The Paradigm of Piero Della Francesca

It is small wonder that Florence attracted an increasing number of non-Florentine artists and that the Medici were perceived as the arbiters of taste. In 1438 Domenico Veneziano wrote from Perugia, where he had decorated a room in the Baglioni palace, to Piero de'Medici, who was in Ferrara for the Church Council, to request employment.14 He was familiar with the Florentine scene—he had worked in the city earlier in the decade—and he knew that Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi had more work in hand than they could reasonably expect to finish (as we have seen, Fra Angelico was employed at San Marco). "If only you knew how much I wish to make some famous work, and especially for you," he wrote, "you would favor this request." Piero de'Medici's response has not survived, but a year later the Venetian was working in Sant'Egidio, assisted by another painter who had been drawn to the city, Piero della Francesca.

Piero della Francesca is one of the protagonists of this exhibition and it is worth pausing over the circumstances surrounding his arrival in Florence. His position in Domenico's workshop is not specified, and, indeed, were it not for the excessive scruples of the bookkeeper recording payments for the fresco cycle in Sant'Egidio, we would have no documentary evidence that he ever visited the city. On September 12, 1439, a disbursement to Domenico of forty-four florins was received by "Pietro di Benedetto dal Borgho a San Sipolchro sta cho'illui" ("Piero . . . of Borgo Sansepolcro [who is] staying with him").15 That we are now able to enlarge upon the significance of this notice is due to the recovered evidence of Piero's prior activity as an artist in his native Sansepolcro and his collaboration with a local artist, Antonio d'Anghiari—memorably characterized by Roberto Longhi as "un ritardato pittorello goticheggiante" ("a small-time, retardataire, Gothicizing painter").16

Piero's training in Sansepolcro cannot have served him well for the kinds of tasks he coveted. At most, he could look forward to a career overshadowed by painters—invariably less gifted than he—imported from Siena and Florence. It is well to remember that as late as 1447, in nearby Arezzo, a mediocrity such as Bicci di Lorenzo was able to command enough prestige as a Florentine painter to receive the outstanding commission to fresco the main chapel of the church of San Francesco. Fortunately for posterity, he died after barely beginning the task, which was turned over to Piero. Perhaps it was in 1437, when the commission for a large, double-sided altarpiece for the church of San Francesco in Sansepolcro was transferred from Antonio d'Anghiari to the Sienese painter Stefano di Giovanni, better known as Sassetta, that Piero decided to associate himself with an artist who could introduce him to the still-new science of Renaissance painting. (He had assisted Antonio d'Anghiari on the ill-fated altarpiece, which Sassetta was to replace with a bona fide masterpiece that would influence the center panel of Piero's first documented work, a polyptych of the Madonna della Misericordia commissioned for a lay confraternity in Sansepolcro in 1445.) In 1439—the year he arrived in Florence—Piero was between twenty-six and thirty-two years old, an age by which most artists already had an established artistic identity; this makes his emergence a few years later as a leading exponent of Renaissance style all the more remarkable. It is likely that this relatively late transformation into a Renaissance artist contributed to the impression of sustained intellectual endeavor that Piero's paintings project as well as to his fascination with the mathematical underpinnings of Renaissance art. We can almost hear the nagging voices of the ghosts of his Gothic past when, in his treatise on perspective, the De prospectiva pingendi, he attests that "many painters condemn perspective, because they do not understand the power of the lines and the angles produced by it: with which every edge and line can be rendered proportionally. Hence I feel I have to show how necessary this science is to painting."17 Although Fra Carnevale did not have the subtle intellect of Piero, he, too, embraced perspective as a means of ordering the visual world as well as demonstrating his modernity.

Piero is so often seen as exceptional—not simply in terms of his artistic and intellectual stature but for his cultural itinerary—that it is easy to overlook the fact that his initial provincial training and subsequent refashioning in Florence was not unique. Nor was he alone in further broadening the scope of his art at the highly cultivated courts of Northern Italy—Ferrara, Rimini, and, above all, Urbino. At the court of Urbino he not only found a sympathetic and admiring patron in Federigo but he also met the foremost humanists and architects of the day, including Alberti. Arnaldo Bruschi has argued that we cannot fully understand a work like Piero's Montefeltro Altarpiece (fig. 7), which shows the Madonna and Child and attendant figures of saints, angels, and a kneeling Federigo da Montefeltro in a grandiose church interior, without taking into account the various personalities present at the court of Urbino, where it was painted, and the architectural culture nurtured by the duke and his confidant and adviser and kinsman Ottaviano Ubaldini.18 Similarly, the antiquarianism of Piero's little studied and under-appreciated altarpiece (fig. 8 and cat. 47) in Williamstown, Massachusetts, can only be properly evaluated once we learn something about the cultural interests of its Sansepolcro patron and his relationship with the artist—a task that has yet to be undertaken. As demonstrated in the second half of this exhibition, Fra Carnevale played a key role in the creation of the architectural-antiquarian culture of Urbino. He was, indeed, the first to introduce Florentine avant-garde notions to the court, and his art—eccentric and dilettantish, but always fascinating and informed—helps us to appreciate how much Piero's art owed to Urbino.