by Larry Witham
Finally, though, Gombrich had to follow the scientific approach where it ultimately led, and that was the human brain, the basic means by which people perceived art.78 Wölfflin, the positivist forebear, spoke of the physical eye and modes of vision that seemingly controlled how national cultures perceived a work of art. Gombrich went further, tracing vision to the biological brain, presenting his findings as a “psychology of pictorial representation.” Gombrich’s interest in the physical brain made him a precursor to the field in neuroscience to be called neuroaesthetics, a completely biological approach to all questions about art, perception, and beauty.
For good reasons, Gombrich took this art-as-biology path slowly and carefully. His Jewish family, too, had once been happily assimilated into the cosmopolitan culture of Vienna, a happiness upturned by the new Nazi emphasis on biological purity of the races. This alone was enough for Gombrich’s reluctance to link artistic experience to biological determinism. Those dangers seemed to slowly pass away from his concern, however, as would become evident in some of his later writings.79 In opposition to Panofsky’s deep symbolism, which gave each culture its own “perspective,” Gombrich argued that linear perspective, despite some anomalies, was simply how all biological humans saw the world; it was not cultural, but rather dictated by the common human brain and visual systems. Renaissance painters were simply discovering how vision really works. “Can it not be argued,” Gombrich wrote in 1967, “that perspective is precisely what it claims to be, a method of representing a building or any scene as it would be seen from a particular vantage point?”80
By trying to pull art history back from overheated and now-overwrought speculation, Gombrich moved it toward a biological interpretation. In his Story of Art, biology plays almost no role, except in pointing to tricks of the eye. His 1960 book, Art and Illusion, cited studies of fish behavior related to colored objects, a first crack in the biological door. By the time of his The Sense of Order (1979), Gombrich is tying decorative order to biological evolution as much as to humanist reason and culture. He cites the popular ethnologist Desmond Morris, who wrote The Naked Ape, and then discusses recent discoveries in visual brain science of cells that are “feature extractors,” detecting both colors and shapes such as edges.81 Humanist that he was, Gombrich nearly always used biology as a metaphor so as not to come down dogmatically on the side of science, which also had its ready-made paradigms. Nevertheless, at the end of his career, he said: “My approach is always biological.”82
The divide over how to interpret art, a clash ultimately between transcendental ideas and scientific positivism, was taking place across modern Western culture. It echoed the ancient Greek debate between Platonist idealism and Epicurean materialism, showing that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Like the history of art, the history of religion was also being unraveled by these opposing interpretations.
A complete positivism in religion was an unlikely option, since that would rule out a transcendent Creator or other numinous realms of reality. However, within Piero’s tradition of Christianity, there were ways that religion could call a truce with science.83 One Protestant approach was both orthodox and modernist, duly named neo-orthodoxy. The epitome of this view was expressed by the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, who shaped twentieth-century Protestant thought more than any other single person. For him, God and Christ were “wholly other”—existing in dimensions so utterly different that the only question between God and humanity is God’s forgiveness of the human state of original sin. Barth called it the “apartness of God,” showing, in fact, his indebtedness to the paradox of how the finite and the infinite (or the One and the many) can exist side by side, a topic grappled with since the time that Plato’s dialogue Parmenides introduced the idea of dialectical reality.
Barth’s ideas were, of course, built on the core of Martin Luther’s revolutionary doctrine, which was justification by faith, not works, and its corollary doctrine that, therefore, humans live in two kingdoms—that of heaven and that of the autonomous secular world. Barth took this autonomy of the world to a modern extreme and, before long, some critics of his supposedly orthodox “Barthian” thought said it was a kind of atheism, since God is too exceedingly transcendent to be involved in the messy affairs of the world.
Viewing God as entirely beyond the world, and even hidden from humanity except by his single revelation, would put a painting such as Piero’s Baptism of Christ in a certain theological light. In the Baptism, the Christ figure is from another world, a wholly other, arrived on earth just once in history. This Christ may also invoke a call for ethics, but it is almost entirely faith in things unseen, and surely not questions of science, that he calls attention to.
Theological liberals of the West also had their own form of “secular Christianity.” They effectively made God a psychological or cosmic symbol and, by doing this, no less than by orthodox Barthian thought, put all the questions of earthly life at the doorstep of human powers alone. The German theologian Paul Tillich, who competed with Barth for twentieth-century influence, was a representative of this deep psychological approach. With an ear for contemporary issues, Tillich wrote on how modern art is an expression of existential religious experience.84 Art can play this role, Tillich said, because in actuality God is the “ground of being”—not necessarily a Supreme Being—and religion is “ultimate concern,” both of which can include art. In this light, to look at Piero’s Baptism is to see a symbol that points beyond itself to something ultimate; thus, arguably, it could give even a professed atheist a “religious” experience.
Admittedly, Barth and Tillich are indebted, each in his own way, to the Platonist dualism that has pervaded Christian thought since the days, so long ago, that the Greeks met the Hebrews in the sweep of Alexander the Great’s Hellenistic empire. That Hellenism, revived in the Renaissance, presents another theological alternative to the secularizing dualism of Barth, Tillich, and other forms of existentialist and liberal theology. This is a Platonist theology through the tradition of Cusanus and Kant. In approaching God, this kind of Christianity recognizes that intuition and insight, not only revelation, can be a link between man and a transcendental realm. If secular Christian thought looks at the Christ figure in Piero’s Baptism as a one-time event brought about by a hidden God (Barthian), or a mere psychological symbol (Tillich), the Platonist and Kantian approach takes Christ’s story to mean that God participates in the human imagination: the mind has innate access to transcendent realities, thus bringing them into the physical world, both in daily life and in the practices of making and appreciating art. This continues the Hellenized Christianity of the Renaissance, a time when a wide variety of beliefs, dogmas, and philosophies coexisted in mutual tolerance.
If the great battle between positivism and philosophical idealism forced Christianity to go in these modernist directions, science was not completely immune either. The arrival of Einstein’s relativity and the “uncertainty” principle in physics has forced science to cast doubt on the positivist creed. Nature is turning out to be an abstraction, even a philosophical entity, which puts limits on the strict measurement of its parts. It has been increasingly acknowledged that true scientific discovery, furthermore, can begin with irrational and personal insights and intuitions, or that cultural “themes” can shape the way scientists plot their experiments and arrive at their findings.85
Science’s confrontation with the uncertainty in knowledge was forecast by Plato’s dialogues, perhaps best known in his story of the cave in the Republic, suggesting how opinion and perception (things that are sensible) fall short of higher truths (things that are intelligible). As Plato stated the case in Timaeus:
One kind of [intelligible] being is the form which is always the same … invisible and imperceptible by any sense, and of which the contemplation is granted to intelligence only. And there is another [sensible] nature … perceived by sense, created, always in motion, b
ecoming in place and again vanishing out of place, which is apprehended by opinion jointly with sense.86
And as seen in art and religion, Platonism’s dualistic scheme—an intelligible realm that is ideal and transcendent, and a sensible realm that is physical and roughly measurable—still offers a framework for scientific progress at times when simple positivism comes up short.
In the twentieth century, the positivist approach to Piero still had its advocates in traditional art history. They would include, perhaps, connoisseurs such as Kenneth Clark, but also Ernst Gombrich by way of his scientific preferences. But it was the more transcendental approach, derived from Kantianism and the iconology of Warburg and Panofsky, that seemed to dominate approaches to Piero in the second half of the twentieth century.
It was an approach that looked for depth, and one of the first such forays into Piero’s works was a mathematical analysis of his linear perspective in the Flagellation. This was co-authored in 1953 by historian of architecture Rudolf Wittkower. In addition to offering a groundbreaking technical analysis of Piero’s lines and measurements, Wittkower was in search of its deeper mathematical or geometrical meaning. In that spirit, he concluded that it was “more than chance” that certain numerical patterns emerged from Piero’s painting, some used in objects, others in a kind of mystical design. “Piero may have chosen this curious relation between the module scale and the ‘mystic’ scale to symbolize the interweaving of this-worldly space with that belonging to the Kingdom of Christ,” Wittkower said.87
Another leading scholar of Piero has been Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, a tireless researcher and organizer of activities related to the Quattrocento painter, from conferences to a computer program to map and analyze his frescos. At the heart of Lavin’s work lies a deep iconology that has made her richly authoritative, but also much commented on for her vivid speculations. “She finds hidden meaning in absolutely everything,” said one critical reviewer.88
The search for something—indeed anything—new in Piero was perhaps only natural in an academic world that was not able to go any further on dating Piero’s life or paintings. The last major attempts to pin down dates on his works came in 1941, by one estimate.89 Kenneth Clark, the British connoisseur, said chronology didn’t matter with Piero because his painting styles did not change. This claim prompted a rejoinder by Renaissance historian Creighton Gilbert, who devised a highly elaborate, speculative, and at times convoluted book-length chronology of “change in Piero.”90
Otherwise, for lack of any consensus or new empirical evidence on Piero, the art “theory” that was rising in Western academia—Marxist, Freudian, feminist, and more—became the method du jour for Piero as well.91 Although Sigmund Freud may have seen better days, he was only now being evoked to interpret the arts. A new wave of Freudian analysis of artists and their viewing public arose, splashing on Piero as much as anyone else.
Such were the exploits of Piero scholar, Renaissance expert, and seasoned art-history writer Laurie Schneider Adams. She began her career analyzing the Arezzo frescos for their typology, a method of finding everywhere the symbolism for “types” of momentous people or places, which even St. Augustine had recommended as one of three levels for finding deep truths in Bible interpretation. She went on to become a licensed psychoanalyst as well, and naturally turned that lens back on Piero’s enigmatic story-telling at Arezzo. Not surprisingly, she found evidence of Piero’s struggle with his oedipal complex (which, of course, Freudians presume every child who knows a mother and father supposedly grapples with). In this Freudian analysis, Piero showed all the predictable traits of suppressed desires: he was attracted to his mother (suggested by his paintings of women) but rebellious against his father, and thus against male authority figures (as illustrated in paintings of God, kings, or leaders).92
Then came the French postmodernists with the new “Lacanian” interpretation of Freud (named for the French theorist Jacques Lacan, who applied Freudianism to art objects, since art could arouse hidden desires after being gazed upon). Piero was subjected to this Lacanian approach by the noted historian and philosopher Hubert Damisch. Damisch began by attempting to analyze Piero in the same way that Sigmund Freud had famously analyzed Leonardo da Vinci—by the maternal abandonment of Leonardo’s childhood and one of his dreams. As Damisch conceded, though, nothing is known of Piero’s childhood. Evidence suggests, meanwhile, that he was probably close to his parents and siblings throughout his life. In his final years, Piero wrote in his own hand: “I want to be buried in our family burial place.”93 Using Lacanian theory, however, Damisch said it is proper to generalize Piero’s psyche onto the viewing public. In this way, Piero’s Madonna del Parto—a madonna painted as a visibly pregnant woman—can be taken as evoking a sexually conflicted “childhood memory” in anyone who spends some time looking at this Piero painting.94
The search for secrets in Piero’s works continues to the present, and many of the purported findings have drawn protests from, if not the positivist school, then the common-sense school of art historians. Such was the protest against the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, whose book, The Enigma of Piero, looked for a deep symbolism in three major paintings by Piero. Ginzburg arrived at an elaborate story of how Piero was saying specific things about the unity of the Latin and Greek churches, a charged ecclesiastical topic in his lifetime.95
For some Piero experts, Ginzburg’s iconology was spinning tales from whole cloth. Piero biographer John Pope-Hennessy, then of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, acknowledged the entertainment value of Ginzburg’s Sherlock Holmes approach. But as factual history, he impugned it as “a tissue of tendentious nonsense that far surpasses anything previously written about Piero’s paintings.”96 Many years earlier, Renaissance art historian Bruce Cole had already lamented that nonsense had seemingly become a new norm. “Excessive iconomania has been one of the banes of art history for the last two decades,” he said.97
As suited these secular times, the legacy of Platonism was playing out in the visual arts in the form of iconology, with Freudian overtones. There no longer seemed to be room for evoking the spiritual or religious mystery of Piero’s works, which would have been an alternative evocation of Platonism, a very Renaissance type of evocation. In the modern world, it was hard to see how anything like religious faith or Christian intuition could be acceptable in academic treatments of Piero della Francesca. Outside academia, of course, this spiritual approach might be exactly the way that individuals would enjoy, through the eyes of faith, his paintings and his story.
When, in 1963, Roberto Longhi last updated his seminal book on Piero, he noted how much the fortunes of the Quattrocento painter had risen. Piero had become, Longhi said, “a major artist whose fame is in the ascendant, references to him multiply with inevitable rapidity, in every sphere of culture.”98 Nevertheless, the modern world was not yet done with Piero, art, and the Renaissance. Piero himself had been enthusiastic about the “science” of painting, but in the twentieth century—with its golden ages of physics and biology—science was casting an entirely new light on how artists and their works are perceived. Once the iconographers are done with Piero and the history of painting, what is left for science?
CHAPTER 10
The Eyes of Science
Although he addresses the bulk of his arguments and narrative to painters, Piero’s On Perspective opens with topics that would fascinate modern science. One such is color and light, which Piero speaks of as “colors as they are shown in things, light and dark according as the light makes them vary.” Another is Piero’s brief mention of the biological eye, which “is round and from the intersection of two little nerves which cross one another the visual force comes to the center of the crystalline humor, and from that the rays depart and extend in straight lines.”1
Finally there is perspective and optics. This is Piero’s “power of lines.” How to draw this illusion of optical reality is, in fact, On
Perspective’s core subject, with Piero begging pardon, in effect, for not discussing color: “I intend to deal only with proportion, which we call perspective.”2
As he wrote this work, there is no reason to believe that Piero subtracted metaphysics from his science, or saw science as an enemy of his religion. Such Platonist concord, however, would become rarer in future centuries when physics and biology tried to reduce human perceptions to strictly material causes.
The progress of Western science in the area touched on by Piero’s treatise may be tracked in historical parallel to the revival of interest in Piero himself. At the mid-nineteenth century, when Europe was rediscovering the Quattrocento painter, biological science was arriving at our modern understanding of vision. Then, at the start of the twentieth century, when Piero was revived again in the context of modern art, modern physics was discovering the true nature of light. Finally, at the close of the twentieth century—the time of our current wave of fascination with Piero—neuroscience would combine the lessons of biology and physics to explore how the entire human brain puts all the perceptions of light, color, and space together. Neuroscience also presumed to find in the material brain the origin of all artistic and religious experience, seeming to leave very little room for the kind of transcendental reality that Piero had presumed to exist in the world.