A history of Italian painting

by Frank Jewett Mather

Fig. 111. Piero della Francesca. Battle of Constantine, detail from fresco.—S. Francesco, Arezzo.

Piero’s great opportunity came about 1465 when he painted in the choir of San Francesco at Arezzo ten stories from the Legend of the Holy Cross. For stark impressiveness it is hard to match them in Italy in this century. Only Masaccio and Leonardo da Vinci will at all bear the comparison. On analysis, the power rests mostly on the seriousness with which Piero takes his technical problem. There is little real grief or pathos in the Last Days of Adam, it is merely impersonally solemn. Even of the admirable fresco which represents Constantine in the uneasy dream in which he saw the vision of the cross, there is no warmth, no unexpected or emotional quality. So it is throughout the series; in the Queen of Sheba visiting Solomon, even in the splendid battle-piece, the Victory over Maxentius, Figure [111], the obvious sentiment of the theme is ignored, the figures have a kind of splendid unrelated existence that requires no apology or explanation. It is an effect that recalls the best archaic Greek sculpture.

Taken all in all, Piero is a formidable and enigmatic figure, an exception in an eager and emotional age. His truth to his vision is what counts. One feels it in the portrait of the humanist sovereign and captain of Urbino, Federigo da Montefeltro. It was painted about 1472 and is in the Uffizi, Figure [112]. How sternly honest it is, and what a presentation of a powerful and beneficent personality. Even the little decorative picture on the back of the panel, a Triumph of Fame, has an effect beyond its scale and obvious intention. It suggests wide dominions and heavy responsibilities manfully met.

Piero della Francesca lived out his life mostly in Umbria and far from the artistic centre of things. There is a self-sufficing quality in this voluntary isolation. He lived on to great old age, dying in 1492, and unless his declining years were perturbed by the faintly rising star of Leonardo da Vinci, he might boast himself, in the words of his and Leonardo’s friend, Fra Luca Pacioli, “the monarch of his times in the science of painting.”

We must leave for the Umbrian chapter such sturdy continuers of Piero della Francesca’s experimentalism as Melozzo da Forlì and Luca Signorelli. What is more important to note in leaving him is that such triumphs as his in fresco painting were highly exceptional in the second half of the fifteenth century. The successes of the period are in the minor art of panel painting. The fantasies of Botticelli, the best portraits of Ghirlandaio, the early panels of Perugino and Signorelli and Leonardo da Vinci—these are the outstanding things. In mural painting Florence actually retrograded, not merely as compared with the days of Masaccio, Fra Filippo and Fra Angelico, but even as compared with the earlier days of Andrea Bonaiuti, Agnolo Gaddi and Spinello Aretino. The fact has been obscured by the superficial gain in small realism, in sprightliness, and mere prettiness, but in all the serious qualities of monumental design the decadence is unmistakable. The favorite decorators simply executed on a large scale the sort of compositions that would have been charming on the front of a bride-chest. In the general enthusiasm for the parts of pictures the sense of pictures as a whole seemed in danger of being lost. The undiscriminating enthusiasm for the primitive painting of the Early Renaissance which has ruled for two generations has so clouded critical opinion on this point, that I must be at some pains to make my case good.

Perhaps I can do no better than to review some of the frescoes which Pope Sixtus IV ordered about 1481 for the new chapel of the Vatican Palace.[^[43]] He summoned to the Sistine Chapel the best available artists from both Tuscany and Umbria. By the measure of their success we may estimate the mural painting of the time.

Fig. 112. Piero della Francesca. Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, despot of Urbino.—Uffizi.

Originally the decorative scheme, later amplified by Michelangelo, required sixteen scriptural stories, in which the deeds of Moses were parallelled by those of Christ. The two first and two last subjects, on the end walls, have been destroyed, but we still see the twelve on the side walls. In general they all show the old Gothic coloring, are mostly vivacious in a confused and over-rich way, and lack unity of pattern and dramatic coherence.