Piero's Light

by Larry Witham

  By Piero’s influence reaching Bellini, and Bellini’s reaching Veronese, Longhi was suggesting that Piero had set the stage for all European painting, since it tended thereafter to follow the opulent Venetian fashion. This put Piero at the fountainhead of four centuries of Western art. After making his claim in 1914, the response was encouraging, at least in sowing lively disagreement among art historians and stirring a degree of excitement. One opposing German critic wrote that “The influence of Piero on Venetian painting has been recently claimed, but not demonstrated.”38 Longhi’s teacher, Venturi, had already asserted that Piero had been the dominant influence on central Italian painting, and after Longhi’s article he was willing to risk a further step. In a 1922 work, Venturi concluded, “A great heir received Piero’s gift: Venice.”39 A happy Longhi noted later, “With such authoritative support, my conviction was winning ground.”40

  Soon enough, the Italian publisher Mario Broglio, a painter and art collector who had mastered marketing art monographs, asked Longhi to expand his article into a first-of-its-kind book on Piero. It was published in Italian and French in 1927, titled simply Piero della Fran­cesca (appearing in English in 1931). Broglio knew what he was doing. He aimed the book for Paris, the nerve center of modern art. In Rome’s Piazza San Silvestro, with Longhi’s help, Broglio filled his Buick with French copies and then headed across the Alps. Parisian bookshops and reviewers were waiting.

  Longhi’s book catapulted Piero into a broader modern discussion. On a popular level, the Italian newspaper “culture pages” were happy to declare that another great Italian painter had changed the face of Western art. For fastidious historians, though, Longhi had presented a number of audacious claims that, if true, would require rewriting past monographs and textbooks, and this was hardly convenient. As Longhi suggested, art-historical debates over dates and influence often deteriorated into “personal controversies.”41 The dating of Piero’s works was an especially contested field, but it was two other kinds of claims that made Longhi a target for academic rivals.

  The first claim was that Piero had made a kind of “intellectual breakthrough” in the Renaissance with a new “chromatic style,” which Longhi called a “perspectival synthesis of form-color.”42 This was the style that proved that there was a “lyrical affinity between Bellini’s and Antonello’s spatial sense and the spatial sense of their source, Piero.” Speaking this way, Longhi was wearing his hat as the elite Italian connoisseur, venturing a highly intuitive interpretation of how paintings look and feel.

  Longhi’s second claim was initially hinted at in his book, but then was elaborated more strongly in later editions. Here he stated that Piero’s geometric cityscapes preceded the same unique effect produced later by Cézanne, who produced an “impressionism [of] such accessible form and synthesis.”43

  Going beyond Fry, Longhi made the historical point that Seurat and Cézanne probably had been influenced in their own innovations by constantly seeing the copies of Piero’s Arezzo frescos in the chapel at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris.44 In making the Cézanne connection, gradually and then firmly, Longhi was suitably careful as well. In a moment of introspection, he questioned whether modern painters had really discovered Piero, or whether it was the “critics” who had made the discovery and spread the idea. Either way, nobody could any longer ignore the suspicion that the Renaissance had complicity in modern art—and that Piero was a prime suspect.

  Longhi effectively set the agenda for Piero studies thereafter. He did this by chronicling how other critics and historians had evaluated Piero across four centuries. And he stayed at the forefront by updating his book in 1946 and 1962. On top of that, Longhi’s analysis of Piero’s underlying visual forms, and his placing of Seurat and Cézanne under Piero’s glow, led other writers to take his argument further than he found acceptable. Before long, Piero was being called the first Cubist.

  The occasion was a review of Longhi’s book by the French artist, Cubist, and critic André Lohte. His article in the January 1930 issue of La Nouvelle Revue Française, an influential organ, said that in reading Longhi’s biography of Piero, the reader “will greet the first Cubist.”45 In the decades before Lohte, other critics had been tying Piero to modern painters from Édouard Manet to Picasso, but Lohte’s insinuation was bold and attractive enough to catch on.46 It was also compelling enough to chagrin Longhi. Thereafter, his rebuttals of the “cubist interpretations” of his book were frequent and articulate, beginning with his questioning of Lohte’s political motives: he said the Cubist painter was trying to get Cubism accepted inside France’s art establishment, the École des Beaux Arts, where Piero was admired and Cubism definitely was not. More to the point, Longhi made known his actual distaste for Cubism and abstraction, lamenting the “esthetic confusion” they had invited into Western art.47

  Longhi was more impressed by the era just before Cubism, it seems, when plenty of innovation was already taking place. It was Cézanne and Seurat, not the Cubists, who achieved “a synthesis of form and color,” Longhi reiterated late in his career. And it was this achievement of the Post-Impressionists that recovered Piero’s “great poetic idea” of the Quattro­cento. “Piero was rediscovered by Cézanne and Seurat (or by others on their account), and not by the brilliant rhapsodist Picasso.”48

  Berenson and Longhi began their writing about Piero at a time when the great philosophical struggles of European thought—especially between classical idealism and the new mechanistic sciences, a view known as “positivism”—were influencing even art-historical interpretation. For the most part, Berenson had operated outside of this ideological debate. He had been the classic connoisseur and art dealer, concerned primarily with the facts and visual effects of a painting. As he said of a work such as Piero’s, for example, “No explanations are called for.”49 Excellence, authenticity, and simple art appreciation were the priority.

  It was slightly different for the group of Italian art historians who circled around Adolfo Venturi, the man who was Longhi’s influential teacher. They had done their thinking and writing under the considerable sway of the Italian philosopher of art, Benedetto Croce (1866–1952). As a philosophical idealist, Croce engaged in a dramatic battle with the positivists in the new social sciences. He argued that the story of art is about creative individuals, not about material and social force or about faceless stylistic trends.

  In faulting the excessive emphasis on the evolution of styles, Croce pointed to the master of this technique, the leading German art historian of his own time, Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945). Across the Alps from Croce, Wölfflin had been in search of a “history of art as the doctrine of modes of vision.” This was to be a lawful and systematic linkage, nation by nation, of how physical and psychological processes of seeing changed the creation and appreciation of styles in painting and sculpture. “Vision itself has its history,” said Wölfflin. He thus probed for a “visual strata,” “visual schema,” or a given “mode of perception” amid the rise or fall of painterly approaches. Finally he proposed that changes in art could be explained by a seesaw of five persistent stylistic “categories of beholding” (which he carefully separated from Kant’s categories of mental perception, though he was operating in a similar philosophical spirit, which was the Kantian search for the laws of human nature).50

  It was against Wölfflin’s faceless art history of laws that Croce had rebelled. He called his German rival’s search for changing external features of art—Wölfflin’s phrase was the “effect of picture on picture”—as mere “fables about line and color.” This was “only pseudohistory,” Croce said, not the real experience of the individual artist.51 As a counterproposal, Croce emphasized the importance of human intuition. Contrary to the abstracting tendency in positivism—with lawful physics as the model in science—Croce insisted that human experience is concrete, immediate, and motivated by intuitive forces. And so it should be in describing the history of art.

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nbsp; Accordingly, Croce’s theory of art was this: art is the human experience that simultaneously joins pictorial “intuition” and “expression.” Together they produce concrete “images,” a place in visual arts and in literature where the senses and the imagination meet, “the borderland in which dreams and reality are mingled.”52 This is a capacity of all people, Croce said. But the artist does it best, not as a genius, but instead by expressing intuitions—that is, mental images—that are more profound or more complex. Writing as an idealist, and working in the stream of Platonism, Croce’s search for the concrete did not deny a universal sense shared by all humans. He thus endorsed a common sense in people of the quality of beauty.

  Although not a professed Platonist, Croce positioned himself in the idealist school of philosophy in what historians have called the great conflict between metaphysical idealism and positivism in modern European thought.53 In ancient times, that was the conflict between Plato and the Epicureans, for example. Since the time of the Napoleonic Wars and the rise of European romanticism, the idealist historical philosophy of George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) stood for the Platonist side. Hegel had a distinct vision of art’s spiritual evolution in history, and this prompted art philosophers to look for the “spirit of the age” in individual artists and works. In the early twentieth century, as scientific positivism swelled in Europe, Croce identified strongly with Hegel’s search for Spirit, and although Wölfflin was a founding positivist among art historians, he, too, could not entirely reject the idea of an inexorable Hegelian evolution of epochs in art. Nevertheless, Croce and Wölfflin represented the growing split in philosophies of art—the idealist against the positivist—and it would only widen and become more antagonistic through their modern century.

  For the time being, the work of Croce was amenable to fellow Italian art historians such as Venturi and Longhi. Croce made one other important argument: art is independent of utility, such as politics, industry, or economics. It is a force of meaning and gives an essential quality to civilization. In some ways, the experience of art is not historical, Croce suggested, even though various artists lived and worked at distinct times in history. Croce thus questioned the relevance of dividing art history into periods and styles. He argued instead that individuals define a period, and not the other way around. Giotto, he famously said, explained the Trecento, the 1300s in Italy, more than the Trecento explained Giotto.54 By this analogy, Piero explained more about the Quattro­cento than his era told about him.

  Increasingly, Piero became caught up in the new debate on approaches to art history. After all, his paintings seemed to join disparate themes, be they faith and science or Christianity and pagan classicism. The new art-historical approach went beyond looking for mere trends in style. It was ultimately about interpretation. How much can the modern mind find in a painting? Because it was the modern mind at issue, theories about the mind—ranging from the spiritual to the Darwinian, psychological, and scientific—began to play an increasing role in art interpretation.

  The earliest novelty in this debate over interpreting art emerged from Germany, the land of Wölfflin. The novelty was driven by art philosophers working in the German idealist tradition, which included Platonism and Kant’s philosophy. German philosophers were always a bit Hegelian in their search for a spirit of the age. Among them, the more dedicated idealists sought forms of deeper meaning in every aspect of art and culture. It was a depth not touched on by Wölfflin’s “categories of beholding,” which still seemed too external, missing the hidden layers of meaning that accumulated in culture and that was said to still be alive in art objects as some kind of tran­scen­dental, or intuitive, quality.

  The setting for this new search for meaning was among a generation of young assimilated Jewish intellectuals, all of whom treasured art, Germany’s cosmopolitan culture, and the heritage of idealistic philosophy. The name that appears first on this horizon is Aby Warburg, a banker’s son. Like others before him, Warburg’s love of art began with his travels to Italy. In Florence he studied Botticelli, the so-called Neoplatonist painter. On his return in 1901, Warburg devoted his inheritance—leaving the banking to his brother—to building a library of all the ancient cultural sources that fed into images and philosophies of the Renaissance.

  Warburg, too, was dissatisfied with Wölfflin’s formalism, with its surface analysis of forms, lines, colors, and subjects in paintings. His quarry was instead the deeper, lasting traces of classical and pagan mythology which, below the surface, he believed, shaped the way Renaissance artists made their pictures. At a time when Darwinian evolution—or, more precisely, evolution as human progress—was a dominant intellectual theme in Europe, Warburg wanted to find this evolution in art as well. Art was thus a story of how past superstitions, often dark and sinister, had transmuted into enlightened and beneficent ideas and images—the very definition of the Renaissance, as he saw it.55 Having developed this agenda, at the peak of his career, Warburg showed his hand in a famous 1912 paper at the Tenth International Art Historians’ Congress in Rome, which he helped to organize.

  The paper focused on the Renaissance art of Ferrara, a city where Warburg investigated the frescos produced for the House of Este in the 1470s, a time after Piero’s visit. What Warburg found in the frescos of the Palazzo Schifanoia, he said, was an “international astrology.” Such a mythology was the key to unlocking many riddles in the paintings, which were filled with symbols, items, and allegories. Warburg’s method was to take a few of these pictorial items and discuss every possible literary, occult, and linguistic source for them. This was a new method for art history, and he called it “iconology.” It was not the old “iconography” that simply discussed subject matter in a painting. Warburg was calling for a new depth and breadth, and as he presented it to the Rome congress, its ambition was fairly stunning.

  In attempting to elucidate the [Ferrara] frescos, I hope to have shown how an iconological analysis that can range freely, with no fear of border guards, and can treat the ancient, medieval, and modern worlds as a coherent historical unity—an analysis that can scrutinize the purest and the most utilitarian of arts as equivalent documents of expression—how such a method, by taking pains to illuminate one single obscurity, can cast light on great and universal evolutionary processes in all their interconnectedness.56

  After Warburg, art history would often do just that: take one simple item, not necessarily a masterpiece, and extrapolate at great length about its interconnections with just about anything a scholar could find of interest in the history of culture. In Warburg’s era, the fledgling science of anthro­pology was digging into the human past for the origins and “survivals” of human beliefs. With Warburg came the parallel search for primeval roots behind the ideas in art objects. What would be called the “Warburgian method”—both seriously and humorously—may have been too diverse and freewheeling to define as a clear methodology; it did nonetheless shoo away the “border guards,” who had prescribed normal ways for art history to be done.

  In the same year as the Rome conference, Warburg drafted a paper on Piero. Warburg’s topic was the Arezzo fresco Battle of Constantine, and his approach was really more like normal iconography than like a deep, controversial, probing by the new iconology.57 In this paper, Warburg, among the earliest to do so, associated Piero’s use of various exotic hats and garments in this particular Arezzo fresco to three possible influences: his 1439 visit to Florence; his seeing a Pisanello medal of the Greek emperor; and his likely desire for the Constantine story to symbolize the Quattro­cento battle of Christians against Turks.

  Later in life, Warburg went into seclusion to deal with a long bout of mental illness, prompted not incidentally by the First World War. His library nevertheless grew and, having become affiliated with the University of Hamburg, he would move from his home to a new building. In time it became the hub for a Warburg circle, of sorts, that would make its mark on the art-history profes
sion. Prominent in that circle was the philosopher of science Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), who arrived in Hamburg around 1920 to teach at the university. He came upon the Warburg Library, which rekindled his long-held fascination with art and culture. He became a self-described member of “that group of scholars whose intellectual center is [Warburg’s] library,” a place that embodied “the methodological unity of all fields and all currents of intellectual history.”58

  Twelve years younger than Warburg, Cassirer had begun as a university student of German literature, turning finally to science and its related philosophies. In making this shift, Cassirer transmitted his idealist (that is, Platonist and Kantian) views into the modern problems of exact scientific knowledge. One of his early writings was on the importance of Marsilio Ficino’s Platonism during the Renaissance. In his 1907 work, The Problem of Knowledge, which made Cassirer famous, he argued that it was idealist thinkers, such as Ficino and many others, who had given rise to science. When it came to the Renaissance, Cassirer felt that Burckhardt’s influential Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy had left out the most important part, which was Renaissance philosophy.

  Not only did Cassirer highlight the importance of Ficino, but he became the first modern biographer of Nicholas of Cusa (Cusanus), whom he credited as a Platonist who broke down old scientific conceptions, allowing new ones to be born. Cassirer also augmented Burckhardt’s definition of the Renaissance as a “leader of modern ages” by defining it further as a “unity of direction.” That direction created new systems of thought, especially thought that focused on the importance of the individual and the problem of knowledge, both concepts that were promulgated by someone like Cusanus. “Like the whole Quattro­cento, Cusanus stands at a historical turning point … —the decision between Plato and Aristotle,” Cassirer said. “This position toward the problem of knowledge makes of Cusanus the first modern thinker.”59