Piero's Light

by Larry Witham

  The Arezzo frescos, by their enormous scale, suffered the fate of any large old church with sinking walls and cracking plaster. A few centuries after Piero painted the walls, supportive iron bars were inserted between them. This naturally interrupted or damaged some of the fresco surfaces. Once the Arezzo frescos reached a dangerous state of affairs, they had their first major restoration. This came in 1858. They were restored again by a different expert, with a different effect, in 1915.

  Presently the Piero quincentenary—1992—appeared on the horizon and, thanks to the philanthropy of Italian bankers, the Arezzo frescos would receive their fullest restoration. The work began in the mid-1980s, but by one account, the “huge restoration project unfolded very slowly, Italian-style,” missing the goal of a 1992 opening. It was completed instead in 2000.28 Reportedly the care and sophistication of the restoration work, though dogged by technical difficulties, was more complicated than even the Sistine Chapel restoration that was taking place around the same time in Rome. The Arezzo work revealed basic knowledge of how Piero proceeded with such techniques as sinopia, pouncing with cartoons, and painting highlights and glazes. It was seen that his smaller fresco, Dream of Constantine, was composed of ten separate patches of plaster, each laid up on a different day of work. Everywhere, thanks to the original true fresco and some of Piero’s durable oils, details not seen before began to appear in many of the fresco cameos.

  Archival research on Piero would also bear fruit with just enough new detail to alter the typical story of his life. This resulted from the combined efforts of Banker, the American social historian, and Dabell, the British art connoisseur. When they began their searches for Piero in the 1980s, they knew that the facts lay somewhere in Italy. The most likely and most available source would be the accounting books and notarial contracts either in the State Archive in Florence; in what remained in San­sepol­cro; or in what may even have come into the possession of the Vatican during the years when Piero’s town was under papal jurisdiction. This put Banker in a situation of frequent travel between the Florence archives and San­sepol­cro, a winding seventy-five-mile drive to the southeast.

  Though coming of age in England, Dabell had been born on the Continent and lived in Italy in his youth.29 When he attended Oxford University, it was natural to play his strengths and study modern languages. For graduate school, Dabell followed his family’s long interest in fine arts by attending the Courtauld Institute, and that meant finding a research topic that had not yet been done. At first he probed into the early Renaissance painter Masolino da Panicale (1383–1447), who had worked alongside Masaccio, the Florentine pioneer of the new naturalism. On a trip to New York in 1981, though, Dabell discovered that somebody else was already working on that topic. So he switched to Piero and, in agreement with his Courtauld adviser, began to pursue more deeply the story of Piero’s patrons in Arezzo. On the way, quite naturally, Dabell checked in at the State Archives in Florence, and it was here that his and Banker’s paths crossed.

  By the 1980s, the State Archives in Florence was a hive of archival research. For Piero studies, the bible of research was the two-volume collection of available documents, compiled in 1971 by Eugenio Battisti. In all such historical projects, two prongs of work are necessary. One is to verify previous sources, such as even in the Battisti volumes, which in the first edition, for example, had many typographical errors in the very precise citations. The second prong is to slog through archival records that have seemingly been untouched in the modern context, what Dabell calls the “needle in a haystack” approach. “We look for that piece of gold in the mud, and you have to go through an awful lot of mud to get to it.”

  At this time, Banker’s early rounds of research—published piecemeal in journals—were about to appear in a major academic work on medieval society. In Banker’s academic era, the majority of case studies on the Renaissance seemed to focus on almighty Florence, one of Europe’s largest cities in the late medieval and early modern period. Florence seemed an endless quarry for new studies of its leading merchants, families, political figures, and artists. Bucking that trend, Banker followed a new orientation in his field: to study smaller hamlets. It was an approach that also tried to reconstruct a social history of ordinary people in their time. Banker had chosen San­sepol­cro for this kind of case study, and the first summary of his findings, published in 1988, was poignantly titled Death in the Community: Memorialization and Confraternities in an Italian Commune (San­sepol­cro) in the Late Middle Ages.30

  By this time, Banker and Dabell were beginning to work on dates related to Piero. Banker was in the lead on this. Foremost, he was able to constrain the possible dates of Piero’s birth and early life, presenting the strongest case yet for a birthdate of 1412. He also identified painting commissions that gave plausible evidence that Piero’s first major work had been the Baptism of Christ, and that it was painted for a church named for John the Baptist. All this was pointed to by records in San­sepol­cro and in the State Archive.

  From a different angle, Dabell pursued the Piero of Arezzo fame. As the fall of 1983 turned to the winter of 1984, Dabell wanted to find a new source of San­sepol­cro documents, so he headed for Rome. He knew of at least one good historical reason that data on Piero might be there. Before the Battle of Anghiari in 1440, San­sepol­cro had been in the Papal States. That meant that documents from the town might well be part of the national archives in Rome, not just the State Archives in Florence. In Rome, the Vatican archives had already yielded some important information on Piero in the twentieth century, but now Dabell asked, What about Rome’s State Archives? “Things get scattered all over the place,” he said. As luck would have it, the state archives did have some old San­sepol­cro municipal records, and within these were some old papal payment documents. After a few days of skimming the San­sepol­cro material, Dabell came upon such a papal entry, which fairly jumped off the page: an August 31, 1431 notation of a papal treasurer. The treasurer paid Antonio Anghiari and Piero’s father (presumably on behalf of Piero) for painting and installing celebratory flags for events in San­sepol­cro.31

  Much as Gaetano Milanesi in the 1850s had turned a page in a Florence archive to find that Piero had been in that city in 1439, Dabell had opened the Rome ledger to a date for Piero’s first known payment as an artisan. It placed him alongside Antonio, a master painter. The early career of Piero finally was revealed. “There was an arrow next to it, as if somebody has been here before,” Dabell said of the notation. “So the panic sets in.” No one had, however, recorded this document in the annals of art history, so Dabell had something new. When he took it to textual experts, they ruled it an authentic entry made in San­sepol­cro centuries before. Banker would later remark on the importance of Dabell’s discovery: “Up until 1984 nothing certain was known of Piero della Fran­cesca’s activity before his [1439] work in the choir of S. Egidio, the hospital church of S. Maria Nuova, Florence.”32

  After all this dust settled, the wider world of Piero scholarship seemed oblivious to the new, potentially revolutionary, findings, even when published. “My discovery and those by Jim Banker were routinely ignored,” Dabell said. Banker was looking for hard biographical dates, and Dabell was dedicated to a commonsense approach to Piero’s style when so many others wanted to find deep iconographical meanings and mathematical mysteries. Dabell knew that stylistic changes in paintings could reveal the chronology of a painter’s life. Beyond that stipulation, however, stylistic interpretations still had to yield to documentary facts, both art-historical and sociological. “My interest was art history, Jim Banker’s was [social] history,” Dabell said. “Finally, you have the paper trail. That’s what it was about.” And that is where he and Banker altered the way that Piero della Fran­cesca’s biography can be viewed.

  The resistance to their findings showed how much tradition and habit can determine the basic narrative of a Renaissance painter. Part of that habit is always the e
nduring awe toward Florence. It was natural to believe that Piero must have learned at the knee of Florentines. To say otherwise, according to one Piero scholar, “is to say virtually that Piero sprang from the Umbrian soil with his philosophy almost formed.”33 And yet a new picture of Piero’s nurturing, non-Florentine soil was being presented. Banker, too, had entered the field learning that Piero had been a teenage apprentice in Florence in 1439, “making him a child of Florentine painting.”34 To the contrary, though, Piero does seem to have blossomed on his own terms. He rose as a regional painter who picked up observations wherever he could, whether it was through wide travels or study. By the best evidence, he honed some early skills with Antonio, learned more with Domenico Veneziano, and then imbibed from the splendid work of the Flemish, all of this putting him on his own unique path.

  Dabell has argued for another needed change, since the habit in Renaissance art history has often been to find a date and presume a person was at that location for a long, substantial, and formative period. Yet it was never quite so in Quattro­cento Italy. Painters moved around quite a bit. “You could go from one place to another in a day,” Dabell said. “They traveled an enormous amount.” Dates in documents can, unfortunately, become almost meaningless, even as they are necessary pointers when history offers a blank.

  At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Banker was impelled to follow one more paper trail that seemed irresistible—the suspicion that Piero had copied an entire manuscript of Archimedes. Scholars of Archimedean manuscripts in the Middle Ages had already noticed that Piero cited the ancient Greek scientist with some precision, especially in his final treatise, Five Regular Solids. European scholars had also solidified the important role of Piero’s relative Francesco da Borgo as an architect, bookkeeper, scribe, and manuscript collector in papal circles in mid-Quattro­cento Rome.35 Adding to this, Banker’s own work on the history of San­sepol­crans, including Francesco, convinced him that Francesco had introduced Piero to a rare Vatican copy of Archimedes during Piero’s trip to the Eternal City. All that was needed was a link between these findings and a suspiciously well-illustrated copy of Archimedes that now sat in the Biblioteca Riccardiana in Florence—suspicious because so few people had as good a handle on Archimedes in the fifteenth century as Piero did, and because its exquisite diagrams, accurate and numerous, required a skill such as Piero’s to be so well executed. At some point, Banker began spending time in the Biblioteca Riccardiana at the heart of old Florence, only several blocks from the cathedral that bore Brunelleschi’s great dome and the baptistery that boasted his bronze doors and was the subject of his perspective drawings.

  Managed by a literary society that dated back to the time of Gaetano Milanesi, the Biblioteca Riccardiana is now located in the famous Medici Palace (now also called Riccardi for a later owner). The Archimedean manuscript in question had been among its prize holdings for centuries, along with original works (called “autographs”) by Pliny, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Alberti, Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Savonarola, and Machiavelli. The Archimedes manuscript (a typical compendium of his seven short works) had been bound in various ways over the generations, and its covers still showed traces of the gold trim once applied by an obviously princely owner.

  Yet the prized manuscript mentioned no title or author. This is what Banker noticed with trepidation when he began to hunker down over the work in the Biblioteca Riccardiana reading room with its black-and-white chessboard floor and curved ceilings festooned with colorful baroque frescos framed in ornate gold moldings. Suspecting that it might be a Piero—since the diagrams were so meticulous—Banker began looking for all the telltale marks of his handwriting. Thankfully, these came through even in Piero’s transcription of Latin: the zig-zag “e,” angular “a,” peculiar “et,” and “g” with a large circular tail.36 Relying on the judgment of an expert in antique Italian scripts, Banker finally declared in print (2005) that the anonymous manuscript was actually a work by Piero della Fran­cesca. This conclusion was enthusiastically supported (and duly publicized) by the Biblioteca Riccardiana, which has since made the entire fifteenth-century text available in digital form on the Internet.37

  Why Piero carried out such a laborious project remains unclear. It could have been as a personal possession or for an unknown patron, such as the Montefeltro in Urbino. Either way, a generation before Leonardo da Vinci, Piero had become perhaps the first workshop artisan to breach the wall of the humanities, heretofore guarded jealously by the elite Latinists and humanists of the university culture.

  As ancient manuscript interpretations go, Banker’s case for Piero is extremely compelling, yet not unassailable (since, finally, the Riccardiana item has no dates or names). With the bragging rights of a sea explorer who has found land, Banker naturally emphasized the extraordinary implications. Copies of Archimedean manuscripts would have been rare in Piero’s time. There were perhaps only five or six, Banker says, and therefore “Piero was probably the only person in the fifteenth century to hold in his hands three of these manuscripts of Archimedes” (two owned by Francesco da Borgo and one of his own making).38

  Despite such marvelous new ways to see Piero in his time, the discrepancies over dating and the timeline of Piero’s life continue into the twenty-first century. The proliferation of subtle and specialized connections—and four hundred years of misnomers—still present a challenge to presenting a clear story.

  Nevertheless, there has always been good reason to celebrate Piero, and another opportunity arrived in 1992, the five-hundredth anniversary of his death. It was to be a year of great summation of all that was known—to date—about his life. Only one such celebration had been possible before, and that was because the date of Piero’s death had not been known until 1875. In that year the townsfolk of San­sepol­cro had recovered a “book of the dead” from the fifteenth century. It spoke of Piero as a “famous painter” and gave the exact day of his demise: October 12, 1492. A plaque with this information was soon affixed to his historic home. The first centenary of his life was celebrated in 1892. At that time, the dispersed pieces of the Misericordia Altarpiece were reassembled in San­sepol­cro.

  With 1992 on the horizon, something like a national and international commemoration became the order of the day. Significantly, it would also include projects to restore Piero’s most famous works. It was not easy to compete with Christopher Columbus in 1992. The five-hundredth year of the Genoese explorer’s voyage was celebrated from Italy to the United States. The Year of Piero was no mean celebration either, it would turn out. It was coordinated, as much as possible in fractious Italy, by a National Committee for the Fifth Centenary (quinto centenario) of the Death of Piero della Fran­cesca. Its fifty-one members included Italy’s national and local cultural leaders, representatives of the economic development department at UNESCO, and a host of Renaissance scholars.39

  In addition to promoting international tourism in Italy and various Piero “itineraries,” the Piero projects of the year included many that were small, brief moments to commemorate. The largest activity of all was doubtless the fifteen-year restoration of the Arezzo frescos. This guaranteed that some part of the frescos would be covered by scaffolding before, during, and after the Piero celebratory year. In 2000, when the final restoration was unveiled, the steep, walled old town of Arezzo was thronged, its narrow streets hosting more than just the city’s monthly antiques fair.

  For generations already, the “Piero Trail” and “Piero Pilgrimage” had waxed and waned, as self-guided explorers or those signed up with tourist packages took a Piero itinerary, which typically began in Florence or Bologna in the north, visiting the core Piero territory of Arezzo, Monterchi, and San­sepol­cro, and often adding branches to Perugia, Urbino, and Rimini on the coast. The final 2000 unveiling of the Arezzo restoration was a great shot in the arm for this spirit of Renaissance wanderlust. A reported fifty thousand people made reservations to visit the Arezzo church over that first
summer. “The ‘Piero Pilgrimage’ was given a new lease on life,” one chronicler said.40 Several books were written on Piero by art historians, and the two-volume collection of Quattro­cento documents related to his life—compiled by Eugenio Battisti—was corrected and updated.

  The national committee also helped organize Piero exhibits in four cities where he had lived or worked: San­sepol­cro, Florence, Urbino, and Monterchi, his mother’s home town.41 The arrangements were not simple. Piero’s work had been dispersed throughout the world, though the vast majority was still in Italy. Some of the favorite paintings were in the midst of restorations, making it difficult to ship them around for display. Various owners of the works, meanwhile, were reluctant to loan them out for transport to other exhibit locations, presumably due to the perils of transporting delicate antiques. Some of Piero’s works did hit the road, however. Outside the city of Monterchi, the pregnant Madonna del Parto was gone from what has been considered her original location in a rural chapel. She was temporarily moved to the Monterchi city museum, where the restoration process was part of a 1992 public exhibit. Not only was this restoration work on the Madonna del Parto a perennial controversy for some in tradition-minded Italy, but the debate also continued on whether to move the beloved Piero artwork permanently from the outskirts into town.

  The museum directors in Urbino wished that the owners of various Piero works had been willing to lend them for an exhibit, but to no avail. The Montefeltro altarpiece stayed in Milan the entire year. At least, the recently restored Malatesta fresco—which had been removed from the wall and adhered to a permanent canvas support—was carried to the rocky precipice of Urbino to be shown with Piero’s Flagellation, his St. Jerome from Venice, the Senigallia Madonna, and parts of the Saint Augustine Altarpiece (which Piero had painted for San­sepol­cro, but whose parts had been scattered to the winds). All of these were exhibited at Urbino’s Ducal Palace, where visitors could walk in the stone hallways that Piero himself had once navigated.