Matthew Collings on Piero della Francesca.

What I like about Matt Colling's new Renaissance Revolution series is that he's determined to make the Renaissance intelligible to our modern world. This isn't just achieved with the digital painting, microscopic analysis- which by the way is pretty damn impressive- but with Collings's idea that renaissance art was the modern art of its time, and that we haven't really fully appreciated its revolutionary qualities.

Looking at this modern art critic looking at Piero della Francesca's Baptism of Christ in the National Gallery- one of my favourite paintings- I suddenly thought of modern artists who had been inspired by him, say Philip Guston and Romare Bearden. And before them Paul Seurat, who was a proto-modernist whose career would have been impossible without Piero's influence. Fledgling modern artists like Seurat came to Piero because they discerned the seeds of modernity planted in his rational and structured compositions. But the moderns also saw the other, "surrealistic" side of the artist: a strange, disquieting element in Piero's work; the hint of a breakdown in the machinery of perspective and pictorial composition, such as unrealistic reflections and incongruous features like a tree seeming to grow out of the head of an angel.

 Seurat memorably uses the latter device in his Afternoon at Grande Jatte in Chicago, which marries cool classicism a la Piero with a knowing self-consciousness about the art of painting. Collings touched on that lack of fit between rationally conceiving the world and the awareness that it's all an illusion, with his point about the illogical distance between the mysterious figures at the back of the canvas and their reflections in the river Jordan, the source of Christ's baptism.

It's easy for a renaissance art historian like me to detect the ideas in books that Collings must have read in preparation for this programme; but I note he didn't mention the drying up of the river Jordan which is discussed in a number of Piero texts. He did, however, contrast the Baptism with Byzantine representations of the subject at Ravenna where Christ is half immersed in the cleansing waters. In Piero's Baptism, the river is turning into an arid bed of earth and stone, a phenomenon which has been interpreted as a response to the miracle of Christ's baptism, but is difficult to reconcile with the idea of salvation in the world.

After viewing the microscopic world of the picture, its tempera dots and daubs, I'm wondering if it's more likely to represent a kind of scepticism in the painter's mind, a gap between painting and the conviction of the religious symbol depicted. Water isn't a powerful cleansing agent here; the micro resolution of the camera shows that there's hardly any water dropping down onto Christ from the paten or plate that John the Baptist holds. This is a desiccated landscape that is drying up by degrees, despite the presence of fecund vegetation dotted across it.

I've always believed that Piero's Baptism of Christ was well ahead of its time, 1450. It points the way out of the quattrocento towards Leonardo, Raphael and the high Renaissance, but it also anticipates that uneasy alliance between faith and science that informs Poussin's own paintings of the Baptism, where God is also absent. Like his 17^th century successor, Piero's art has fired up debates about whether this is truly religious painting or the secularization of art, a disciplining of the spiritual experience into modes of the rational. Indeed, some have even stated that Poussin was not a religious artist. Could the same accusation be leveled at Piero?

Collings starts each programme by stressing the groundbreaking nature of renaissance art, "the art that came before modern art." It was the modern art of its time, and maybe in Colling's mind has taken the place of modern art, or even postmodern art, an idea which Collings seems to be pushing with his presentational style: eclectic soundtrack; comparisons between modern installation art and the performative nature of Piero's art- perspective construction jarring with the flat medieval surfaces; analogies between stylistic overlap and the "scrambled "formal message of some of Piero's earlier paintings. I think it's unsurprising from a critic whose faith in modern art faltered in the 1990s, but was rediscovered by considering the art of the renaissance in the 21^st century in order to reclaim the innovation that has deserted modern art. I've written on that before, here.

There will be those who complain that Collings is too anachronistic, academically naïve, or whatever. But I see no contradiction between seminal and institutionalized concepts like the period eye (Michael Baxandall) and Collings's microscopic meanderings in search of the painter's secrets. The only difference is that Collings is using the paintings not only to make sense of renaissance space, but the space of our own time too. Collings's Renaissance Revolution strives to make the renaissance real for us; something that other critics like Jonathan Jones do when they use the renaissance to talk about the culture, politics, and art of our own time; something that renaissance art historians, me included, need to do more.

Comments

[H Niyazi]

I really enjoyed the compositional theory in this one, any art history discussion that brings geometry and mathematics into it makes us science types pleased!

Some links your readers may be interested in David. Non UK users can see this episodes at my post at 3PP:

http://2.ly/du5e

Also, seeing you mentioned talking about a contemporary art in a way that references the Renaissance approach - my interview with Digital Artist Gilles Beloeil is framed in exactly this manner, establishing links between Uccello's perspective drawings to modern digital imaging suites.

http://2.ly/du5k

Kind Regards
H Niyazi

[Art History Today]

Thanks H. I'll do a short post tipping readers off about the Beloeil.

On a technical point, do you know how you get images to open out in new windows? I usually write/publish the post using word and then put the images in via Typepad where it's done automatically. But there must be some way of getting the images ready in the word software. If you don't know I'll put them in again via Typepad because I would like people to see a larger image of Poussin's Baptism which I scanned in.

Best- David

[H Niyazi]

Hi David - clicking the image above labelled 'Washington Baptism' definitely opens in a new window for me, and at a more significant res.

If you like working in a wordprocessor type environment, but not the typepad interface, another option is Windows Live Writer, which is part of free Windows Live essentials suite. It allows more advanced imaging options, including adding watermarks and such.

If you would like to have a look, see here

http://bit.ly/ccE2HD

Kind Regards
H

[Art History Today]

Thanks H.

I'll check out Windows Live Writer. Not surprised I've never heard of it; the gaps in my computer knowledge are vast!

[Mattjhew Collings]

The series is not academically naive, it's just not coming from an academic place (or not only). I've never been disillusioned with modern art, and in fact have always thought of modern and pre-modern as profoundly continuous. The discontinuity is between modern and a certain type of post-modern, namely populist institution post-modern The aim of the series is to criticise that kind of thing.

[Glennis McGregor]

A really fantastic book (well written and recent!) on this subject is "The Mirror, the Window, and the Telescope: How Renaissance Linear Perspective Changed Our Vision of the Universe" by Samuel Y. Edgerton.

I drew heavily from this book, as well as from the 3rd Renaissance Revolution programme (which I thought was excellent! - except for the music:) in my blog post 'Heaven in a Box' http://glennis.net/real/?p=279 where I also explore contemporary ambitions to break out of the perspective box....

[Art History Today]

I don't know the book but I've heard of Edgerton. I'll look out for it.

When I get a little time I'll flag up your site- really good- in a post.

Best- David

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Matthew Collings on Piero della Francesca. - Art History Today

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