Piero's Light

by Larry Witham

  In many ways, this modern reaction to Renaissance humanism was similar to how, in the sixteenth century, both the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation attacked the Renaissance as an errant, even godless, age—or at least one that had gone the way of Greek paganism, not the way of the Hebrew fathers whose faith was not philosophical but was based on revelation from Mount Sinai and the prophets. Now in the twentieth century, even as the Hellenizing liberalization of Christian theology remained, it was the Hebraic side—with its prophetic voice of warning—that seemed to again rise up against a humanism—and a humanity—gone too secular.13

  A prophetic voice would also rise against Platonism in ways never heard before. It was a secular and libertarian warning, though it came in almost biblical proportions. This was the voice of Karl Popper, a man fleeing from Nazism as he meanwhile mounted an attack on all forms of racial identity and irrational religion. Popper was a brilliant Viennese philosopher of science, an exceedingly assimilated Jew, and a close friend of the art historian Ernst Gombrich. Faulting every jot and tittle of Plato’s metaphysics, Popper reserved his greatest damnation for Plato’s politics, at least as found in his Republic and Laws. The Republic proposes the rise of philosopher kings. For Popper, these were history’s dictators. They accounted for various “dark ages with their Platonizing authorities.” Their acolytes promoted the “Platonizing worship of the state,” all of which “links Platonism with modern totalitarianism.”14 Popper’s two-part manifesto, The Open Society and Its Enemies, scored many points for the cause of rationalism and liberty, but it did begin to sound like Plato had caused every misfortune in history.15

  As a free-market thinker, Popper felt that the Renaissance had done what it could to end medieval authoritarianism. But academics on the secular left, typically Marxist, were not so sanguine. The Italian Renaissance gave birth to capitalism, among other things, and this made even Renaissance painters a potential target of criticism. They painted not only for the capitalists, in fact, but mostly for opulent courts and self-aggrandizing tyrants. The Marxist criticism had a contemporary bite as well: the royal classes of the past had typically owned all the great antique art in Europe, and in the twentieth century it was still the upper class that bought and sold that artistic legacy. Perhaps Piero was tarred on occasion by the same brush, but it never seems to have been significant.16 As to be expected, the latest tar-and-feathering of the old masters would begin to take place in the ebullient 1960s. It was a rite of initiation for artists and critics who sought a left-wing credential, and it was easy enough to do, since the great painters of the past had typically worked for right-wing aristocrats. People change, however, and it was not atypical for young radicals, now grown old, to have second thoughts and to admit their admiration of the skill and beauty of works by the old masters.17 This warming to artistic tradition on the political left would add to the broader popularity of Piero, for he is sometimes spoken of as a “cult” hero among members of the Western counterculture du jour.

  In the postwar era, however, the praise showered on Piero came from the mainstream of society for very traditional reasons: nostalgia for better times in Western Christian culture. In 1951, the British novelist Anthony Bertram, a writer of illustrated monographs on famous artists, editorialized on what Piero meant for the crisis of the West: “Piero was a Christian, a mathematician, and an artist. It is the balance in him, his integritas, his wholeness and his holiness, which makes him so peculiarly attractive to us; a steady light above our dark turbulence, a certain star, knowing his way with such assurance.”18 Elsewhere, Piero was simply heralded as a magnificent painter, a lost treasure of culture. “Hitherto considered minor,” he was now “elevated to the ranks of the greatest,” said France’s first postwar cultural minister, André Malraux.19 It was this sudden interest in Piero that had surprised the art historian Bernard Berenson, prompting him to present his “ineloquent in art” thesis to explain the enduring fascination with Piero.

  Although Piero was largely unknown in the United States, the American debate on the identity of the Renaissance began picking up steam during the interwar years. It was clear to American historians that, despite Burckhardt’s thesis on the seminal importance of the Italian Renaissance, there may have been many renaissances in European history. These included the Carolingian age of Charlemagne’s libraries, the early medieval ferment in philosophy, architecture, and science, and finally the “medieval synthesis” that Aquinas produced between Christianity and Aristotle. In Marvin Becker’s field of medieval studies, there remained a strong sentiment that the Middle Ages was the most significant rebirth in Western culture.

  Naturally, then, when the American Council of Learned Societies was presented with the idea of creating a Renaissance subgroup, it galvanized partisans for and against. In 1937, that American academic umbrella organization opened the Renaissance discussion by debating Burckhardt’s seventy-year-old thesis, but no action was taken. Only after the Second World War did the boom in higher education give birth to something like a Renaissance specialization. First came the fledgling Renaissance News periodical. A growing interest finally justified the creation, in 1952, of the Renaissance Society of America.20 This was about the time that Becker and others had headed for Florence to dig through its archives.

  On these foundations, the new wave of Piero research developed something like a geographical origin. In the case of James Banker, it was the University of Michigan, for that is where Marvin Becker (after teaching at the University of Rochester) would establish himself; there, Becker would inspire many young Americans to study the Renaissance. A geographical locus in England, in turn, seemed to arise from the Warburg/Courtauld alliance in London, and these two institutions became natural springboards for anyone in pursuit of Piero. Such was the case in the 1980s with another aficionado of the Renaissance, the young scholar and future art dealer Frank Dabell. Once he had enrolled at the Courtauld for graduate studies, Dabell put Piero firmly in his sights. In time, Banker and Dabell would spend a good deal of time in the archives of Italy.

  Down the road of his studies, Banker became a professor of history at the University of North Carolina. From there, he directed his social history approach at the late medieval period, especially its religious and communal culture. This is what led him to make San­sepol­cro, an emblematic town of the Quattro­cento, a lifelong case study. In England, meanwhile, Dabell had been casting about for a dissertation topic. The new trend in Renaissance studies was to investigate the patrons as much as the artists. Hence, by the 1980s, Dabell was traveling to Florence, Arezzo, and Rome in search of more information about Piero’s patrons for the Arezzo frescos.

  When Banker and Dabell began these pursuits, the accumulation of information on Piero had essentially stalled. What was known derived still from Pacioli, Vasari, Gaetano Milanesi, and Piero’s modern relative Evelyn Fran­ceschi Marini, an Englishwoman who, by marriage into the Fran­cesca line, had access to sundry family archives. If Banker and Dabell stood on the shoulders of proverbial giants in Piero studies, it would have been the expansive work of Roberto Longhi, perhaps Kenneth Clark’s exemplary biography, and finally a 1971 work by the Italian art historian Eugenio Battisti. Patiently, Battisti and a fellow archivist had collected the citations, and some content, of all known documents related to Piero in a two-volume Piero della Fran­cesca.21

  For all this good work, the data on Piero remained inconclusive, and yet an image of him had been set in stone: he was a Florentine apprentice. This claim had never been made by Pacioli or Vasari. It arose nevertheless as the edifice of Piero studies. With a new set of data presented by Banker and Dabell, however, the edifice would begin to crumble.

  During their research in Italy, Banker and Dabell were occasionally greeted by scaffolding over Piero’s frescos. The science of conservation and restoration had taken off in the postwar years, and Piero’s works would benefit from a good deal of this, despite the peren
nial debate over the appropriateness of man­handling antique artworks. Wars, fires, and floods had destroyed a good deal of early Renaissance art, and it is likely that the bulk of Piero’s work had been destroyed by such causes in the first century after his death. His Quattro­cento works often were torn down or plastered over by new tenants of palaces or churches.

  Those that survive may surprise first-time viewers, who will suddenly realize the scarred antiquity of Piero’s oeuvre (despite the beautiful color photographs in books). At such a moment of visual disappointment, viewers may want to recall the wisdom of the art collector John Charles Robinson in his late-nineteenth-century comment on one of Piero’s paintings: “It was a venerable relic, and it possessed in certain respects special interest and importance, and the only thing to be done with it was to leave it untouched, inasmuch as the particular interest which still attached to it would be completely destroyed by any attempt to ‘restore’—in other words, to ‘repaint’—the picture.”22 Nonetheless, repainted Piero was, and fortunately most such modern conservation efforts have been praised as authentic and successful.

  Before such restoration is even possible, the paintings must have actually survived, of course. During the Second World War, it was a small miracle that more Renaissance art was not destroyed when the Allied bombing and shelling came to the Italian peninsula. The Milan church that housed Leonardo’s Last Supper, for example, was left in ruins but incredibly the fresco inside was untouched (even though it, too, is now considered to be only about 20 percent of the original paint applied by Leonardo, the rest coming from restorers over the centuries).23 South of Milan, the war nearly erased Piero from the heart of San­sepol­cro as well.

  By August 1944, the Allied forces had taken Rome and were pushing the German Tenth Army back past a line between Florence and Rimini. British units spearheaded the charge up the Apennines and central Tiber Valley toward San­sepol­cro. At some point, Captain Anthony Clarke of the British Royal Horse Artillery was ordered to bombard San­sepol­cro to soften up any German resistance. Earlier, in the spring, the Allies had been able to capture Rome by winning the battle of Monte Cassino, which required the utter destruction, by bombing, of the ancient Benedictine monastery, serving then as the German holdout and high observation point.

  Captain Clarke may have been thinking of the tragedy of such destruction of history when the name San­sepol­cro suddenly triggered a memory. Years earlier, he had read the travel essay by the English author Aldous Huxley that said San­sepol­cro held “the best picture in the world.” Huxley was marveling at the Resurrection, the fresco that continued to decorate the San­sepol­cro city hall. Risking reprimand, Clarke ordered the battery of cannon to fall silent. His commander radioed him to begin firing again, but Clarke stalled for time. He looked through his binoculars and said he could not see any German targets to aim at, and fortunately, their retreat was soon confirmed. Clarke may have received a mild scolding for his hesitancy, but for that he would take an equally small position in art history. San­sepol­cro’s iconic Renaissance bell tower, or campanile, would be destroyed during the war, but not its most revered civic painting. One day, a street in suburban San­sepol­cro was named after Clarke. He became the “man who saved the Resurrection.”24

  Much of the art of the Renaissance has also been in need of saving, and that had been the quiet and piecemeal activity, over the centuries, of owners and dealers who wanted Renaissance works to look their best. This was the world of art conservation, which has grown increasingly sophisticated with the tools of chemistry, materials science, and infra­red and x-ray technology. Remarkably, the new technology can flawlessly lift entire fresco surfaces from the ancient plaster and put them on a backing of steel or fabric.25 While such high-technology techniques suggest a hands-off approach, there is really no escaping the essence of conservation, which means a certain amount of cleaning, a topic of continued controversy. Cleaning has often proven to bring a painting back as close to the original as possible, but also sometimes to ruin it, and thus the controversy continues. After a cleaning there may be “touches,” a euphemism for new paint. All of these steps have proven inescapable, it seems. It has been estimated that nearly all known Renaissance tempera panels have areas that are repainted, and this would include works by Piero, both on panels and in fresco.

  In memory, only one of Piero’s surviving works had reached the precipice of destruction by means other than war, and that was the Misericordia Altarpiece in San­sepol­cro. During a fire sometime before the seventeenth century, the flames licked at its panels, but it was duly touched up and put in a gaudy baroque frame. Then it was separated into pieces for a century, finally reunited at the turn of the twentieth century, a full altarpiece put on display at the former Palazzo Comunale, or city hall, in San­sepol­cro.

  Perhaps the two most notorious cases of restoration work on Piero’s legacy would be his Resurrection fresco and his panel painting, done at the end of his life, the Nativity. If the Resurrection fresco had received some cleaning over its early lifetime, it was given the shock treatment in the eighteenth century: the fresco was whitewashed over. Thanks to its durability as true fresco, it could be cleaned and restored, although the frame of Corinthian columns that Piero had painted around it has been much trimmed away. Similarly, the fate of Piero’s Nativity has been much debated. Was it a finished painting, or did Piero stop before he was done? Many areas seemed to be sketchy or poorly done. No strings exist on the lutes. Although this question is not absolutely resolved—even though it is logical to think that Piero finished the work—it is clear that the Nativity had suffered a good deal of over-cleaning, burnishing off the original paint. Here and there, amateur restorers tried to repaint what was lost.

  It has always been tempting to fix up Piero’s smaller works as well. When Piero did an altarpiece, with its central paintings, he also produced many of the side panels. These were separated off as individual artifacts over time. They exchanged hands between collectors and art dealers and, just as certain, underwent enhancing restoration. Such was the case with the small but brightly elegant Crucifixion panel in the Saint Augustine Altarpiece in San­sepol­cro. Mercifully, though, the painting retains its original colors and composition, if not every original stroke by Piero’s hand, having been “restored several times” by connoisseurs and collectors.26

  Beginning in the early 1950s, Piero’s work began to benefit from the careful attention of the newest technologies. His Senigallia Madonna was cleaned, which included the removal of paint added by earlier attempts to “repair” the old picture. The Flagellation panel also received a beneficent cleaning, and, in the case of such complex works, more details could be seen. In Rimini in the 1950s, the fresco Sigismondo Malatesta before Saint Sigismondo also was cleaned. From behind many centuries of dirty patina, the original Piero was revealed. For the first time to the modern eye, it featured a remarkable amount of subtle decoration and color, from the robes on the human figures to ornate lines in the simulated architecture.

  Piero’s Perugia polyptych—the Saint Anthony Altarpiece, with its odd pointed steeple—was also gone over in the 1950s. The debate here had been whether it had been all one composition at its creation, or had later interlopers patched its odd shape together from different broken altarpieces? While Vasari had commented on the beauty of the taller-than-usual Perugia polyptych, it was not so glowing to later eyes. One mid-nineteenth-century account said its parts were “so ruined and greatly repainted, that they look more like copies than originals by Piero.”27 Owner-devotion to the old work never flagged and it, too, was given a new life by a series of professional restorations. Its dismantling in the 1990s would seem to resolve the running dispute: it was in fact a single construction, and if the top looked odd, that was simply because someone had cut it into a point, trimming off some of Piero’s original composition in his famous portrayal, bristling with perspective, of the Annunciation.

  In England, t
he Baptism—perhaps Piero’s first major work—was cleaned, analyzed, and touched up in 1966. The same was done in 1968 with Piero’s early St. Jerome (now in Berlin), revealing a more authentic reading of his early land­scape style. In these two paintings, Piero’s panorama of Tuscan geography was seen more plainly, describable as browns of baked earth contrasted to summer greens. Also, it was now clear that in the Baptism, Piero had changed some aspects of its composition as he went along. In time, more Piero works received such analysis.

  As the five-hundredth anniversary of Piero’s death approached in 1992, the decade before and after bracketed a period of concentrated restoration projects. Piero had become a national treasure. So it was that the Italian government cleaned his popular standalone fresco Madonna del Parto, a small monument in the city of Monterchi. Of all such cleaning projects, the two most storied would be the long, drawn-out restoration of the Arezzo frescos, begun in the 1980s, and the restoration of Piero’s large oil-painted altarpiece picturing Federico da Montefeltro, completed in the 1990s.

  When Napoleon’s art collectors found the Montefeltro altarpiece, it was generally thought to have been done by a minor painter. It had impressed enough, though, to merit shipping to Napoleon’s Milan art museum, the Brera. Seeing the altarpiece in the mid-twentieth century, when it was determined to be by Piero’s hand, even so admiring a writer as Kenneth Clark felt it was evidence of Piero’s decline: the aging artist had apparently lost interest in painting. However, what Clark had seen was a dull, grime-covered work. A cleaning and touchup in the 1990s brought back an oil painting with the richness of a glossy color photograph. The conservation team also discovered that the right side of the panel had been trimmed and the bottom plank removed. Another mystery solved. The altarpiece had always seemed off-kilter, and the missing pieces explained why. Originally, Piero had painted it in perfect symmetry and perspective.