Piero's Light

by Larry Witham

  How Piero may have done likewise in his home can only be speculated upon. If Hercules is typical, then he painted figures with presence and vitality. Piero presents Hercules as young, with scruffy black hair. Standing in a relaxed contrapposto, he is all but naked except for his lion-skin apron. He is shown coming through a stone door, extending his club as in a show of power. In Piero’s house, he probably aligned the painted architecture around Hercules with the actual interior, as was the illusionist style of the Renaissance.37 Though a pagan figure, Hercules was like an echo of Piero’s early theological work. The anatomical naturalness and pale skin of Hercules are much like that of Jesus and John in the Baptism of Christ.

  In his other homebound painting, the Nativity, Piero drew directly upon his church tradition. This nativity scene is based on the medieval story of St. Briget, a Swedish mystic. In a vision, Briget had seen the infant Jesus and his adoring mother amid the “miraculous sweetness” of the music and song of angels. The beguiling story became a popular pictorial, with a special emphasis on the angelic choir. On this musical group feature, Piero would not disappoint, and the painting’s overall pleasantness suggests that he had brought it to completion as a leisurely and gratifying project.

  Piero painted the Nativity in oil on an approximately square panel. He began with an under­drawing, now leaning toward the new Flemish methods of more modeled rendering in brown on a white surface before the color is applied. By this time, the classical revival had produced many biblical scenes in the midst of crumbling Roman buildings. Piero turned in a different direction. He portrayed a broken-down shed or lean-to, the kind that farmers tolerated in their workaday world and that a poor couple such as Mary and Joseph would have welcomed as shelter. The story unfolds in the kind of dry clearing that Tuscan farmers used to thresh grain. The scene is high above the valley, which stretches out into the distance in one of Piero’s typically idealized Tuscan land­scapes. Also typical, Piero divides the vista into two different ethoses. On one side is a distant city with a basilica, towers, and geometrical streets; the other looks down a winding river that courses through a valley and past cliffs.

  In this work, Piero drops all courtly and classical pretenses. Here is a rustic and even humorous world. The Virgin is a red-haired maiden, elegantly dressed yet kneeling on dusty soil. She has more the look of a young woman in Flemish pictures than in Roman statuary. To her right are five barefoot angels like a choir troupe, wingless and without halos. Three of them are singing, the other two playing lutes. Joseph is a saddle maker, and two shepherds appear as if travelers on a country road. Piero also includes a mule and an ox, perhaps inspired by a popular devotional work, Meditationes de Vita Christi, which painters used as a reference. Piero’s mule is braying with the choir, and the ox is admiring the baby. To top off this holy bestiary, Piero places a black bird, probably a magpie, on the shed’s roof, seeming to announce the event.

  All of Piero’s elements are here: a sense of unlimited space defined by light, color, and an idealized human story. The colors are reminiscent of Piero’s early Baptism of Christ, and he is clearly in a more informal mode of painting. He uses only a shadow in the shed to suggest linear perspective, and his painting strokes don’t always match his underdrawing. The scene is a Christian story. It is also a Renaissance story of man and nature, and, in that sense also, a final word on the accumulated skill and sensibility of an early Quattro­cento artist.

  In this final period of his creativity, Piero had also been busy writing or copying treatises. Quite naturally, the amount of painting he did would decline with his age.38 He also was putting his traveling days behind him, with only one known exception. In April 1482 he was in Rimini on the Adriatic coast, and, whether on holiday or working, he rented a furnished room with the use of a kitchen garden. The changing world of Renaissance art, however, was becoming beyond his physical reach. He probably did not make the trips necessary to see the new directions in painting taking place in Mantua, Florence, Venice, or Rome, change that was typified by artists such as Andrea Mantegna, Sandro Botticelli, Giovanni Bellini, Antonio Pollaiuolo, Domenico Ghirlandaio, and Pietro Perugino. As Piero sat back on his considerable laurels, as it were, these younger painters opened the way to the nascent High Renaissance, a time when painting became far more elaborate, playing on emotion, drama, and princely glamour, and pushing perspective to new inventive uses.

  Piero’s last painting, the Nativity, defied all of this in its regal homeliness. As a kind of ending, it shows his Renaissance classicism tinctured with the Flemish aesthetic and the casualness of a painter in old age. The composite effect of all his paintings, strong in their cool, classical look, would influence some of his immediate successors in Italian painting, but the Pieroesque style was not going to be a bridge to the next age. This was the age of the baroque, an ebullient and hotly emotional time in the arts that was driven by the Counter-Reformation. The Roman Church and its patrons would become far stricter on the theological imagery that could be painted, but they otherwise put no limits on the melodrama that could be infused into the orthodox Christian story.

  Free to follow his own vision in his last paintings, Piero had produced Hercules and the Nativity for his own final surroundings, the family’s large ancestral house in San­sepol­cro. Piero had perhaps been on the cusp of his sixties when he returned home permanently, mustering enough energy still for himself and his brother Marco to consolidate and expand what they owned in San­sepol­cro as heirs to the Fran­cesca family.

  Although Piero now made it a family known for the arts, it was essentially a family steeped in Quattro­cento commerce. From the day Piero received his first payment in 1431, his father had been his agent, and would continue as such, though he had obviously tapered off by the time he died in 1464. From around that time, Marco had overseen the family house, and, probably even before this duty, had also begun to operate as Piero’s agent, as a paper trail of documents has shown.39 For the Saint Anthony Altarpiece in Perugia, Marco received the final payment for Piero on June 21, 1468—years after its commissioning—suggesting again how slowly Piero could work (or how slowly patrons paid their debts).

  For all of Piero’s travels, which for thirty years had taken him far from the family hearth, he seems to have had a remarkable bond with his father and Marco, a deep camaraderie in all things mercantile, including art. This common cause in business may also explain why Piero, such a prominent artist, never had a famous workshop that produced disciples who perpetuated his style and methodologies beyond his lifetime. As shrewd as the next man, and a veritable walking calculator as well, Piero may have been looking for ways to escape extra costs, such as paying exorbitant taxes. As one assessment states, “Piero’s artistic activity was carried on under the legal and administrative aegis of the family’s commercial activity.”40 In this scheme, Piero could share overhead, rents, and tax liabilities with his family, shoehorning his studio space into buildings where his family operated a warehouse or workshop.

  In such a setting, Piero probably never established a permanent workforce of assistants, the kind of influential workshop that had been seen in Florence under Lorenzo Ghiberti (who trained Donatello) and Andrea del Verrocchio (who trained Leonardo da Vinci), or in Padua under Francesco Squarcione (who trained Mantegna, among others). No Piero “school” was left behind. Nonetheless, Piero was unique among notable painters for making a lasting mark on a home town, something possible because his family was influential and a possessor of property.

  Besides the ancestral house, the family had a rural villa in nearby Bastia and also had rented a structure on the main piazza, which probably served as Piero’s studio on many occasions. By the 1460s, however, the family had acquired two new properties nearby, and with this their living circumstance would dramatically change. The first property was a broken building just a block down the hill from their house. They restored this as a wholly owned workshop. This would have been where Piero set up
a new studio, perhaps his best-accommodated, and certainly his last. He may have produced the Perugia polyptych (the Saint Anthony Altarpiece) and works for the House of Montefeltro at this location, then delivered them overland. If Piero had indeed organized a scriptorium to copy his written works into Latin, and to labor on his copying of Archimedes, this, too, may have been the location.

  In another physical expansion, the brothers acquired the house next door and merged it with their original structure. This would be Piero’s first chance, apparently, to design something like a classically decorated urban palace. When the two buildings were joined—externally by a new façade—it became the new and final look of what local pride would eventually call “Casa di Piero,” a true Renaissance house.41

  The new house, one of the city’s largest, had the normal three tiers of a Renaissance palace. The lower level had cellars, a stable, and a workshop, while the second floor had rooms for social gatherings and probably for Piero’s living quarters. The third floor had private family rooms. Outside, the old house was surfaced with a new façade that featured Renaissance tabernacle windows (given this name because of their squat triangular pediments on top). Inside, Piero installed decorative doorframes and ornate corbels (the protruding brackets that support cornices), all of which resembled the architecture he had put into his paintings.

  Piero’s exposure to the architectural doings of the Quattro­cento had been lifelong. It began with watching his own father’s fix-it trade. Then at the princely courts he saw greater things erected in wood and stone, all the while analyzing the engineering and the various kinds of decorative surfaces. When Piero settled down in San­sepol­cro—from the 1470s to his death in 1492—his skilled work on the house was no surprise, nor was his election as overseer of construction in the city and supervisor of fortifications.

  Although retirement was on the horizon, Piero seemed to keep up with the family, civic, and spiritual duties that a respected senior citizen might have been willing to perform. Being the eldest son, he probably oversaw some of the affairs of the extended family. For two years, beginning in 1480, he was head of the craftsmen’s Guild of Saint Bartholomew. The city called upon him to be a councillor and auditor, and for several years running he was leader (prior) of the Confraternity of San Bartolomeo, the city’s largest charitable organization.

  In 1487, when Piero was probably seventy-five, he wrote out his brief will and testament in the Tuscan vernacular and then gave it to a notary for official transcription. Incredibly, that scrap of paper with the vernacular would survive down to the present, revealing Piero’s statement that he was “in sound mind, intellect, and body” and that “I want to be buried in our family burial place.”42 He left money for his nieces, who needed a dowry, and the rest to his surviving kin.

  Piero’s eyes were still strong enough to see what he was writing at this point, as evident in his clear script. Yet in the years following his will and testament, he would be going blind. A young boy, according to one local memory passed down through history, may have helped him around town in those final days. That town had changed, thanks to Piero. Cosmopolitan in trade, San­sepol­cro had been medieval in art when Piero was young: this echoed in its altarpieces and statuary. Piero conformed to that, but also broke that medieval mold. He gave San­sepol­cro its first freestanding, undivided panel paintings, as if windows on a new world. He moved the local aesthetic away from Gothic spires to Renaissance rectangles. He probably introduced the first lunettes into local design.

  When Piero died, he was buried alongside his family in the Saint Leonardo Chapel at the Camaldolese abbey. The abbey, soon to become a cathedral, was said to mark the original foundation site of San­sepol­cro. The registrar of deaths, applying quill and ink to the town’s “book of the dead,” told the final story: “M. Piero di Benedetto de’ Franceschi, a famous painter, on October 12, 1492; buried in the Badia [abbey].”

  This was the same day, of course, that Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World. After the revolution in painting and geometry brought by Piero—and in mapmaking by his fellow geometers—the landing was another signal event in the growing impact of the Renaissance.

  A year before Piero died, the Church of San Bernardino was completed in Urbino. With its opening for public worship, Piero’s altarpiece featuring a kneeling Federico da Montefeltro was first seen by a wider public. All the faces of the saints in the painting were remarkably well done. To some viewers, the face of St. Peter might have looked strangely familiar. Its model was Piero’s acquaintance, the Franciscan mathematician Luca Pacioli. In the last years of his life, Piero and Luca were comparing notes. They were both from San­sepol­cro, and Luca, the younger of the two, was a traveler, often teaching mathematics around Tuscany. Luca was also writing his own treatise on mathematics, to be known as the Summa de Arithmetica.

  As the memory of Piero rapidly faded in the tumultuous days of Italy at the end of the Quattro­cento, Luca Pacioli’s treatise would become the first document to guarantee that Piero’s name remained in circulation. Pacioli was turning out to be the most noted mathematician at the end of Piero’s century. The Italian Renaissance still had a few more generations to go, highlighted by Michelangelo, and then ending in the sixteenth century just before the rise of Galileo. Across this period, Italy was blanketed by military invasions. It would see a great rebellion in the Church—the Protestant Reformation surge—and the last vestige of communal republics. Those short-lived Italian experiments in something like democracy were eclipsed by old-fashioned autocracies just about everywhere.

  In a quiet corner of this all, Pacioli wrote down that Piero was a “monarch of painting.”43 Piero, who had traveled most of his life, was now in his grave. But his journey into history had just begun.

  PART II

  CHAPTER 7

  After the Renaissance

  After Piero’s death, Italy witnessed a tide of artistic achievements and political catastrophes. There was the ebullience of High Renaissance painting, and then the summit of the Renaissance papacy, its Vatican soon decorated by gold from the New World. The sixteenth century also brought the Protestant rebellion in the north, and, like a cresting wave, an increasing number of invasions of the Italian peninsula. These French and German invaders, as compared to the derring-do condottieri on horseback, arrived with armies that were terrifyingly modern.

  Small wonder that Piero’s calm and measured works of art began to look dated. Reflecting the mood of a new, tumultuous, and extravagant century, paintings such as Titian’s playful Bacchanal of the Andrians (1526), Michelangelo’s terrifying Last Judgment (1541), and Caravaggio’s erotic Bacchus (1597) were far more typical. Beyond the walls of San­sepol­cro, Piero’s name dropped from view; indeed, one pope, Julius II, had Raphael paint over his Vatican murals.

  Though hardly a consolation, Piero’s own descent into obscurity was paralleled, on a much larger scale, by the misfortunes of his homeland for the next 350 years, lasting until the modern unification of Italy in 1870. During the preceding block of centuries, Italy was occupied by foreign empires, starting in 1494—two years after Piero’s death—with the invasion of the French. “A most unhappy year for Italy,” said Francesco Guicciardini, the country’s first modern historian.1

  In Florence around that same time, the apocalyptic preacher Girolamo Savonarola had chased out the Medici family. A too-ardent Dominican, he welcomed the French as God’s judgment on even the papacy, chastising his foes with such thundering flourishes as “Tyrants are incorrigible because they are proud, because they love flattery, because they will not restore their ill-gotten gains.”2 For that matter, Savonarola also put Plato and Aristotle in hell, hardly an encouragement to Renaissance humanists, who now circulated widely, from court scriptoriums that translated ancient works to a so-called Platonic Academy in Florence and the universities of the north, which continued to be hotbeds of Aristotelian thought.

  The next
very unhappy year came in 1527, when German armies sacked Rome. Some of the northern mercenaries, being pro-Martin Luther, a German priest who was now leading a rebellion against the papacy, gouged Raphael’s Vatican frescos with their swords. On the whole, though, the invaders had no particular grievance with Italian art. The great works of Florence, Venice, and Rome continued to receive admiration, acclaim, and confiscation by foraging foreign royalty.

  Such attention was fated to overlook Piero. He lacked an urban showcase like Florence, and his Vatican frescos had been painted over. Nor had he joined the artisan/guild system of the larger courts, where opulence prevailed over artistic scruple, but where his name might have resounded nevertheless. The Arezzo frescos, though large enough to demand praise and attention, were off the beaten path. Piero’s two treatises in the Urbino library, On Perspective and Five Regular Solids, were not turning out to be the kind of “monument” he had hoped people would notice after his death. Tucked away on a library shelf, they would take generations to be recognized for their originality. Piero’s eclipse outside Italy was notable as well. A century after his death, a leading Dutch art historian compiled an influential volume on Flemish, German, and Italian artists, the Schilder-boeck (1604), but did not bother to include Piero among the forty Italians featured.3