Piero's Light

by Larry Witham

  15.The idea of God’s “immediate” relationship to all things was also a feature of nominalism, a system attributed to the English Franciscan thinker William of Ockham (c. 1285-1349). However, Ockham did not question the Aristotelian structure of the universe, so his nominalism, while opening the door to empirical science, arguably did not provide the opening for astronomical science that was provided by Cusanus.

  16.Cusa, De docta ignorantia, 114.

  17.At the dawn of the Scientific Revolution, shortly before 1600, Cusanus’s writings benefited Bruno, Galileo, and Descartes. Bruno “read and admired” him and called him “divine Cusanus.” Galileo had Cusanus’s texts, and his contemporary, René Descartes, spoke of “Cardinal Cusanus” in regard to infinity. See Hilary Gatti, Giordano Bruno and Renaissance Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999): 118-119. On Descartes see Moran, “Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464),” 11. Fundamentally, Bruno, Galileo, and Descartes jettisoned the Aristotelian and stepladder universe for one in flux and movement, with various qualities of the finite and infinite.

  18.Cusanus’s agenda was also to bring the thinking of the ancients under a divine providence that heretofore had only included the founding of the Christian church. This made him a modern prophet of natural religion, the idea that there is a common tran­scen­dent human experience upon which particular religions build precepts. There is “the One who seems to be sought in the various rites and various fashions,” Cusanus said. “In the multiplicity of rites, there is only one religion.” From Nicholas of Cusa, De pace fidei, quoted in Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963), 29. His vision of tolerance among religions, based on a theory of knowledge, received mixed reviews across modern history. At the least, his idea of an indeterminate world required that the center of reality be found in each being, a kind of humanist ennobling of the individual.

  19.The most dedicated anti-Platonist critics of Bessarion and Cusanus, respectively, were George of Trebizond in Rome and John Wenck in Germany.

  20.For Alberti and Cusanus see Il Kim, “Nicholas of Cusa and the Theological Foundations of Disegno,” paper delivered at the College Art Association, New York City, February 15, 2013; and Il Kim, “Nicholas of Cusa, Leon Battista Alberti, and the Cult of Light in Fifteenth-Century Italian Renaissance Architecture,” doctoral dissertation, Columbia University, 2010. For Alberti’s Platonism see also John Hendrix, Platonic Architectonics: Platonic Philosophies and the Visual Arts (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 97-148.

  21.See Geoffrey Smedley, “Reason and Analogy. A Reading of the Diagrams: Piero della Fran­cesca, Plato, Ptolemy, and Others,” in Emiliani, PDFSA, 385-405. Smedley emphasizes that as a draftsman, Piero was aware of the intelligible and the sensible, using practical mathematics but also following the deeper analogy of number and proportion found in Plato’s Timaeus.

  22.On Piero in Rome see Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, vol. 1, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere (New York: Knopf, 1996, 1979), 471. At best the Lives vaguely cites Piero’s projects in both the biography of Piero and Raphael’s biography as well. It is now believed that Raphael may have painted his dramatic chiaroscuro Liberation of St. Peter fresco over the original Piero.

  23.Quoted in Kenneth Clark, Piero della Fran­cesca (London: Phaidon, 1951), 37. See also Vasari, Lives, vol. 1, 471.

  24.Piero’s lasting influence on painting styles in Rome was first proposed by the Italian art historian Roberto Longhi in the first quarter of the twentieth century. As in so much art-historical interpretation, the evidence is purely stylistic, for there are no documents showing such a transmission of style. The young Raphael may have indeed seen Piero’s work before Rome (in Urbino or Arezzo, for example) and then seen his Roman frescos later. If Luca Signorelli was in fact Piero’s student (a contested issue), Raphael (as well as Michelangelo) might also have been influenced by Signorelli’s work. Art historians are eager to trace such “influences” but disagree widely on such stylistic interpretations.

  25.Ginzburg, The Enigma of Piero, 45.

  26.Lyle Massey, ed., The Treatise on Perspective: Published and Unpublished (Washington, D.C., and New Haven, CT: National Gallery of Art/Yale University Press, 2003).

  27.James R. Banker, “Three Geniuses and a Franciscan Friar,” lecture, The Frick Collection, New York City, March 20, 2013. Banker has itemized examples of how Piero intervened in each manuscript copy differently. In a manuscript now located in Parma, Piero wrote in vernacular with over a hundred diagrams. In the manuscript in the Ambrosiana Library, Milan, he added corrections to the Latin text of On Perspective, including drawing all the diagrams. In another Latin version, now in Bordeaux, France, Piero made Latin corrections in the margins.

  28.Piero’s On Perspective (De prospectiva), quoted in Judith V. Field, “A Mathematician’s Art,” in Lavin, PFL, 185, 187.

  29.Ibid., 188.

  30.Ibid., 184.

  31.On Perspective, quoted in Kim Veltman, “Piero della Fran­cesca and the Two Methods of Renaissance Perspective,” in Emiliani, PDFSA, 410.

  32.Ibid., 409.

  33.Ibid., 411.

  34.Ibid.

  35.For a summary of the two methods, and the continuing historical debate on the rise and application of perspective, see Ibid., 407-19. As Veltman says, “Five hundred years after Piero’s death we are only beginning to recognize the complexity of the new methods which he helped to articulate” (p. 418).

  36.Some mathematicians have interpreted the diagram and Piero’s intent as a successful, even ingenious, proof. Less impressed, the critics have brushed it off as one more Renaissance attempt, akin to alchemy and astrology, to find secret harmonies. Commending Piero are Mark A. Peterson, Galileo’s Muse: Renaissance Mathematics and the Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 109-12, and J. V. Field, “A Mathematician’s Art,” in Lavin, PFL, 185. Questioning Piero’s proof is James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 104-108.

  37.In making the ninety-degree claim, Piero may have been referring to Pecham’s work on perspective. See also Dejan Todorovic, “The Effect of the Observer Vantage Point on Perceived Distortions in Linear Perspective Images,” Perception and Psychophysics 71 (January 2009), 183ff. Todorovic says: “In the 15th century, the painter-geometer Piero della Fran­cesca studied the conditions under which such effects are manifested (Field, 1986), and the problem is still under investigation” (emphasis added).

  38.On Perspective (De prospective), quoted in Michael Baxandall, Words for Pictures: Seven Papers on Renaissance Art and Criticism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 152. The Italian is in Piero della Fran­cesca, De prospectiva pingendi, ed. G. Nicco Fasola (Florence, 1942), 98. This is Piero’s only comment on the nature of the biological eye and optics, and in it he seems to adopt the antiquated, and incorrect, theory dating from Plato and Galen that the “force” of vision extends from the eye (extromission theory) and does not enter the eye from outside (intromission theory).

  39.See Kim H. Veltman, Leonardo da Vinci and the Visual Dimensions of Science and Art (Munich: Deutscher Künstlerverlag, 1986). He surveys Leonardo’s experiments with this perspective effect in about a dozen geometrical sketches. On Leonardo and binocular vision see Leonard da Vinci, A Treatise on Painting, trans. John Francis Rigaud (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002), 257-58; and Judith V. Field, “A Mathematician’s Art,” in Lavin, PFL, 184.

  40.Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, vol. 2, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere (New York: Knopf, 1996, 1979), 736.

  41.For anatomy during the Renaissance see John William Shirley and F. David Hoeniger, eds., Science and the Arts in the Renaissance (Washington, D.C.: Folger, 1985), 103-109; and Katharine Park, “The Criminal and the Saintly Body: Autopsy an
d Dissection in Renaissance Italy,” Renaissance Quarterly 47 (Spring 1994): 1-33.

  42.Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, Piero della Fran­cesca (New York: Phaidon, 2002), 275-76. Lavin sees the coral pendant on the Christ child as representing the human trachea and bronchial tubes, suggesting that Piero knew internal anatomy, perhaps from “public autopsies.”

  43.Marsilio Ficino, Platonic Theology, vol. 6, ed. James Hankins, trans. Michael J. B. Allen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 3.

  44.Stephen Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210-1685 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 87-101; and Edward A. Gosselin, “The ‘Lord God’s’ Sun in Pico and Newton,” in Renaissance Society and Culture, ed. Ronald G. Musto and John Monfasani (New York: Italica Press, 1991), 51-58. See herein chapter 7, n.29.

  45.Piero’s On Perspective (De prospectiva), quoted in Veltman, “Piero della Fran­cesca and the Two Methods of Renaissance Perspective,” 411.

  46.Pius, quoted from his Commentarii, V, in Maria Grazia Pernis and Laurie Schneider Adams, Federico da Montefeltro & Sigismondo Malatesta: The Eagle and the Elephant (New York: P. Lang, 1996), 27. See Cusanus’s role, p. 33.

  47.Clark, Piero Della Fran­cesca, 30.

  CHAPTER 6

  1.Bruce R. Cole, Italian Art, 1250-1550: The Relation of Renaissance Art to Life and Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), 61. On the plague and Renaissance art see Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena After the Black Death (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951).

  2.See Philip Hendy, Piero della Fran­cesca and the Early Renaissance (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 119.

  3.Piero Bianconi, All the Paintings of Piero Della Fran­cesca, trans. Paul Colacicchi (New York: Hawthorn, 1962), 26, 61.

  4.Kenneth Clark, Piero della Fran­cesca (London: Phaidon, 1951), 47-48. Clark sees anticipation of Vermeer in the Senigallia Madonna.

  5.On Piero’s 1469 presence in Urbino see Luigi Pungileoni, Elogio Storico di Giovanni Santi (Urbino: V. Guerrini, 1822), 12, 75, as cited in Longhi, PDF, 184.

  6.Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, vol. 2, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere (New York: Abrams, 1979), 878. Giovanni Santi, a court artist with a workshop in Urbino, between 1484-1487 wrote a thirty-two-part “rhymed chronicle,” Cronica Rimata, providing a good deal of historical detail about the Montefeltro court. He presented it to Guidobaldo, son of Duke Federico Montefeltro, in 1492.

  7.Quoted in Longhi, PDF, 184, from Pungileoni, Elogio Storico di Giovanni Santi, 12, 75. In the record, on April 8, 1469, the Confraternity of Corpus Domini refused to reimburse Giovanni Santi, who had advanced money “for the expenses of Maestro Piero dal Borgo” for the trip to Urbino.

  8.See Pernis and Adams, Federico da Montefeltro & Sigismondo Malatesta, xiii-xiv.

  9.John Shearman, “Refraction, and Reflection,” in Lavin, PFL, 216.

  10.Richard Cocke, “Piero della Fran­cesca and the Development of Italian Landscape Painting,” Burlington Magazine 122 (September 1980), 631.

  11.Quoted in Bruce R. Cole, Piero della Fran­cesca: Tradition and Innovation in Renaissance Art (New York: Harper and Row, 1991), 135, 137.

  12.Marcello Simonetta, The Montefeltro Conspiracy: A Renaissance Mystery Decoded (New York: Doubleday, 2008).

  13.Millard Meiss, “Ovum Struthionis: Symbol and Allusion in Piero della Fran­cesca’s Montefeltro Altarpiece,” in Studies in Art and Literature for Belle da Costa Green (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954), 93.

  14.The two-year time period on the Montefeltro altarpiece is suggested in Meiss, “Ovum Struthionis,” 101. He argues that it was begun after the death of Federico’s wife (July 1472) and completed before Federico received international honors (fall 1474), because those honors don’t appear as symbols in the painting.

  15.Quoted in Julia Mary Cartwright Ady, ed., Baldassare Castiglione: The Perfect Courtier, vol. 1 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1908 [1528]), 52.

  16.Donato di Angelo Bramante (c. 1444-1514) was a painter and architect of the High Renaissance who specialized in perspective illusion. It has been theorized variously that, hailing from Urbino, he either studied directly under Piero, simply saw Piero’s work in Arezzo and elsewhere, or studied with Piero’s follower Melozzo da Forli. See “Bramante,” Oxford Companion to Art, ed. Harold Osborne (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 154-55.

  17.The full preface letter to Five Regular Solids is translated in Judith V. Field, Piero Della Fran­cesca: A Mathematician’s Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 350-51.

  18.James R. Banker, “Three Geniuses and a Franciscan Friar,” lecture, The Frick Collection, New York City, March 20, 2013. Banker says that at least eight physical copies of Piero’s works were produced in Latin under Piero’s supervision, done after Piero composed his three originals in the vernacular. Hypothetically, a fourth manuscript supervised by Piero was his own copying, Latin to Latin, of the works of Archimedes.

  19.James R. Banker, “A Manuscript of the Works of Archimedes in the Hand of Piero della Fran­cesca,” Burlington Magazine 147 (March 2005): 165-69.

  20.As a geometer, Archimedes wrote treatises on planes, spirals, and the measurements of circles, spheres, and cylinders. As an engineer, he discovered principles for the pulley, fulcrum, lever, screw, and bodies floating in water.

  21.Five Regular Solids quoted in Marshall Clagett, Archimedes in the Middle Ages, vol. 3 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1978), 395.

  22.Quoted in Field, Piero Della Fran­cesca: A Mathematician’s Art, 351.

  23.Banker, “Three Geniuses and a Franciscan Friar.”

  24.See Banker, “A Manuscript of the Works of Archimedes in the Hand of Piero della Fran­cesca,” 165-69. See also Banker, “Three Geniuses and a Franciscan Friar.”

  25.Alberti, quoted in Philip Hendy, Piero della Francesca and the Early Renaissance (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 62.

  26.See Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, vol. 1, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere (New York: Abrams, 1979), 304. For an analysis of Vasari and space, see James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 53-58.

  27.Thomas Martone, “Spatial Games in the Art of Piero della Fran­cesca and Jan Van Eyk,” in Emiliani, PDFSA, 95, 100.

  28.For comments on the submerged-feet illusion see John Shearman, “The Logic and Realism of Piero della Fran­cesca,” in Festschrift for Ulrich Middledord (Berlin, 1968), 180-83; and Millard Meiss, The Painter’s Choice: Problems in the Interpretation of Renaissance Art (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 13.

  29.Piero’s On Perspective, quoted in Martone, “Spatial Games in the Art of Piero della Fran­cesca and Jan Van Eyk,” 96.

  30.See “Proportion,” Oxford Companion to Art, ed. Harold Osborne (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 930-36.

  31.The empirical study of brain responses to proportion began with the German psychologist Gustav Flechner (1801-1887), who gathered information on people’s visual responses to various objects and shapes. This approach continues under the field of neuroaesthetics, although its ability to find innate human preferences for specific proportions has been questioned by critics as either too narrow or impossible to determine in controlled experiments. Meanwhile, cognitive science presumes that the brain has evolved to recognize certain constants—symmetry, distance, faces, sexual attractiveness, etc.—as the basis for effective human survival. Brain studies have shown that the prefrontal cortex of the brain experiences higher blood flow when humans and rhesus monkeys evaluate proportions in number, lengths, and sizes. Similarly, blood flow increases in parts of the visual cortex when viewing symmetrical patterns. However, neuro­science has barely moved toward the study of how the brain judges proportion at the level of firing neur
ons.

  32.For general summaries of symmetry in nature, mathematics, brain science, and human culture see Marcus de Sautoy, Symmetry: A Journey into the Patterns of Nature (New York: Harper, 2008); and Magdolna Hargittai and István Hargittai, Visual Symmetry (Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific, 2009). The technical study of the brain’s perception of symmetry is characterized by the following paper, which found increased blood flow of a particular area of the visual cortex in humans (and less so in non-human primates) when presented with symmetrical patterns: Yuka Sasaki, et al., “Symmetry Activates Extrastriate Visual Cortex in Human and Nonhuman Primates,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 102 (2005): 3159-3163.

  33.Cicero, quoted in Denys Hay, The Italian Renaissance in Its Historical Background (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 126.

  34.On the Hellenization of Renaissance Christianity see Roland H. Bainton, “Man, God, and the Church in the Age of the Renaissance,” in The Renaissance, ed. Wallace K. Ferguson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962 [1953]), 87-96.

  35.See Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, “The Dignity of Man,” in The Portable Renaissance Reader, ed. James Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 476-79. For a helpful interpretation of Mirandola see Bainton, “Man, God, and the Church in the Age of the Renaissance,” 82-83.

  36.See “Hercules,” in Silver, Piero della Fran­cesca in America, 123-27.

  37.Ibid., 124.

  38.Piero may have no longer received commissions, or he may not have been interested in those that came to him, perhaps with some exceptions. Such an exception may have been a painting attributed to Piero between 1460 and 1470 titled Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Angels, apparently for a private home. A disciple of Piero may have worked on this painting. It has the distinction of being the first Piero purchased in Italy and brought to England (1837). Now it resides in the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts. See Nathan Silver, Piero della Fran­cesca in America: From San­sepol­cro to the East Coast (New York: The Frick Collection, 2013), 117-21.