Art History Today

On the Piero della Francesca Trail 9

Other Pictures in Urbino

What were the Raphaels that Molly’s companions were rushing to “knock off”? The most famous Raphael in Urbino they could have seen is the portrait of a woman known as “La Muta,” the silent one. Then there are pictures by Giovanni Santi, Raphael’s father, like the Dead Christ.[1] However, there are other interesting paintings to be seen in Urbino: quattrocento curiosities like Uccello’s cycle of the “Miracle of the Desecrated Host” to Orazio Gentileschi’s beautiful Vision of Saint Frances Romana at the other end of the spectrum.[2] Urbino also contains examples of pictures by Piero’s contemporaries who worked for the Duke of Urbino, like the Portuguese Pedro Berruguete whose charming portrait of Federico and his son is here. Artists also painted for religious confraternities at Urbino. From Flanders, we have Joos van Wassenhove (Justus of Ghent, who influenced Santi in the 1470s) whose Institution of the Eucharist was painted for the Brotherhood of Corpus Christi. And more famously, Titian did an altarpiece of the Resurrection for the Corpus Domini brotherhood. I also hear from my sources that recently Urbino has acquired a picture of the plague saint San Rocco (St Roch) by Lorenzo Lotto which is a good addition to their holdings, though the frame surrounding it detracts from the enjoyment of the picture.

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[1] Shown in the NG Raphael: From Urbino to Rome ( NG, 2004), no. 5.

[2] Shown in the New York exhibition, Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi ( Met, 2001), no. 30.

On the Piero della Francesca Trail 8

Across the Mountains of the Moon to Urbino.

Molly and her companions drive across the mountain massif known as Alpe della Luna called by another character in the novel “Mountains of the Moon” down into Urbino. Like many an art historian, she stands alone before the extraordinary Flagellation puzzled at the meaning of it whilist her friends rush off “to knock off the Raphaels” before the Palace closes. Perhaps it would interest Molly to know that over forty interpretations have been made of this famous picture whose titular subject is relegated to the background whilist a mysterious trio of renaissance men stand planted to the earth in the foreground. It is impossible to enumerate these readings here which show every sign of being increased with James Banker adding his own theory to the accumulated pile. Banker divides interpretations into three groups: the three men “as contemporaries of the Biblical moment;” they are portraits of fifteenth-century individuals (the majoritarian view); the third group see the figures “as types of some abstract quality.”[1] Banker’s reading falls into the second group; he claims that the oldest figure is Jacopo Anastagi, adviser to the Malatesta for whom Piero worked.[2] As to its dating, Piero’s Flagellation is thought to date from the 1460s; Banker dates it to either 1467-68 or 1470-71, the first date because it is a fact that Piero was in Urbino in early 1469- and Urbino is where the painting was first located. Moreover, it the time when Piero’s “theoretical interest in perspective intensified” and he was about to begin his De prospective pingendi which would be completed in the mid-1470s.[3]

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[1] Banker, Piero della Francesca, 136.

[2] Banker, Piero della Francesca, 136.

[3] Banker, Piero della Francesca, 134.

On the Piero della Francesca Trail 7

“The Best Picture”

Aldous Huxley made the trip from Urbino with his wife Maria to see this remarkable picture in 1925, though others had visited it and wrote about it though Huxley says he has no desire to contribute to this corpus; he does not wish to write another treatise on Piero della Francesca.[1] His essay starts with an account of the uncomfortable travel to Sansepolcro by bus. Then Huxley notes the location of picture before declaring it in the “best picture in the world.” There follows a short digression on what Huxley calls the “absolute standard of artistic merit” as well as making some pointed comments about the futility of connoisseurship. Then Huxley describes the triangular composition formed by the soldiers and the lines to the apex (Christ’s head). Most memorably, Huxley labels Christ a “Plutarchian” rather than Christian hero due to his athletic torso, and he says the whole picture is a “resurrection of the classical idea.” Afterwards Huxley compares Piero’s solidness to Botticelli’s arabesques before proceeding to observe that Piero’s figures have the look of Egyptian sculpture generally, especially the women in the frescoes at Arezzo. He draws attention to Piero’s love of painting headdresses, veils, and drapery like in the Misericordia whose tubular drapery he likens to that of the Charioteer in the Louvre. Huxley says that he is “attracted to his [Piero’s] character by his intellectual power.” He then goes on to say that he would unhesitatingly consign all Botticelli’s works to the flames in order to save Piero’s art. Finally, he lists the art of Piero stating that “anyone who wants to know Piero must go from London to Arezzo, San Sepolcro and Urbino, The essay concludes with musing on the reaction of audience if the principal works of Piero were at Florence and Botticelli’s at San Sepolcro. In this event Huxley has no doubt that “the public estimation of these two masters would be reversed.”

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[1] Aldous Huxley, “The Best Picture” in Along the Road: Notes and Essays of a Tourist. (Chatto and Windus, 1925), 177-189.

On the Piero della Francesca Trail 6

The Most Horrible Figure in Renaissance Art.

Well, not quite the Piero trail, but an altarpiece in Sansepolcro. Time for a nightmarish intermission. Whilist in Sansepolcro we could exchange the calm placidity of the Madonna and her charges for the bizarre, disturbing Deposition by the mannerist Rosso Fiorentino. The painting was commissioned in 1527 by the Confraternity of Santa Croce, and was probably finished before 1 July 1528. It contains a number of iconographical peculiarities such as the horrible animal figure who may symbolise “the treachery and deceit that killed Christ.”[1]

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[1] Elisabetta Marchetti Letta, Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino, (Scala, 1994), 65.

On the Piero della Francesca Trail 5

The Misericordia Altarpiece in Sansepolcro.

Putting that insoluble question to one side, and leaving the archives for now, we are confronted with the work that Piero did for patrons in Sansepolcro. Perhaps the earliest, if not the first picture that Piero painted, was the Misericordia, commissioned by the brotherhood of Santa Maria della Misericordia. Due to the cataclysm of the Black Death in 1348 confraternities like this had flourished, and the iconography of a cross-section of Sansepolcro society sheltering under the Virgin’s cloak demonstrates how the town regarded the Madonna as a bulwark against such perils. Fortunately the contract for the altarpiece has survived (one of the few to do so) and it is illustrative of the way such business arrangements were conducted, though it does not offer clues as to when Piero finished the painting. From the contract dated 11^th June 1447 Piero was bound “to make, paint, embellish and erect the said picture according to the size and type of the painting which is there [in the Oratory] at present.”[1] In addition to the pre-existing painting, there were other models that Piero could have used to create the Misericordia. For example, a Madonna della Misericordia by the Sienese artist Nicolo di Segna of 1330, though Piero’s Madonna seems to come from an alternative universe. In describing Piero’s figures Longhi didn’t hesitate to call them “Egyptian” or “Etruscan,” and one might add in the case of this Virgin, Asian as she seems to have an almost Buddhist serenity about her.

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[1] Cited in Bruce Cole, Piero della Francesca: Tradition and Innovation in Renaissance Art (1991), 25.

On the Piero della Francesca Trail 4

Borgo Sansepolcro and Piero della Francesca

The next stop on our tour is the town of Borgo Sansepolcro, town of the Holy Sepulchre. Thanks to the pioneering archival research of historian James Banker, far more is known about Piero’s origins and his formation through the social, economic and intellectual networks in Sansepolcro. Some issues still remain unresolved though, such as in the words of Banker: “how then, did this young man from a provincial town 79 miles from Florence and 169 miles from Rome and without a formal education become along with Leonardo da Vinci, both an outstanding geometrician and the most intellectual painter of the Quattrocento?”[1] That question may never be answered, but we do know that Piero attended the town’s grammar school; but he never commenced studies in any university. Neither does his family origins indicate anything of the mathematical painter to come such as shown in his use of optics in the Baptism of Christ. Piero’s forefathers were “modest artisans and artisans of hides and leather, “though his father Benedetto had ambitions to elevate the family into more socially distinguished circles.

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[1] Banker, Piero della Francesca, 1.

On the Piero della Francesca Trail 3

The Madonna at Monterchi

The Madonna del Parto was painted for a small church halfway between Arezzo and Sansepolcro, just outside the small hilltop town of Monterchi. Due to neglect, an earthquake and a “radical reconstruction” it was relocated to a former school on Monterchi where its future destination is still a matter of debate. There it is shown in a light box which the French theorist Hubert Damisch says “makes it look like a hologram, if it isn’t reduced to a derisory beaker containing a rare specimen that in this context takes on the allure of an iconographic curiosity.”[1] In fact its iconography of a pregnant Madonna has provoked interpretation; some say it signifies the existence of a local fertility cult; others that it might refer to an actual mother buried nearby. One plausible theory is that it is linked to Piero’s mother Romana because Monterchi was her place of birth, or the place where she lived in early life. Banker seems to favour this hypothesis, though as Damisch says wether it is or isn’t Piero’s mother “changes nothing about the mater, objectively speaking.”[2] Unlike the great Arezzo cycle Piero painted this fresco in only seven giornate (days), though preparation of the surface and drawing the cartoons would have required more time. Cartoons are significant here: though the two angels are painted in different colours they look identical as they come from the same cartoon which was reversed.

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[1] Hubert Damisch, A Childhood Memory by Piero della Francesca, (Stanford, 2007), 21.

[2] Damisch, A Childhood Memory, 20.

On the Piero della Francesca Trail 2

Frescoes at Arezzo

The frescoes in the church of San Francesco at Arezzo are Piero’s most ambitious set of paintings. Possibly commissioned by the wealthy Bacci family, and overseen by the Franciscans (with whom they had many links), it is thought that the Florentine painter Biccio di Lorenzo began the work in 1447. It is not known how Piero came to be involved in the painting of San Francesco, but he may have had links with somebody in Arezzo. The whole cycle deals with the Legend of the True Cross which appears previously in renaissance art, e.g. Agnolo Gaddi in Santa Croce, though an entire sequence devoted to the subject is rare in medieval and renaissance periods.[1] In Summer’s Lease Molly describes the people in Piero’s wall paintings as having “round, invariably handsome, always unsmiling faces, with eyelids that seemed heavy as stone, looking down with perpetual detachment and even, in the case of the women, a kind of contempt.”[2] This is an excellent description, but an art historian would be asking him or herself two major questions: when was the cycle painted? And how is it meant to be interpreted? The first is not easily answered though James Banker not unreasonably offers the earliest date as 1452 and 1466 “as the latest possible finishing date.”[3] Banker further shortens this fourteen-year time span to 1452 to 1458, or early 1460, interrupted by Piero’s two trips to Rome (1453-54 and 1458-59). As to the interpretation of the cycle, the main point of reference is the medieval source book, the Legenda Aurea (Golden Legend), though more enterprising scholars like Carlo Ginzburg and Kenneth Clark have not been content to regard the frescoes as simply visual “transcriptions” of the Legenda Aurea. Ginsburg was the most imaginative stating that Piero’s cycle represented “a political and religious call for the re-conquest of Greece and of the once Christian Orient.”[4] Needless to say, this fanciful reading of the Arezzo frescoes has been met with great scepticism and in the case of Pope-Hennessey outright contempt.[5] Speaking of alternative readings, recent cleaning of Piero della Francesca's "Vision of Constantine" has shown that the painter showed the constellations of the Great and Little Bear. Apparently the configurations conform to what modern computer programs have projected for the stars in the mid quattrocento. But there's a catch: Piero's accurate representation of the stars is consistent with how an external viewer, say God, would see them, not a terrestrial viewer. Explanations range from Piero reversing the cartoon to the painter demonstrating Euclid's presentation of the stars from an external viewpoint.[6]

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[1] Jeryldene M. Wood, “Piero’s Legend of the True Cross and the Friars of San Francesco” in The Cambridge Guide to Piero della Francesca (ed J.M. Wood), (CUP, 2002), 51-65, 55.

[2] John Mortimer, Summer’s Lease, 263.

[3] James Banker, Piero della Francesca: Artist and Man, (Oxford, 2014), 46.

[4] Carlo Ginsburg, The Enigma of Piero, (Verso, 1981), 31.

[5] Pope-Hennessey, The Piero della Francesca Trail, 10.

[6] James Banker, Piero della Francesca, 57.

On the Piero Della Francesca Trail 1

Origins of the Piero della Francesca Trail.

“The villa will appeal in particular to devotees of Italian painting. It makes a perfect centre for the study of the Sienese school. More importantly, perhaps, the work of Piero della Francesca can be followed from the frescoes in Arezzo to the pregnant Madonna in the small chapel at Monterchi. Enthusiasts can take the trail to San Sepolcro and on, across the Mountains of the Moon, to see the sublime ‘Flagellation’ in the Ducal Palace at Urbino, undoubtedly the greatest small picture in the world. Those making this journey should ensure that the stopcock is closed and all electrical appliances switched off before departure. The pleasures of art tend to be diminished by returning to a complete absence of bath water.”[1]

The late, comic novelist and satirist John Mortimer incorporates the “Piero della Francesca Trail” into his comedy cum murder mystery about Brits taking a villa near Siena. In the villa one character, Molly, finds a copy of Kenneth Clark’s book on Piero della Francesca, though as the art historian John Pope-Hennessy said there were other books which Molly failed to consult ranging from “a brilliant poetical volume by Roberto Longhi,” “a fat, holdall of a book by Battisti,” and “a mythomanical study, filled with imaginary history, by Carlo Ginzburg.” All these and others were mentioned in the book developed from his Walter Neurath memorial lectures, The Piero della Francesca Trail.”[2] Both Pope-Hennessy and Clark whose study appeared in 1951) took their cue from an earlier author, the polymath novelist Aldous Huxley who in 1925 wrote an essay on Piero’s Resurrection entitled “The Best Picture.” Clark was a friend of Huxley and from him learnt a lot about looking at pictures. And inspired by Huxley’s essay, Pope-Hennessy made his way to San Sepolcro to see the venerated Christ, almost the ritual of a private aesthetic cult, though today tens of thousands of people pursue what somebody called the Piero della Francesca Trail. In Summer’s Lease, Mortimer describes how Molly and two companions leave their villa in “Chiantishire” to drive successively to Arezzo, Monterchi, Borgo San Sepolcro and Urbino, though you could start in London with the Baptism of Christ (above). After an early breakfast they resolve to “do the Resurrection before lunch.” We shall follow in their stead, but will also look at other artists as well as Piero.

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[1] John Mortimer, Summer’s Lease, (1988), 19.

[2] John Pope-Hennessey, The Piero della Francesca Trail, (Thames and Hudson, 1991).

Masterpieces of Florentine Sculpture 9

Giambologna and the “Climax of the Florentine Tradition”

Unusually, Giovanni Bologna was a Flemish sculptor who had visited Rome in order to familiarise himself with the antique style as well as new developments. He spent two years in Rome (1555-7) where he encountered the aged Michelangelo who encouraged him. On his return journey Giovanni passed through Florence where a rich patron prevailed upon him to prolong his stay. After working on a Neptune Fountain in Bologna, Giovanni was recalled to Florence in 1565, one year after Michelangelo’s death. That great master’s closing statements had been two pietas, one made just for himself in which he carved his own features; and the Rondanini Pieta which seems to anticipate modern sculpture. With Michelangelo dead, Giambologna as he became known was the leading sculptor in Florence. For that city he created a number of masterpieces, some known, some not so familiar. In the latter category sits the sculptor’s bronze turkey, cast straight from the original wax model.[1] More famously he created the Rape of the Sabines group which ambitiously integrates three figures into “an action group” (Avery). Derived from Michelangelo’s experiments with the figura serpentinata, this is one of the most renowned examples of mannerist sculpture ever conceived and sets the standard for a new kind of sculpture.

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[1] Avery, Florentine Renaissance Sculpture, 245.