Piero's Light

by Larry Witham

  While the San­sepol­cro exhibit boasted a hometown hero, the city was limited to augmenting its few Piero originals with examples of other regional art that had been created before, contemporary with, and after Piero. The Uffizi Gallery in Florence took the prize, according to critics, by mounting an exhibit on “A School for Piero,” suggesting again that Florence had provided his training in “light, color and perspective.”42 Only a few paintings by Piero were available to show along with other color-and-light painters who worked in Florence. The supreme example of this style was Domenico Veneziano, the one painter who has a documented relationship to Piero—though it still is uncertain whether he and Piero worked together mostly in Florence or outside the city.

  Several academic conferences on Piero and his time were held in Italy. For the English-speaking world, the high point was a two-day consortium in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the National Gallery of Art.43 In addition to the delivery of eighteen scholarly papers and the unveiling of a new computer program to analyze fresco-cycle arrangements such as at Arezzo, the two Piero sleuths—James Banker and Frank Dabell—presented once again their new findings that dated Piero earlier than generally thought. At a roundtable event, they argued that it was urgent to compile such new information in an easily accessible place. The old data on Piero, much of it erroneous, still seemed to dominate popular and scholarly treatments of his life.44

  The conference had been held in December, and in the next month—January 1993—Banker published his first article on documentary evidence that suggests that Piero was born in 1412 and that his Baptism could have been painted as early as 1438.45 A decade later, in 2004, Banker was still at the task of separating the wheat from the chaff. “The extraordinary number of publications on Piero della Fran­cesca presents scholars with the difficult problem of mastering the literature on this painter,” he said. “Added to the problem is that in the past decade previously unedited documents have surfaced that require a rethinking of interpretations that have long been thought to be secure.”46 Indeed, in homage to Eugenio Battisti’s compilation efforts four decades earlier (Piero della Fran­cesca, 1971, updated in 1992), Banker was bringing to completion a new compendium, to be published in Italy, of all available documents and sources related to the life and times of Piero, including much that was new. A somewhat new Piero, it seems, was being put on the record.

  New milestones on the life of Piero continued to come and go, such as the 2012 thousandth anniversary of the founding of San­sepol­cro, which now deems Piero its most famous native son. The next year, the Frick Collection in New York City, which is the largest owner of Piero works in the United States (owning four of the now-separated panels from the Saint Augustine Altarpiece that Piero had painted in San­sepol­cro), held the first-ever exhibit on “Piero in America.” At this event, a number of emerging Piero-and-the-Renaissance scholars acknowledged that the exhibition’s new image of Piero—as a self-made artist and mathematician—was a “tribute” to James Banker’s long-suffering research.47

  For all the rethinking of the historical Piero, it has long been evident that he was a man of deep personal interests. These ranged from art and religion to “science” and Platonism. Such themes are perennial, and they allow us to rethink Piero’s legacy from a contemporary point of view. What do art, religion, and science tell us about Piero today, and whither the influence of Renaissance Platonism in the modern world?

  Epilogue

  As travel books and tour packages attest, the regions of central Italy that were Piero’s home ground—Tuscany and Umbria—retain much of their flavor from the past. The summer light still explains the bleached colors that Piero often used in his works. As ever, the steep hills and winding roads chart the miles that Piero must have traveled. Standing in the streets of the walled old town of San­sepol­cro, you can imagine the time in 1431 when Piero saw his painted candle in a religious parade; or the day in 1859 when the British art buyer John Charles Robinson showed up at the cathedral to take Piero’s Baptism across the Atlantic.

  After several centuries, there also remains in the Western world a strong residue of Platonist tradition, both Christian and secular, which during the Renaissance had offered a means to integrate art, religion, and science. Throughout this story, we have imagined that it was also a belief system that helped Piero harmonize his own aesthetic, spiritual, and intellectual experiences. An argument may also be made that even today, Platonism offers a plausible way to understand the nature and limits of human perceptions of the world, both sensible and intelligible.

  How is this so?

  At the most fundamental level, Platonism tells us that the world and experience are made up of essences and particulars, tran­scen­dental realities and material things. The mind and the physical senses endeavor to penetrate these, but within limits. In turn, these limits allow a tentativeness in human knowledge, and thus enough ambiguity to avoid whatever ultimate conflicts may arise between the vying claims of art, religion, and science.

  The usefulness of this outlook is manifold. Perhaps most important, it allows us to retain an aesthetic and spiritual aspect of perception in a scientific age. Some quarters of science will claim that such experiences are strictly produced by matter in motion, nothing more. However, the broad swath of humanity surely sees the need to balance science with the world’s spiritual traditions, and the broad Platonist outlook on reality offers a kind of middle path to achieve this. It recognizes scientific progress, but also the provisional nature of scientific knowledge. It holds out the possibility that behind nature lies a tran­scen­dental reality, something with a quality of universal meaning, yet not necessarily with a doctrinal or ideological specificity. When Einstein asked whether the universe is, quite simply, friendly toward us or not, he was alluding to a Platonist kind of choice, even a religious choice.

  Depending on one’s “friendly” point of view, the tran­scen­dent realities of Platonism can be taken to mean the rationality, or mathematical nature, of the universe, or taken to mean the mind of God. In Piero we can find both, it seems. On one front, Piero’s paintings convey a sense that universal beauty, religious belief, and science can coexist on relatively friendly terms. In a second line of attack, his work with mathematics foreshadows the modern world’s reliance on numbers and our continuing suspicion that somehow—and for some tran­scen­dental reason—the universe is rational. The universe is here for our minds to understand within the great Platonist limits of the sensible and intelligible powers of human perception.

  The Platonist legacy of the Renaissance has also perpetuated the healthy debate on the nature and origin of beauty. It has produced our modern fascination, moreover, with the concepts of human imagination, intuition, and insight. From where do these intangible qualities come? How does an insight arise? Having evolved out of Platonism, the continuing belief in intuition as a non-material quality in human life and human achievement suggests that there is something about the mind that is greater than its parts. Even scientists, drawing the line at religion, nevertheless speak of the physical brain as producing “emergent” properties that seem to have a nature of their own.

  Platonism since the Renaissance has proved relevant to art. It has allowed the belief that finite human ideas can participate in some kind of higher Ideas in the universe. Even for science, this notion of a tran­scen­dent order that makes contact with the human mind is one way to explain why the world is as intelligible as it seems to be. Otherwise, how could the mind know, or discover, the secrets of nature or produce the highest forms of creative beauty?

  The seemingly scientific, or “positivist,” approach to art history has been extremely productive, giving us the unadorned facts and sloughing away the hearsay and falsehoods. Nevertheless, not all the facts are available, and even they can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Once the sensible facts of a painting have had their say, it is something intelligible about the painting that finally inspires the viewer. Art historians h
ave always seemed to know this, and it has created the urge to produce interpretations of art, what Plato might call “opinions,” and yet which require both intuition and insight. This is the motive behind connoisseurship and especially iconology, the attempt at a “deep” interpretation of art’s reality. Beyond iconology, the idealist tradition of intuition also defends the belief that art can have something to do with religion or spiritual experience.

  The modern world has been rich with debates on the nature of things, and, in general, Platonism has been the bulwark for metaphysical idealism, a chief Western alternative in the age-old debate with materialism, now called scientism or scientific positivism. Neuro­science is only the latest science to join positivism’s debate with metaphysical idealism. From time immemorial, psychology has tried to explain, or “explain away,” religion. This continues with neuro­science, which has expanded its territory now to include explaining (or explaining away) the biological experiences of the pleasures of art.

  As the feeling of beauty is being reduced to neurons, Platonism offers an alternative (or an add-on) that retains a tran­scen­dental element. Both neuro­science and Platonism recognize that the mind seeks constants and essences.1 Whereas positivist science will say that these are byproducts of the brain alone—a phantasm generated by one hundred billion nerve cells and their one thousand trillion connections—Platonism adds the other plausible possibility: essences exist in some tran­scen­dental way, perhaps in the mathematical rationality of the universe, or perhaps in the thoughts of a Creator.

  The modern fields of developmental and cognitive psychology have explained why the human need for essences will not go away. From childhood, humans believe in a basic nature to things in the world. The child’s mind innately produces types and associations.2 It also attributes powers to inanimate things, as if a tree, a storm, or an animal is a person like them. Adults don’t easily give up this orientation, and in culture that is the foundation for religion. This all springs from what some psychologists have said about human beings from childhood to adulthood: we are “intuitive dualists” and “intuitive essentialists.”3 Our physical brains, and our coming of age with five senses, persuade us that there are tran­scen­dent things (like minds) and there are essences (constant ideals and types). To destroy these intuitions will take years of rigid Epicurean education. Even then, the avowed positivist or atheist will speak of a faux tran­scen­dence, a sense of awe, wonder, or the numinous.4

  Whatever the true case about the origin of essences, we know that they are central to human perception. Humanity will always feel that there is “something more.” Even as the best scientists have told us, there is no way to prove or disprove such claims. Platonism takes the broadest approach. The modern world has recognized the limits to human knowledge (as derived from the physical senses), and this fits well with Platonism. In a very modern way, Plato had said the senses and human opinion are natural steps to try to understand the world. These steps can aim for a final truth about the nature of things. Those heights, however, will always be higher than our human reach.

  The life and work of Piero della Fran­cesca remind us of this Platonist legacy since the Italian Renaissance, and they do so in five ways. First is Piero’s use of mathematics. It set him apart during the early Renaissance but also foreshadowed the future in science. Some would say that his mathematics is what has made Piero so interesting to the modern world. Others have argued that he pioneered a new kind of mathematical literature, and thus was an early link in the chain of Western science. The social historian James R. Banker is only the latest to make this case for Piero’s scientific contribution. After Piero applied mathematics to geometry, “It was just another step to say that this numerical geometry expressed the underlying structure of nature,” which is one definition of the Scientific Revolution.5

  For Piero, the great truths and certainties of mathematics and geometry were found not only in Archimedes and Euclid, but also in his Christian tradition, which combined the Bible and the Platonist outlook. In the Hebrew account, God “ordered all things in measure and number and weight,” and in Plato’s Timaeus the things in the world are “perfected and harmonized in due proportion” by “the ratios of their numbers, motions, and other properties.”6 That geometrical quality is an essence to Piero’s paintings. Our response to a painting by Piero may indeed arise in part from the biology of our brain enjoying the constancy of geometry. From a Christian or Platonist point of view, it may also arise from an experience of something tran­scen­dent.

  A second feature of Piero is this reminder about the role that science can play in the world of art. His challenge was to render linear perspective, apply mathematics to geometry, and identify perfect geometrical shapes. He did all this on the presumption that the mind had a true way of seeing the world. Today, that question of perception has shifted to psychology and neuro­science.7 Natural science grapples relentlessly with how nature produces such human experiences, and, just as with the phenomenon of wave-particle light, the answer may remain elusive.8 To some degree, neuro­science may explain why material images can have such a powerful effect on the mind, generating pleasure. One such mental thrill is the “counter­intuitive” experience, which cognitive psychology has shown to play a role in religious perception.9 Piero’s works may project that counter­intuitive effect on perception: he presents the world in an idealized form, contrary to normal experience.

  Third, Piero was a painter of religious topics. This may embarrass some modernists, but it nevertheless reminds a secular age that people will always be interested in theological beliefs, or at least in the mystery behind them. The erudite agnostic Aldous Huxley, taking the Grand Tour of Italy, once stood before Piero’s Resurrection fresco in San­sepol­cro and called it “the best painting in the world.”10 Huxley was not espousing Christian doctrine, nor was he being a connoisseur who compared different techniques or iconographies in Renaissance art. “[Piero] is majestic without being at all strained, theatrical or hysterical,” Huxley said.11 In the stark honesty of Piero’s work, Huxley found a compelling story of the existential circumstances of human life. A thousand times more people enjoy Piero exactly because of the religious sentiments in his paintings.

  The debate about the nature of beauty has countless examples, but Piero has presented us with one of the more classical cases. This is a fourth point: Piero painted in a time when there was a belief in metaphysical Beauty. It had divine, human, and material sources. By contrast, modern theories have attributed beauty to Darwinian survival, sexual advantage, market­place competition, or satiation of an appetite. Nevertheless, the nagging idea of universal Beauty will not go away. In his writings about judgment of beauty, Immanuel Kant had made the distinction between the merely pleasurable and something that evokes a unique and intense response. Still today, the exclamation “It’s beautiful!” seems reserved for what is special. As one modern philosopher of art has argued, the “merely agreeable” is quite different from a beauty that is a “notable pleasure,” that “excites reflection and thought.”12

  At such moments, some people may include the idea of God or a higher realm as an explanation of why “things” participate in this special quality. On the other hand, the experience of beauty could simply be the chemistry of how the visual cortex and the brain’s memory function interact. Either way, people are likely to always be transfixed, even for a moment, in the presence of something beautiful. Piero’s art has had this effect on some viewers, and perhaps most. Being part of the Renaissance legacy, he reminds the modern world that the belief in metaphysical Beauty remains at issue.

  Piero has left behind one final legacy: the story of his life itself. This is simply a matter of historical biography, and its existence seems so plain—as with the well-thumbed biographies of Julius Caesar, Marco Polo, Abraham Lincoln, or Queen Victoria on library shelves—that it would need no explanation. Human beings are forever interested in stories, narratives, and the power of knowing the origin o
f things: in biography, in history, in natural science, or in the authentic work of art. Humans find an essence behind biographical realities. That essence is why people put great value on objects related to great or famous people. Authentic art is only one example, but it is a particularly keen example. A forger can make a painting that looks exactly like Piero’s, but it will never have the same value, either spiritually or financially. Biography is yet another illustration of how essences give value to things that do not satiate appetites—like food or sex do—and yet are great sources of pleasure.

  There are few trends in the modern world that have not been traced to the Italian Renaissance, for better or for worse. These range from individualism, hedonism, skepticism, and secularism to scientism, utopianism, new-ageism, and the Renaissance celebration of fame, wealth, and glory. The turn to artistic realism also was inaugurated in that fertile period. The number of streams of Renaissance thought may be too many to count, but, in all, they can be divided into two major ideas that have rivaled each other since the dawn of Western precepts in ancient Greece.

  One is ancient materialism and Epicureanism. The other is Platonism, the first metaphysical system of thought. Although Platonism was eventually infused in Christian thought, with its Hebraic origins, the Renaissance elaborated this element even further. The Renaissance also gave Platonism a place in the new scientific thought. This was through mathematics and a more flexible outlook on the structure of the cosmos. The Platonist subculture of an artist such as Piero and a scientist such as Galileo created a fruitful environment for new solutions to the old problems of reconciling the roles of art, religion, and science in the human perception of the world.