Piero's Light

by Larry Witham

  3.The English writer Joseph Addison, after his Grand Tour, commented that the Alpine precipices “fill the mind with an agreeable kind of horror.” See Joseph Addison, Remarks on Several Parts of Italy, etc.: In the Years 1701, 1702, 1703, second edition (London: J. Tonson, 1718), 350.

  4.Luigi Pungileoni made this discovery, reported in his tract Elogio Storico di Giovanni Santi (Urbino: V. Guerrini, 1822).

  5.See Margaret Daly Davis, Piero della Fran­cesca’s Mathematical Treatises: The “Trattato d’abaco” and “Libellus de quinque corporibus regularibus” (Ravenna: Longo, 1977), 100. She notes: “A close reading of the commentaries to Vasari’s vita of Piero shows that around 1832 … there were manuscripts by Piero in the possession of the Franceschi Marini in San­sepol­cro.”

  6.Giacomo Mancini, Istruzione Storica-Pittorica (Perugia: Baduel, 1832), 340-41. In this book, Mancini appends letters written during his art-appreciation travels, and the “third letter” dated 1828 touches on Piero.

  7.M. Valery, Historical, Literary, and Artistical Travels in Italy, trans. C. E. Clifton (Paris: Baudry’s European Library, 1839 [1931, French]), 638.

  8.Johann David Passavant, Raphael of Urbino and His Father Giovanni Santi (London: Macmillan, 1872 [1839, German]).

  9.In Padua, the master painter Francesco Squarcione (c. 1397-1468) had a school that trained such painters as Mantegna, who was a skilled perspectivist. Squarcione believed the painter was a humanist, so he rejected the term “bottega” and called his school a “studium.” Some German historians believed Piero studied under Squarcione.

  10.For the names of all the enthusiasts see Luciano Cheles, “Piero della Fran­cesca in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Italianist no. 14 (1994): 219. See also herein, chapter 8 n.34.

  11.See David Robertson, Sir Charles Eastlake and the Victorian Art World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978).

  12.Eastlake, quoted in Cheles, “Piero della Fran­cesca in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” 224.

  13.Eastlake, quoted in Robertson, Sir Charles Eastlake and the Victorian Art World, 19.

  14.Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colors, notes by Charles Lock Eastlake (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970 [London: John Murray, 1840]). The German title is Zur Farbenhehre.

  15.Lives of the most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and architects: translated from the Italian of Giorgio Vasari, with notes and illustrations chiefly selected from various commentators by Mrs. Jonathan Forster, 5 vols + 1 supplement edited by J.P. Richter (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1850-55, and 1885). Piero is in volume 2.

  16.Ranke, quoted in Edward Hallett Carr, What is History? (New York: Knopf, 1962), 113.

  17.Eastlake, quoted in Franz Kugler, Hand-Book of the History of Painting: From the Age of Constantine the Great to the Present Time, vol. 1, ed. C. L. Eastlake (London: John Murray, 1941), 138.

  18.James Dennistoun, Memoirs of the Dukes of Urbino, Illustrating the Arms, Arts, and Literature of Italy, 1440-1630, vol. 1 (New York: John Lane, 1909 [1852]), xxix, 201; and Dennistoun, Memoirs of the Dukes of Urbino, vol. 2, 201.

  19.Lindsay, quoted in Cheles, “Piero della Fran­cesca in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” 228. Lindsay would write Sketches of the History of Christian Art (1847).

  20.Dennistoun, Memoirs of the Dukes of Urbino, vol. 2, 207.

  21.Piero, quoted in Dennistoun, Memoirs of the Dukes of Urbino, vol. 2, 205-206.

  22.Ibid., vol. 2, 209. Dennistoun’s erroneous comments included that Piero had painted “ideal city” panels and that he had written an anonymous perspective treatise found in the Urbino library. Having seen a copy of Pacioli’s Summa de Arithmetica, with its praise for Piero as the “prince of modern painting,” Dennistoun also disputed Vasari’s claim that the Franciscan friar had plagiarized the painter, saying Pacioli was no “literary pirate.” Quoted in Dennistoun, Memoirs of the Dukes of Urbino, vol. 2, 204. For a discussion of Vasari’s charge of plagiarism against Pacioli see herein chapter 7, n.7.

  23.Jennifer Meagher, “The Pre-Raphaelites,” in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–). (http:www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/praf/hd_praf.htm) (October 2004).

  24.See Cheles, “Piero della Fran­cesca in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” 247-48. William Michael Rossetti’s article on early Renaissance art was in the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1875) and was repeated in editions up through 1910. He praised the Arezzo frescos but said “Piero’s earlier style was energetic but unrefined, and to the last he lacked selectness of form and feature. The types of visages are peculiar, and the costumes … singular.” See Cheles, 248.

  25.Florence dealer William Spence, letter to his parents in England, March 2, 1854, quoted in John Fleming, “Art Dealing in the Risorgimento II,” Burlington Magazine 121 (August 1979): 498.

  26.Elizabeth Eastlake, quoted in Hale, England and the Italian Renaissance, 157 (emphasis added).

  27.Lady Trevelyan, quoted in Nathan Silver, Piero della Fran­cesca in America: From San­sepol­cro to the East Coast (New York: The Frick Collection, 2013), 120 n.1.

  28.Government reports and directives, quoted in Hale, England and the Italian Renaissance, 158, 40.

  29.Graham and Dennistoun, quoted in Hale, England and the Italian Renaissance, 161.

  30.Eastlake, quoted in Hale, England and the Italian Renaissance, 162.

  31.See Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ piu eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architetti, vol. 4, ed. Vincenzo Fortunato Marchese, Carlo Pini, Carlo Milanesi, and Gaetano Milanesi (Florence: F. Le Monnier, 1848), 13-24.

  32.Ernst Harzen, “Über den Maler Pietro degli Franceschi und seinen vermeintlichen Plagiarius den Franziskanermönch Luca Pacioli,” Archiv für die zeichenden Künste (Leipzig, 1856): 231-244. In the article, Harzen questioned whether Pacioli really plagiarized Piero since Pacioli could have known about regular solids by other sources, and indeed, Piero may have copied from Pacioli. For a discussion of the charge of plagiarism against Pacioli see herein chapter 7, n.7. On Milanesi, see his second edition of Vasari’s Lives (now the standard): Giorgio Vasari, Vite de’ più eccelenti pittori, scultori, ed. architettori, vol. 2, ed. Gaetano Milanesi (Florence: Sansoni, 1878-85), 487-501. As an update, Milanesi’s notes cite the 1439 presence of Piero in Florence and the recent discoveries of his 1487 will, written “in sound mind,” and the official recording of his death, which surfaced with a book of the dead in San­sepol­cro. Milanesi’s second edition also updated a range of dates discovered for Piero’s commissions or payments (such as in 1445, 1454, 1469, and 1478), cited more documents from Franceschi Marini heirs of Piero, drew upon the opinions of Passavant, Crowe, and Cavalcaselle, located Piero’s nativity painting in “Mr. [Alexander] Barker’s” collection in England, and cited two new cases of Piero’s manuscripts being found.

  33.See Austin Henry Layard, “Publications of the Arundel Society,” Quarterly Review 104 (1858): 277-325. After establishing his fame for the Near East discoveries, Layard joined up with the Arundel Society, founded in London in 1848 to publish facsimiles of historic works of art for public edification. Layard joined in 1852 and, taken by the new interest in frescos and aware of their deterioration at locations in Italy, helped organize a series of copies—drawings and etchings—of such works, including by Piero. In his 1858 article about the series, Layard praised Piero as holding “first place of order of genius” among the fresco painters. Quoted in Cheles, “Piero della Fran­cesca in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” 230. Historians attribute this affection to the association Layard drew between the stoic friezes of Assyrian and Egyptian art and the similar effect Piero produced in Arezzo.

  34.The Marini-Francesci family booklet is cited in Longhi, PDF, 223, 280. It was produced as a wedding present, published as F. Gherardi-Dragomannin, Vita da Pietro della Fran­cesca by Vasari, with notes (Florence, 1835); Giacomo Mancini, Istruzione Storica-Pittor
ica (Perugia: Baduel, 1832), 340-41.

  35.Eastlake, quoted in Nicholas Penny, “Piero della Fran­cesca in the National Gallery,” in Piero interpretato: copie, giudizi e musealizzazione di Piero della Fran­cesca, ed. Cecilia Prete e Ranieri Varese (Ancona: Il Lavoro editoriale, 1998), 188.

  36.Quoted in Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, Piero della Fran­cesca’s Baptism of Christ (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 167.

  37.Cheles, “Piero della Fran­cesca in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” 241-44; on the Louvre see Caroline Elam, Roger Fry and the Re-Evaluation of Piero della Fran­cesca (New York: Art Museum Press, 2004), 33.

  38.J. C. Robinson, “To the Editors of The Times,” The Times (London), June 9, 1874, 7.

  39.See Penny, “Piero della Fran­cesca in the National Gallery,” 185-89.

  40.Eastlake, quoted in Robertson, Sir Charles Eastlake and the Victorian Art World, 195. See also Cheles, “Piero della Fran­cesca in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” 238.

  41.Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, rev. edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 10.

  42.Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Press/Macmillan Publishing, 1951), 45.

  43.Kant, quoted in Gerald R. Cragg, The Church and the Age of Reason, 1648-1789 (New York: Penguin, 1970), 252.

  44.Classical definitions of beauty have included Dionysius’s divine Beauty, Aquinas’s perfection, Alberti’s proportion, Shaftesbury’s unity of parts, and Winckelmann’s “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur.” All of these have roots in Platonism’s idea of universal forms. See for example Jeffrey Morrison, Winckelmann and the Notion of Aesthetic Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 217 n.17. Morrison cites both Winckelmann and Goethe’s interest in Platonism and neo-Platonism in developing their objective ideals of art.

  45.Kant, Critique of Judgment, 52. See J. H. Bernard’s “Introduction,” xxxiii, for how several commentators, from Edward Caird to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, have noted this contradiction in Kant.

  46.Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, trans. Hugh Bredin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002 [1959]), 108.

  47.At this point, it is worth summarizing Erwin Panofsky’s study on how the Platonist “Idea” became modern “intuition” in art. See Erwin Panofsky, Idea: A Concept in Art Theory (New York: Harper and Row, 1975 [1968, English] [1924]). Plato proposed that eternal Ideas are beyond nature, so at best the artist can use skill to only approximate ultimate Beauty. The later Greco-Roman classical world eschewed Plato’s negative view of the artist and praised artistic craft. Thus, the Idea of Plato was now put into nature, which artists could imitate by skill. At the start of the medieval period, Neoplatonism combined the two previous eras: it said that tran­scen­dent Ideas and Beauty could be materialized in art, thus keeping the artist’s stature and also allowing art to retain a divine quality. During the early Renaissance, figures such as Alberti, while working within the Platonist tradition of mathematics, otherwise were positive toward art expressing the classical ideal of imitating nature (with no tran­scen­dent Idea necessary). The later Renaissance, however, departed again from Alberti by combining theology with Platonism to reintroduce the divine element of Idea back into art.

  At this juncture, what Panofsky calls “art theory” began to face serious contradictions. Western culture wanted to keep three opposing priorities: the eternal Idea, human invention, and nature. Gradually, beginning with the early baroque (around the time of Vasari’s Lives of the Artists in 1568), and then peaking in neoclassicism, the artist was given the power to tap into the Idea, as if divinely connected. In this, the artist could represent ideal forms, improving even on nature. Neoclassical art formalized this idea: a painting that conveyed nature “purified” by the mind was Beauty incarnate. However, an alternative solution would begin to win the day, which Panofsky traced to Albrecht Dürer: this emerged in modern thought as the idea of intuition (typical of Immanuel Kant’s formulation). In short, the Idea and nature were, as Plato suggested, forever separate, but the human mind in a mysterious kind of way is a link between the two. Artists therefore often express this conjunction.

  In Panofsky’s scenario, I will argue, Piero della Fran­cesca was prescient of the revival of the Platonist Idea by his use and knowledge of mathematics and his Christian Platonism, which he learned from his religious and intellectual environment.

  48.Kant, Critique of Judgment, 150-64.

  49.See Clive Bell, Art (New York: Capricorn Books, 1958 [1914]), 17. He said “significant form” is “the quality that distinguishes works of art from all other classes of objects.”

  50.In Kant’s discussion of art, imagination, and genius, he says that true art, using the material of nature, is “worked up into something different which surpasses nature” and achieves a “completeness of which there is no example in nature.” Moreover, the imagination is the source of “aesthetical ideas”; also the “movement of the mind” is the source of feeling the “sublime” when seeing nature. See Kant, Critique of Judgment, 157-58, 85, 89.

  51.Bell, Art, 17.

  52.On Eastlake’s aesthetic see Cheles, “Piero della Fran­cesca in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” 225.

  53.Eastlake, quoted in Robertson, Sir Charles Eastlake and the Victorian Art World, 195.

  54.Jules Michelet, Renaissance et réforme: Historie de France au seiziéme siécle, ed. Claude Mettra (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1982).

  55.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 Roland H. Bainton, “Man, God, and the Church in the Age of the Renaissance,” The Renaissance, ed. Wallace K. Ferguson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962 [1953]), 82-83.

  56.Jacob Burckhardt, The Cicerone: An Art Guide to Painting in Italy for the Use of Travelers and Students, trans. A. H. Clough (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1908 [1855]), 69.

  57.Helene Wieruszowski, “Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897) and Vespasiano da Bisticci (1422-1498),” in Philosophy and Humanism: Renaissance Essays in Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller, ed. Edward P. Mahoney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 387-405; and Udo Kultermann, The History of Art History (New York: Abaris, 1993), 95-102.

  58.Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (New York: Modern Library, 2002 [1860]), 385.

  59.Joseph A. Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle, A New History of Painting in Italy: The Florentine, Umbrian, and Sienese Schools of the XV Century, vol. 3 (London: J. M. Dent, 1909 [1864]), 5.

  60.Ibid., 2.

  61.Ibid., 8.

  CHAPTER 9

  1.Pacioli’s Summa de Arithmetica (1494) called Piero the “prince of modern painting,” quoted in James Dennistoun, Memoirs of the Dukes of Urbino, Illustrating the Arms, Arts, and Literature of Italy, 1440-1630, vol. 2 (New York: John Lane, 1909 [1852]), 204; and Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, vol. 1, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere, intro. Kenneth Clark (New York: Abrams, 1979), 474.

  2.Caroline Elam, Roger Fry and the Re-Evaluation of Piero della Fran­cesca (New York: Art Museum Press, 2004), 36.

  3.For Piero’s influence on Puvis see Serge Lemoine, ed., Toward Modern Art (New York: Rizzoli, 2002), 223; and B. Biagetti, “Puvis de Chavannes,” Arte Cristiana 5 (May 15, 1917): 130-40. Lemoine, director of the Musee d’Orsay, is quoted on the book cover saying that “modern art does not descend, as is commonly thought, from Manet and Impressionism, but from … the French painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.”

  4.Blanc, quoted in Albert Boime, “Seurat and Piero della Fran­cesca,” in Seurat in Perspective, ed. Norma Broude (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978), 158.

  5.Ibid., 159 n.27. Boime gives the sizes and dates
of the Arezzo copies.

  6.Blanc, quoted in Ibid., 160.

  7.Ibid., 155-56. For more on various ties between Piero, Puvis, Blanc, Seurat, and modern art see Daniel Catton Rich, Seurat and the Evolution of “La Grande Jatte” (New York: Greenwood Press, 1969 [1935]), 47-48; Robert L. Herbert, “Seurat and Puvis de Chavannes,” Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin, 25 (October 1959): 23-29; William Innes Homer, Seurat and the Science of Painting, 17; and Lionello Venturi, “Piero della Fran­cesca-Seurat-Gris,” in Broude, Seurat in Perspective, 105-110. Venturi says that, of eighteenth century painters, Seurat “bears most resemblance to Piero” (108), and that “it was not Seurat who sent art-lovers flocking to Arezzo. It was Cubism” (109).

  8.The evidence of Piero’s influence on Cézanne is circumstantial. By the time in 1873 that the two copies of Piero’s Arezzo frescos were displayed in the chapel of the École des Beaux Arts, Cézanne had been in Paris as a painter for more than a decade. He recalled his rejection twice to study at the École des Beaux Arts, but he attended exhibits there and was a fastidious observer of classic art at museums: he registered as a copyist at the Louvre in 1863 and 1868. He said “The Louvre is the book from which we learn to read.” While saying he never looked much at Renaissance “primitives” at the Louvre—Cimabue, Uccello, and Fra Angelico—that was because of their lack of solidity, which, by contrast, he must have found in Piero’s buildings, landscape, and figures. His Piero-like landscape View of Gardanne (c. 1886) was done around the time he moved back to the family estate he inherited in Aix-en-Provence, though he visited Paris frequently. In short, he had at least thirteen years in Paris when he could have regularly viewed the Piero copies. Cézanne, quoted in Alex Danchev, Cézanne: A Life (New York: Pantheon, 2012), 9, 101, 140.

  9.See Cézanne’s “Letters to Emile Bernard,” which were published in Mercure de France on October 1 and 15, 1907, at the same time as his Salon d’ Automne retrospective.