny armor simple, Federico’s helmet and gloves set humbly on the floor. The Flemish had done paintings of kneeling soldiers in armor, and perhaps this is the kind of look that Federico had asked for. All the same, a kneeling donor, a sacred conversation with Mary, and a holy enclosure were safe bets for the duke’s honor. Piero had already done the diptych’s profile portrait of Federico, which he presumably liked, so Piero retained that visage, using the same drawing as a kind of stencil.
A new kind of altarpiece—a large single painting surface—was emerging in Italy, and with the Montefeltro monolith Piero would be extending its use. He set the size at about nine feet tall by six wide. His carpenter made it by joining together nine horizontal planks, a Flemish approach being adopted in Italy. (Furthermore, in general, Italians used poplar planks, while the Flemish preferred walnut, often in full solid panels sliced from trees, as Piero had used in the Senigallia Madonna and would again in future projects.)
Once such practical matters were in place, Piero followed his natural instincts for innovation, which was now becoming so cerebral that only the most acute observers might have noticed. Most obvious to all was the thrust of lines in his composition. Federico, Mary, and the standing group of saints are vertical thrusts, and against these are contrasted the diagonals of Federico’s arm, the sword at his side, and the seemingly floating Christ child in Mary’s lap. Piero’s use of oil further built his reputation as an early Italian exploiter of the craft. Fully in control of the medium, he created a marvelous set of effects, both textural and luminous, from crystal and gauze to gold-embroidered fabric and the reflective surface of metal.
Although Montefeltro’s honor was the visual priority in this composition, Piero infuses it with clever geometrical underpinnings, producing what modern commentators call his “spatial games.” Piero’s human figures are gathered in a great architectural setting, a church apse under a half dome rendered in the classical motif of a scallop shell. By modern analysis, Piero’s perspective represents an interior going back forty-five feet, a cavernous area supported by columns and ceiling elements. Despite this depth, Piero has made his figures seem to tower at the very front, as if larger than life.Then, in an illusionist quirk, they also seem deep within the church. As if to add a further touch of novelty, Piero portrays them engaged in their sacred conversation without halos.
A sense of architectural space absolutely clarified by light dominates the scene, and into this space and light Piero has dangled the simplest of perfect shapes. From the ceiling hangs an overly large egg on a gold chain, taking “so peculiar a prominence” that it will forever baffle art historians.13 The egg has been calculated to be six inches tall in real life, and thus probably an ostrich egg. Piero might have seen one in a prince’s bestiary. Nothing is ever so simple in art-historical interpretation, however, and therefore Piero’s use of the egg has been attributed to a wide range of possible sources: pagan stories, Islamic decorations, Christian symbolism, a symbol used by secular princes, a symbol of the elements or mathematical perfection, and even a symbolic allusion to the much-celebrated birth of the duke’s son.
In the Montefeltro altarpiece, Piero makes a conventional topic look strange and monumental. The architectural backdrop was the first of its kind in Italy. In a generation, this extravagant stage-like atmosphere would be emulated in major paintings from Venice to Rome. It has been worth noting that the Venetian master Giovanni Bellini had been painting in nearby Pesaro through 1472 and 1473, and perhaps had the opportunity to see Piero’s newest work. Whatever Bellini’s actual sources or inspirations, he would carry a Pieroesque sense of perspective, color, and space back north, setting a new standard for Venetian painting.
Piero may have completed the Montefeltro altarpiece in as little as two years, though there is really no telling how long.14 In this case especially, there was no great hurry. He was painting ultimately for Federico’s tomb, and the church to bear that tomb was still on the architect’s drawing board, drawings which Piero may have seen as he embarked on his painting. This made the project a rare case in which the design of the church and the painting may have been organized in tandem, a contrast to the expedient mix-and-match decoration of so many churches. Clearly, Piero painted faster than the architects could build (finishing Federico’s church years after the duke’s death). This destined the painting for a smaller interim setting, the Observant Franciscan church of San Donato on the outskirts of Urbino.
Like his completed painting, Piero was a bit off to the side in such a magnificent court as Federico’s. One chronicler of Urbino had called the duke the “light of Italy” for his patronage and the company he kept. The court was filled with luminaries.15 Alberti may have passed through around 1470, and the architect Laurana gave Urbino its unrivaled classical achievement, the ducal palace. Also at Urbino, Florence’s legendary book collector, Vespasiano da Bisticci, built one of the best libraries in Italy, and humanist and diplomat Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529) would also settle there, writing a Renaissance handbook on manners that would shape future European gentlemen. In the pictorial arts, the court of Montefeltro would become equally famous for his private den, or studiolo, which was lined with some of the most elaborate intarsia in Italy. It also had a cycle of great-men paintings along the wall.
How brightly Piero himself might have shown in the blazing atmosphere is
uncertain, as is who met whom in the hallways of the Urbino kingdom. Piero may have met Alberti, for example. Laurana might have seen Piero’s painted architecture and copied some of its features. As to Piero’s influence on architecture, the better-known theory is that he inspired the painter and architect Donato Bramante, who probably trained in Urbino, and who would specialize in creating architectural illusions with perspective.16 The city was the birthplace of Raphael, who would learn much in that local setting before making his way in Florence and finally Rome, where he became chief artist for the papacy. Vasari had said that Piero produced a number of small pictures in Urbino, and who knows how much of this legacy young Raphael may have seen?
Working with Federico’s court gave Piero the opportunity to emerge as a full-blown humanist. He was taking a rare step in Italy’s class-conscious society, bridging the social gap between the mere artisan and the humanist, who usually needed a university credential and mastery of Latin. (It was the kind of step made later, and more famously, by the life of the polymath Leonardo da Vinci, who openly shunned pompous university education.) Piero’s first humanist calling card had been his On Perspective treatise. He had dedicated that manuscript, his second, to the House of Montefeltro, where it occupied a spot on the library shelf. Now Piero began to write a third original work, a treatise on geometrical shapes. By its bookish size and ornate rendering, the treatise would commonly be called the Little Book on Five Regular Solids (Libellus de quinque corporibus regularibus).