Category Archives: Cognoscenti 2015-18 archived posts

straining to imagine the key door in Palazzo Ducale Urbino

Deep inside Federigo di Montefeltro’s palace, in that extraordinarily condensed, triangular, liminal world created by turning away from the rectilinear Renaissance calm, for its balconies to face the road to Rome, lie all the secrets of that duke’s cosmos.  

The studiolo, the double chapels to the muses and to god, these are well known. But that which might hold the best key to this amazing late 15th century world, is a pair of doors of beautifully made intarsia, every panel as slightly different as phases of the moon, and each constructed with the most precise and intentional geometry – this is no mere decoration.

Today, while all admire the brilliant perspective projections and the technical mastery of inlaid wood, images of instruments (Francesco di Giorgio?) or squirrels (Botticelli?), these doors are virtually invisible and, as far as I could see last week, without any caption.

Their ‘pictorial’ side – with caged birds and a chiming clock (above left) – is displayed, but the enigmatic, coded side which might help unlock that world for us, is barely visible and only by squeezing a camera round and photographing them in a mirror.

35 years ago, when we could touch such things, I remember an ILAUD student being able to make precise measured drawings and then enthral us with his arcane geometrical attempt to unravel their secrets.

29 September 2017 

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I worry about the ideas of “influence” and “icon” which so pervade popular art history today. Two new exhibitions, one built around Piero della Francesca and the other around Giorgione, bring these issues directly into the open. And on two very different Cognoscenti tours this year we will try to cut through to the actual world of these great artists – we will be visiting the countryside of both, indeed visiting the birthplace of both, and we will see masterpieces in the setting for which they were painted.

Art history exists to offer us lenses through which to view the world of great paintings or sculptures. We may see more clearly through these lenses, but they will always to some extent be distorting, and they can change focus with seemingly arbitrarily changing fashion.

I believe art historians are most useful when they help explain the formation of a work and the world wherein it could be made, with the varied actors and the tools available to them – from beliefs and symbolic gestures to pigments and hammers.   But art historians have most influence on our experience, rather differently, in what they choose to focus on, what they neglect, and what they group together.

Three little Piero works: two very minor ones and Lavin’s little monograph on a very major one

The intriguing exhibition ‘Piero della Francesca: Exploring a Legend’ which has now opened near Bologna, shows just that. And it raises again the two worries I have – around “icon” and “influence.” ‘The Age of Giorgione,’ at The Royal Academy in London shows a rather different approach to similar curatorial issues.

“Icon” makes me shiver particularly, as a large book I wrote on Charles Rennie Mackintosh many years ago had the word “icon” in its title, against my wishes but with a publisher convinced the word brought sales. Piero della Francesca attracts such superlatives and perhaps visitors to this exhibition, though the word is equally meaningless – since “legend” he surely is not.

His remaining works, particularly moveable ones, are few; and here parallels begin to appear with the slightly later Veneto painter, Giorgione. Both are called enigmatic, both left work whose subject matter is far from simply explicable. “The Enigma of Piero” (by Carlo Ginsburg) I referred to in this post); “The Enigma of Giorgione” (by Ali Smith) is referred to (Cognoscenti post 68) and can be read in full (in The Guardian archive).

“Excessive iconomania has been one of the banes of art history for the last two decades,” lamented a critic years ago, when reviewing Marilyn Aronberg Lavin’s book about Piero’s Flagellation (its cover seen above).

“Influence” worries me rather differently; it can tend to diminish artists, focusing on what they took from, rather than how they built on others, and it can also privilege the art historian’s skill over our focus on the actual works.

With each of these shows there is only a handful of works by the “icon,” the painter who appears in large bold lettering on the posters. So how do they build into a satisfactory exhibition? The Piero show has over 150 works, but just three by Piero, two being his (minor) saints shown above. There are ‘contemporary’ works from Giovanni Bellini and Antonello, Veneziano and Beato Angelico. There is, for example, the bust seen below of Battista Sforza, she who was painted by Piero as in my post (Cognoscenti 115). In this exhibition there are lots of copies of Pieros, mainly of the Arezzo fresco cycle. But the main sense of “influence” is in the inclusion of Seurat and Degas, Carra and Morandi, even Balthus, Duncan Grant and Hopper. Unexpected juxtapositions are often fascinating, but this show must appear strange to a devotee of Hopper; or indeed of Piero.

One of our American travellers to The World of Piero in September has kindly pointed out a long and interesting review in The Wall Street Journal this week.

Battista Sforza, Duchess of Urbino, by Laurana; Castelfranco altarpiece by Giorgione; portrait of a man, by Giorgione or Titian

The Royal Academy, on the other hand, sticks entirely in the age of Giorgione, the shortly-lived painter of whom so little is known. And it offers wonderful pictures whose attribution has swilled around, keeping the historians in business, but whose actual qualities never change. Does it matter whether the young nobleman above is by the hand of Giorgione or of Titian?

Finally a word on two amazing altarpieces. The extraordinary, original composition (above centre) is one of very few works verifiably by Giorgione. It is not in the exhibition – but it will be visited by our Cognoscenti Terraferma tour in June, in Giorgione’s home town of Castelfranco.  The highlight of the ‘Piero Legend’ exhibition – indeed the only ‘Piero’ reason to visit – is his magnificent, unique Madonna della Misericordia (below). This also will be visited by our Piero tour in September, for by then we are promised it will be back in Piero’s home town of Borgo Sansepolcro, whither it returns to become once more the central panel of a great polyptych.

(And surely the penitent on the extreme left is also the donor with S Girolamo on the far right in the first image of this post, kneeling in front of his city of Sansepolcro.)

24 March 2016

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Travellers joining us to visit the world of Piero della Francesca in September have been asking if we might recommend reading. Where do you start? One recent book, which I do recommend here to the serious enquirer, has itself a “select bibliography” which runs to 14 pages! Well here are a few, very varied, personal encounters you may choose to follow up. (The city pictured by Piero above is his hometown, Borgo Sansepolcro, which we will be visiting.)

There are picture books and introductory guide-books to the paintings, there are general biographies, and then there are original and particular explorations (like the little Piero and His City by Luigi Andreini).

Pictorial guides are perhaps best found at the locations, their reproductions reminding us of what we’ve been looking at. The lower book on the left, however, is not. It is a heavy, majestic volume which might threaten a lightweight coffee table and certainly your baggage allowance. It is the fully explained and wonderfully photographed record of Piero della Francesca: The Legend of the True Cross in the Church of San Francesco in Arezzo. Written by top experts including the superintendent of their restoration (Carlo Bertelli and Anna Maria Maetzke), published by Skira Editore in 2001, its 278 hardback pages are in print at around £40. A beautiful book back home, to remind you of what you saw in this one building in Arezzo, and be the envy of your friends who leaf through it on your coffee table.

For the proper, rounded life-and-work, an expert account by Marilyn Aronberg-Lavin, Piero della Francesca (Phaidon, 2002, paperback around £18) follows the well-known book by Kenneth Clark – same publisher, same simple title, 65 years earlier but still accessible. However two other new books are very interesting. James Banker’s  Piero della Francesca: Artist and Man, (Oxford UP, 2014 about £20 hardback) and Larry Witham’s Piero’s Light: In Search of Piero Della Francesca: A Renaissance Painter and the Revolution in Art, Science, and Religion (Pegasus, 2015 paperback at around £11). Both of these books locate Piero, rather differently but very well, in his cultural context. Banker is a serious Piero scholar. Witham’s attempts to see Piero himself as scholar as much as painter and to draw lines of inspiration through subsequent centuries up to modern neuro-science I find less convincing.

Then there are the odd treats for those who like a bit more, and each of these, unlike the above, fits in the pocket.

John Pope-Henessy’s lectures, The Piero della Francesca Trail (Thames & Hudson, 1991), interesting not least for its contrarian view on the Flagellation in Urbino. It is not too easy to find, but it has been reprinted with the Aldous Huxley Piero essay “The Best Picture” (Little Bookroom, New York, 2005). Hubert Damisch’s A Childhood Memory by Piero della Francesca (Stanford University Press, 2007) is a post-modern echo of Freud on Leonardo, and a read not undertaken lightly. Keith Christiansen’s little Personal Encounters is a Metropolitan Museum of Art catalogue (NY, 2014, c.£13) and very particular. The picture on his cover (seen at the start of this post, S. Girolamo and a donor) and a very early Madonna and child are subjects of two of his four nice brief essays. Both these (small, minor) paintings are currently exhibited in a show in Italy which I discuss elsewhere, and one of the essays is published by that exhibition online.

The great Carlo Ginzburg‘s Enigma of Piero (Verso, 2002, in print paperback c. £18) is personal, provocative and brilliant sleuthing. (I have my own thoughts on ‘enigmas’ here.) Much more simply, Luigi Andreini brings his subject home in Piero and His City; it is slight but of real local interest and, I think, only available in Sansepolcro itself (introduced by James Banker and translated by Maureen Banker).

Finally, to put our understanding of Piero in a greater context, a book which, a generation ago, revisioned how we looked at such things is Michael Baxandall’s classic Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style, (Oxford UP , paperback 1988, today around £8), and a fine more contemporary context is painted by Evelyn Welch’s Art in Renaissance Italy 1350-1500, (Oxford UP, paperback, 2000 £16 and not to be confused with John T. Paoletti’s oft reprinted book of the same title).

But hang on, this isn’t a course to be tested – it’s a holiday, and there’s certainly no need to do homework. The tales of the different works will be discussed when we get there, but most importantly they will all come alive in our experiencing them, in the places where Piero himself lived and worked, and still today a world away from the mass throngs of tourists.

Oh, and then, of course, there’s the imagination of novelists and filmmakers – you remember Juliette Binoche swinging on a rope from the Arezzo rafters in The English Patient? This rather different story is found here!

8 March 2016, slightly updated 1 August 2016.

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All too short a date – speedo or bungee Piero? 

“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 frescos in Arezzo to the pregnant Madonna in the small chapel at Monterchi. Enthusiasts can take the trail to Sansepolcro 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 hot bath water.”

Well, this was the note awaiting John Mortimer’s visitors at the Tuscan villa whence, in Summer’s Lease, they embark on “The Piero Trail,”ending at ‘the sublime Flagellation’ – with its romance, its coded meanings and its mystery (as intimated in the other cover pictured here).

All on one day, they ‘do’ Piero, from Arezzo to Monterchi, and Sansepolcro to Urbino. Mortimer’s three tourists leaving their rented holiday villa after an early breakfast to ‘do the Resurrection before lunch.’   They make a perfunctory stop at Arezzo, glance at the vast and wondrous frescoes in San Francesco, and ‘not ten o’clock yet, and we’ve done Arezzo,’ says one. ‘It won’t take us long to knock off the pregnant Madonna.’   And knock it off they do at Monterchi; they pop in to nearby Sansepolcro for the Resurrection, where ‘you can see what all the fuss was about.’ Then, after a hasty lunch they continue to Urbino and the Flagellation, which was the picture they had particularly wanted to catch.

John Mortimer, in his charming book, enjoys this gentle satire on the “Piero Tourists.” Their tour, however, could not be more different from ours. We will guide you at leisure and with space to breathe in the wonders. We will assume you have no wish to have “done Arezzo and it’s not yet ten’oclock, ” and that your enthusiasm is even the equal of Juliette Binoche’s.

[Show slideshow]

And the Sikh sapper helps her fly. No, today you can’t light flares, nor will you dangle from the roof beams. But today the frescoes are recently gloriously restored, they are beautifully lit and we gaze in wonder at our leisure.

For the English patient’s nurse, as for Mortimer’s tourists, their Piero summer’s lease certainly had all too short a date. Join us in September in the world of Piero della Francesca, and feel the time expanding.

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What an amazing vignette: at the foot of the elegant, invitingly top-lit stair, beyond the swirling white-robed figure, sits a figure in red boots and exotic hat. We may not know what scene is being portrayed in front of us here, but there is no doubt who painted it: THE WORK OF PETER FROM BORGO S SEPOLCRO is so beautifully lettered it could be carved. Yet this post – when displayed on my desktop screen – is even larger than the original, painted on its worm-eaten piece of timber in Urbino’s Ducal Palace. The whole paintings is less than two feet by three (58 x 81 cm, in new money).

It is the Greatest Small Painting in the World. So said Kenneth Clark (in capital letters, it seems).

The paintings of Piero (he from Borgo Sansepolcro, descendant of the matriarch Francesca), tended in the 20^th century to attract such superlatives (you can read Aldous Huxley’s well-known superlative on another post). With neither of these judgements would we care to disagree – hence we are so looking forward to immersing ourselves in the World of Piero della Francesca in 2016 and hearing how our travellers judge such comments for themselves.

But this painting – whatever it portrays, and certainly there is some sado-masochistic goings-on under the gilded statue – is full of romance, hidden coded images and mystery; at least according to Andrea Aromatico whose book cover is also shown.

But, having recently read Sir John Pope-Hennessy’s idea that it depicts The Dream of S. Jerome, I am easily converted away from the notion of it depicting the Flagellation of Christ (as all others say). Whatever else, this mysterious ‘double’ image deepens The Enigma of Piero (as Carlo Ginsburg calls it) which we will discuss when physically in Piero’s world in September 2016.

According to Pope-Hennessy, “As a young man S. Jerome dreamed that he was flayed on divine order for reading pagan texts, and he himself later recounted this dream, in a celebrated letter to Eustochium, in terms that exactly correspond with the left-hand side of the panel.” Pope-Hennessy also reproduces an earlier picture by Sienese painter Matteo di Giovanni, which showed the subject recorded in Jerome’s letter – and the comparison is obvious. No one seems to support Pope-Hennessy. But also, no one has produced a different explanation for all the figures and their various groupings, their costumes and behaviour, which convinces me. I’m sure I’ll have found one by 2016.

Romance and mystery, the Flagellation Code

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Let me make a recommendation: abandon attempts at deciphering and interpretation. Come with us, in the footsteps of Piero himself next September, and simply enter into the extraordinary pictorial world he presents to us.

5 November 2015

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Westwards, over the hills from Urbino where we were a fortnight ago, we descend to the upper Tiber valley where Umbria meets Toscana, and we find the little cities where Piero della Francesca came from.

A little detail of Piero’s private painting for Duke Federigo da Montefeltro, his triumph

While this picture may indeed show the landscape on that wonderfully hairpinned journey between Urbino and Borgo San Sepolcro, its representation of the Cognoscenti team may be a little fanciful. But having just returned from looking at Pieros and smelling the air where they were painted, I can’t wait for the concentrated few days of our Piero della Francesca tour in September 2016.

The tour is on sale here, and places are filling up. It is unusual for Cognoscenti to focus so closely – not just on 15th century painting but on just one painter. Don’t be put off – for we are certainly not just a gallery-based course of study. The world of Piero della Francesca covers a vast richness of little walled cities and fine food, art collections and bustling piazzas, Renaissance patrons and the other artists Piero influenced or whose works he knew. (And what about geometry and perspective and all that? And even Luca Pacioli? And as for the local wines…)

9 October 2015

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No, not Corot seen through a Chagall dream… but…

Detail from the battle of Constantine and Maxentius (photo: John McKean)

So what is this magical and mysterious image, so delicately painted and coloured, the horse’s head only adding to its extraordinary dream-like calm? When might it have been painted?

Even as I look at it now, I find it difficult to realise that, when I took this photograph recently, I was standing in the hugely tall central choir chapel behind the altar and 13th century crucifix in the Franciscan church of Arezzo. And it was ablaze with life and excitement. All its surfaces were filled in three tall, stacked storeys, stretching to further than I can crane back my neck, three layers of oddly juxtaposed mythical stories, much of it coming from the 13th century Golden Legend. This extraordinary fresco cycle of bizarrely varied tales has one section showing the imperial Roman battle between Constantine and Maxentius – where Constantine famously had a vision of a cross, won the battle, and thereafter welcomed Christianity in the western Roman empire. Between the opposing forces – depicted without any clash of arms, but in in perfect perspective and the most realistic shadows and reflective glints from the armour – runs this tranquil stream.

None of the rest is at all like this fragment, but no two moments, no two details in the whole cycle are alike. The viewer is in the midst of a great pictorial book which can never be read too often. And I can’t wait to return with the World of Piero tour this time next year.

For all this was painted by Piero della Francesca, five hundred and fifty years ago.

7 Sept 2015

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Surely Florence is THE Renaissance city?

This was the first question asked when the Cognoscenti Renaissance City tour was first advertised.  That seems long ago; now the case for Ferrara and Urbino is solidly made, the tour is full and we are off there in a few weeks.

But now we are in the final stages of planning the World of Piero Della Francesca, a 2016 tour, which will be on sale very soon, and the question arises once more.

If the principal works of Piero were to be seen in Florence, and those of Botticelli at San Sepolcro, I do not doubt that the public estimation of these two masters would be reversed. Artistic English spinsters would stand in rapturous contemplation before the story of the True Cross, instead of before the Primavera. Raptures depend largely upon the stars in Baedeker, and the stars are more freely distributed to works of art in accessible towns than to those in the inaccessible.

That was Aldous Huxley in 1925 (this text is further quoted in another Cognoscenti post).

Renaissance in perspective, painted in Urbino, in the circle of Piero della Francesca

Of the three known perspectives made within the circle of Piero della Francesca in Urbino in the later 15th century, often called (perhaps by those who feel people get in the way of fine architecture and urban spaces) “ideal cities”, this is the one which remains there.  The ducal court of Urbino hosted a rather different ‘Renaissance’ from Medici Florence. 

As the eminent art historian John White noted, rather more recently than Huxley,  ‘the patent on the history of art was taken out in Florence’. The chief culprit was Giorgio Vasari, a poor painter, a pedantic architect and the wrecker of Florentine Gothic, but celebrated for being the author of a hugely influential work celebrating the supremacy of Florentine art, Lives of the Most Eminent Italian Architects, Painters and Sculptors, published in 1550. For Vasari followers, art had been rescued from its dismal mediaeval abyss by the talents of Florence. In his narrative there was little room anyone else; there are the key Venetians, but virtually not a hint of Duccio or of Siena.

While the reputation of Florentine art is of course unassailable, Ferrara and Urbino as centres of Renaissance humanist scholarship and culture were every bit its equal. Moreover, the motto of Cognoscenti tours is always to head for the paths less travelled in our 21st Century – and every art-loving traveller can reach Florence on their own with their eyes shut or at least by ticking a box in a weekend newspaper’s small ad. What has been called ‘Vasari’s Florentinocentrism’ led naturally to the Art History Industry, to the 19th century cultured Englishman abroad, to I Tatti (Bernard Berenson’s Florentine ‘lay monastery’ for the leisurely study of Renaissance culture) and even to A Room With a View.

The English view of the Renaissance has always been through a Florentine window. But next month on the Renaissance City tour we will be more intrigued by what it was that encouraged the artists and the thinkers themselves to swarm at the different courts of Montefeltro and Este. And next year with the World of Piero tour we will follow Huxley’s footsteps and, despite Piero’s star having risen far since he wrote those words, we will still find we may have these wonderful masterpieces, which could not be grabbed by the Brera or Ufizzi, more or less to ourselves.

Piero’s Sigismondo Malatesta, patron saint and faithful dogs

As a slightly different coda, here is my recent snap of a Piero painted on – damaged but, again, not removed from – its original wall in Rimini, where the Renaissance City tour will see it shortly. It’s not called The Dogs of War and Peace.

25 August 2015

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BORGO SAN SEPOLCRO IS NOT VERY EASY TO GET AT.

There is a small low-comedy railway across the hills from Arezzo. Or you can approach it up the Tiber valley from Perugia. Or, if you happen to be at Urbino, there is a motor ‘bus which takes you to San Sepolcro, up and down through the Apennines, in something over seven hours. No joke, that journey, as I know by experience. But it is worth doing, though preferably in some other vehicle than the ’bus, for the sake of the Bocca Trabaria, that most beautiful of Apennine passes, between the Tiber valley and the upper valley of the Metauro. It was in the early spring that we crossed it. Our omnibus groaned and rattled slowly up a bleak northern slope, among bald rocks, withered grass and still unbudded trees. It crossed the col and suddenly, as though by a miracle, the ground was yellow with innumerable primroses, each flower a little emblem of the sun that had called it into being.

And when at last one has arrived at San Sepolcro, what is there to be seen? A little town surrounded by walls, set in a broad flat valley between hills; some fine Renaissance palaces with pretty balconies of wrought iron; a not very interesting church, and finally, the best picture in the world.

The best picture in the world is painted in fresco on the wall of a room in the town hall. Some unwittingly beneficent vandal had it covered, some time after it was painted, with a thick layer of plaster, under which it lay hidden for a century or two, to be revealed at last in a state of preservation remarkably perfect for a fresco of its date. Thanks to the vandals, the visitor who now enters the Palazzo dei Conservatori at Borgo San Sepolcro finds the stupendous Resurrection almost as Piero della Francesca left it. Its clear, yet subtly sober colours shine out from the wall with scarcely impaired freshness. Damp has blotted out nothing of the design, nor dirt obscured it. We need no imagination to help us figure forth its beauty; it stands there before us in entire and actual splendour, the greatest picture in the world.

That text, now ninety years old, remains a wonderful amuse-bouche. It is the opening of a famous essay by Aldous Huxley. (It is further quoted in another Cognoscenti post.)

The Resurrection on the wall of the town hall in ‘the town of the Holy Sepulchre’ seen from the street

(Thorough restoration in 2015-6, inevitably in situ, restricts this view but allows a really close-up view of this amazing work.)

The journey over the hills from Borgo Sansepolcro to Urbino remains one of my favourites in the world. This is partly memories of Mary having to drive it, with its numerous, numbered and very steep hairpins at exactly the same time as a summer weekend classic sports car speed trial, which clearly did not want anyone else on the road. A bit hair-raising.   But it also is, as Huxley rhapsodises, through a stunning landscape. Luckily for Cognoscenti travellers, today the coach takes a less hazardous if just as lovely and rather quicker, newer route.

Join us on our 2016 World of Piero tour to the cities, towns, villages where he lived and worked. Final details are very soon to be published.

Same view, pulling came back a few inches from the glass door

26 Aug 2015

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