Piero della Francesca and the Invention of the Artist

Machtelt Brüggen Israëls

• Éditeur: Reaktion Books
• Année: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781789143225
• Sujet: Art
• Sous-sujet: Art General

As one of the most innovative and enlightened painters of the early Italian Renaissance, Piero della Francesca brought space, luminosity, and unparalleled subtlety to painting. In addition, Piero invented the role of the modern artist by becoming a traveler, a courtier, a geometrician, a patron, and much else besides. In this nuanced account of this great painter's life and art, Machtelt Brüggen Israëls reconstructs how Piero came of age. Successfully demystifying the persistent notion of Piero's art as enigmatic, she reveals the simple and stunning intentions behind his work.

ONE

Pupil

egend has it that some thousand years ago the pilgrims Arcano and Egidio from Arcadia travelled to the Holy Land and Rome. When they embarked on their return, they carried relics of the Holy Sepulchre in their knapsacks. In the walnut forests of the upper Tiber valley they had a vision. A voice told them to walk no further and their relics were miraculously taken up into the tree besides them. There and then they founded the Town of the Holy Sepulchre with a chapel for their relics. Borgo San Sepolcro, therefore, was a new Arcadia and the visionary daughter of a road and a river.¹ The road, the via Romea and its bifurcations, connects Rome, capital of Christendom, in the west to cities in the east such as Urbino, Rimini and the port of Ancona along the Adriatic coast, from where Arcano and Egidio probably planned to set sail. The river, the Tiber, springs from the Apennine Mount Fumaiolo and flows via Borgo and its lush walnut valley to the Tyrrhenian Sea. Beyond the Tiber’s source, to the north, are the cities of Bologna, Modena and Ferrara. At its mouth, in the south, is Rome. It was at this intersection, in Borgo, that around 1412 Piero della Francesca first saw the light. The town, its road and its river drew the pattern of his travels and life.

ORIGINS

In the fifteenth century Borgo had some 4,500 inhabitants. They traded in walnut, the preferred wood for furniture, in wool and leather, and in indigo, the blue dye extracted from the woad plant. They led an active social life organized in confraternities. Following the long secular dominion of the Malatesta family of Rimini ruling as papal representatives, in 1430 their town passed to direct papal jurisdiction. In 1441 the pope gave it to Florence, which the year before had helped him to victory over Milan at the Battle of Anghiari.

At this crossroads of geographic and political spheres, early fifteenth-century Borgo had a climate auspicious to social mobility. A case in point is Piero’s father, Benedetto di Pietro della Francesca (1375–1464). He started out as a leather worker. Through business and marriages, he engineered a life as a rich and respected merchant. His early widowed mother, the matriarch Francesca, gave the family a distinctive surname to gloss common patronymics. In 1410 Benedetto married Romana (1391–1459), daughter of a certain Renzo di Carlo of the nearby hilltop town of Monterchi. Piero was their firstborn. Of Piero’s siblings, Francesco, Marco, Antonio, Vera and Angelica survived to adulthood. Fulfilling the dream of a good Catholic family, Francesco became a monk, entering the Camaldolese order at the local abbey in 1427. Marco and Antonio continued the family business and married well, as did their sisters.² Piero married painting. It is hard to say how Benedetto took the news of his oldest taking up the brush, but the boy’s talents must have been apparent. They secured his father’s lifelong support.

As the son of a well-to-do family, Piero could attend the local grammar school for boys up to the age of fourteen. His classmates would have included his cousin Francesco di Benedetto del Cera, known as Francesco dal Borgo, Malatesta Cattani and Jacopo Anastagi; they would go on to be, respectively, an architect, a bishop and a councillor of the Malatesta in Rimini. Maestro Girolamo da Fano and later maestro Jacomo da Gubbio would have taught them volgare, or Italian, and some reading knowledge of Latin. Piero had the benefit of a merchant father, double-dyed in geometrical and arithmetical tricks, to teach him abaco, or mercantile mathematics, for which no schools existed in Borgo.

For the aspiring painter the town lacked a challenging master. Borgo had previously commissioned work by artists from Siena and attracted painters from neighbouring centres, including Ottaviano Nelli (1375–1444) from Gubbio and Antonio di Giovanni (fl. 1430–62) from Anghiari.³ Piero is first documented in Borgo as a well-paid twenty-year-old assistant of Antonio d’Anghiari. His apprenticeship would have started elsewhere, in his early or mid-teens, the only age at which the artisanal aspects of painting could be learned. His undocumented time as a painter’s apprentice can be read back from his first picture, the Baptism of Christ.⁴

THE BAPTISM

Piero’s Baptism of Christ (illus. 2), now in the National Gallery in London, once graced the high altar of San Giovanni Battista in Val d’Afra in Borgo.⁵ The church served parishioners of southeastern Borgo and the adjacent valley of the Afra, a tributary of the Tiber. It had been built in 1381 as a simple, barn-like structure. Dreams for a high altarpiece materialized as of 1419, when a parishioner, Agnolo di Cisco, called Bovone, promised the profits from the sale of two houses to finance its carpentry. The creation of an altarpiece was a major event in Borgo. Only the high altars of its churches had polyptychs, whereas the side altars made do with murals, or simple statuary. On 21 December 1433 a local noble, Luca di Guido Pichi, saw to the execution of Agnolo’s last wish. Nicoluccio di Nicoloso Graziani, the church’s rector from 1433 to 1464, commissioned the carpentry. Fully paid for four years later, it was made by the woodworker Benedetto del Cera, the father of Piero’s cousin Francesco dal Borgo. The design was provided by Antonio d’Anghiari, who would also have been the designated candidate for painting it. During the long time it took to finish the woodwork the odds turned against Antonio. The shifting allegiances of Nicoluccio began to transpire in 1437 when he selected Piero as a witness to his last will. It was Piero who at an unknown moment started to paint the altarpiece.

He painted a divine manifestation. True to the church’s dedication and the river life of its parishioners, he represented the key act of St John the Baptist. In the valley of the Jordan, John recognizes Jesus Christ as the Son of God and baptizes him (John 1:29–34). Primordially pale of skin, eyes downcast, hands folded in front of his chest, weight poised on his right leg, Christ stands frontally in a ford of the river meandering through a sun-bathed landscape. He is naked except for a white loincloth rimmed with gold-embroidered pseudo-Semitic script, which positions him in the Holy Land. The water laps around his ankles as from the riverbank John steps in with a tilted bowl of turned wood in his raised right hand. From the bowl, water trickles over Christ’s head, shimmering between the strands of his fair hair. Above Christ, from the heavens behind the crown of the big walnut tree at his left side, a golden emanation showers down. In it the Holy Ghost descends as a white dove. The source of the divine light is hidden from the viewer by the foliage, but is visible to a procession of four men with Byzantine hats at the riverbank in the near distance. One of them has come to a halt and gives testimony, raising his gaze and arm to the sky. They are probably the priests and Levites sent from Jerusalem to question John. In the curve of the river between the priests and the Baptist, a catechumen is preparing for baptism by pulling his white tunic over his head. He cannot see and, unlike the priests, he is therefore unaware of the source of the divine emanation. Piero juxtaposes seeing and not seeing by painting the catechumen’s body struggling in its obscuring tunic arching over the amazed priest in the background. At the other side of the walnut tree, three angels attend in wonder attesting to the divinity of Christ’s nature, as the Baptism is considered his first manifestation as a divine being. An angel in stark red and blue at the far left is depicted from the back, but with its head turned in perfect profile to mirror the Baptist’s, its hand raised to mirror his. The middle angel, wearing a circlet of white and pink roses in its hair and donning a classical white peplos that leaves one shoulder exposed, as in the Wounded Amazon by the ancient Greek sculptor Phidias, is awestruck at the sight of Christ and clasps hands with its companion to the right. Dressed in woad-dyed dusty blue, this angel stands closest to the river and over its shoulder safeguards Christ’s pink robe. While leaning on its companion, it looks out of the painting from around the trunk of the walnut tree, arrestingly locking his gaze with the viewer’s.

Light is reflected in the river, except for the ford on a slope of which Christ and John are standing. There are waterlines around their ankles and the pebbles show in the riverbed. John Pecham, a thirteenth-century theorist of optics, noted that contrary to oblique rays of light, which are refracted by a translucent material, rays at right angles penetrate it. To the Arab scientist of optics, Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham; c. 965– c. 1040), whose work was known in translation, the difference between reflection and transparency was as clear-cut as a sword being either deflected off a surface or penetrating it. Piero honed observation to optic theory and painted an abrupt transition where divine light hits the water at right angles. Light penetrating water without breaking it had become a metaphor for divine mysteries in, for example, Dante’s Divine Comedy (Paradiso II.34–6). In the Baptism, the free passage of heavenly rays might be a figure of the mystery of God’s manifestation as light.⁶

In the distance, the river mirrors the sky, hills and background figures. The valley is in May attire, graced by verdant but still fruitless walnut trees that were as recognizable to Piero and his contemporaries as to their legendary pilgrim founding fathers. The broom scrub is blossoming. John has used some of its branches without removing the flowers to tie his tunic of camel-hair skin around his waist. Walnut saplings and plants indigenous to Tuscany, such as buttercups, black bindweed, verrain, liquorice, great plantain and myrtle, grow in the foreground. Trees and trunks in the fields help the valley’s inhabitants to heat their houses, much as they help the painting’s space to recede measurably. They also reflect John’s warning to Jews who took Baptism without true conviction that ‘Every tree . . . that doth not yield good fruit, shall be cut down’ (Matthew 3:10, also Luke 3:9). The countryside represents the upper Tiber valley. At the far end a road leads up to a walled and turreted city reminiscent of Borgo huddled against the Apennines. It might represent the road that in the 1330s Bishop Guido Tarlati of Arezzo cut at a straight line through the landscape between Borgo and Anghiari after he had seized control of the two towns. Also biblically the road is made straight, as John had replied to the Levites’ query, with ‘I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, make straight the way of the Lord’ (John 1:23).

2 Piero della Francesca, The Baptism of Christ, c. 1442–5, egg tempera and gold on poplar.

The sun is climbing toward its zenith from the right, casting strong shadows on Christ’s torso and John’s right leg. The direction of the light corresponds to the light flowing in from a window in the south wall of the altarpiece’s church. Even in the shadows Piero renders light, but by omission. By leaving the thinnest of lines unpainted around his figures, especially at the shaded side, he keeps the underlying white gesso preparation exposed to represent the reflected light playing in the hair on the skin. It is a skill of great command in execution and foresight in planning that was also used by Netherlandish masters.⁷ Lucid flesh colours, over the lightest of green under-layers, have set the obfuscated skin of earlier tempera painting aglow. The painting’s tonality is blond, with its pale whites, blues and reds against foliage and fields in greys and once mossy-bright, but now browned copper greens.

Piero has a descriptive, realist eye in the service of meaning. There is consequential logic in what he chooses to represent and a sense of the essential in what he leaves out. Details such as the broom twig around John’s tunic and the concealed face of the catechumen are thematically precise and not redundant. The choice for blond colours, limpid lucidity, a blue instead of traditional golden sky, the landscape setting, reflections and transparencies serve the divine manifestation as unfolded in the biblical story. Piero’s imagination, true to both the Bible and the world of the beholder, provides the viewer with arguments for belief in a divine truth.

There is symmetry, but not quite. Christ is placed exactly along the panel’s vertical axis, along which also the divine light and the Holy Spirit are aligned. Placed off-centre to Christ’s left, however, is a single tree rising to twice his height. Likewise, Piero uses the contrapposto reverberating through Christ’s body to disrupt symmetry, even in a detail such as the folded hands. Their delicate position with fingers almost touching allows for bravura foreshortening with a view of the thumbs. In conformity to his body’s contrapposto, Christ’s right hand is slightly higher than his left, enacting a subtle inclination towards the Baptist.

Space is orchestrated with rigour. To achieve spatial logic in the modelling of cloths over bodies, Piero sometimes even painted the nude first and then costumed it. Christ’s thighs are visible to the naked eye under his loincloth. So are the catechumen’s head and arm under the tunic that he is wrestling to take off. Even though Piero seems to have known the figure in already fully clad state in a mural by Gentile da Fabriano (see illus. 4), he re-planned his by drawing the full nude before the tunic. John’s cheeks were painted before his beard, the tree’s branches before its leaves. The figure groups and even subsequent changes were prepared on individual cartoons, which were pricked for transfer to the panel by pouncing, or spolvero. The horizon runs through the town in the distance, with the result that the heads of the figures are d...

Table des matières

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Introduction
• 1. Pupil
• 2. Traveller
• 3. Rhetorician
• 4. Master
• 5. Citizen
• 6. Devotee
• 7. Courtier
• 8. Scientist
• 9. Patron
• 10. Monarch
• REFERENCES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• INDEX