San Sepolcro and Piero della Francesca

 Edward Hutton concluded "Siena and Southern Tuscany" in Arezzo, but in that chapter he did include a side trip by rail to Borgo San Sepolcro to see the famous Resurrection by Piero della Francesca.

 

But the most beautiful of all these treasures to which Arezzo holds the key is Borgo San Sepolcro in the Tiber Valley. … There are very few things more lovely in the world than the upper valley of the Arno, but one of them is, I think, the upper valley of the Tiber. It is a landscape more virile than Umbria—a landscape by Piero della Francesca, in fact, and in Borgo it is his work you find, for the little town is his birthplace.

 

That “Resurrection of Christ” in the Municipio is perhaps the most beautiful representation of the triumph of Christ in the world. …

 

The fresco of the resurrection comes upon us with a kind of surprise; we had not suspected Piero of so much thoughtfulness. It is as though he had listened to some voice, or seen a vision, or on some fortunate day had been led away the captive of Love, … In the cold light of the earliest morning, mere sunless dawn as yet, Christ has risen and is standing in His tomb. His experience is in His face, the dawn of knowledge, perhaps of the sorrows of humanity. It is as though for the first time He had really understood the power of evil, to which, after all, we are so unwillingly the slaves, the hopeless misery of that state of imperfect love. The noise of Hell has furrowed His face, and He has only just escaped into our quiet world. Beneath that terrible and beautiful figure… lie four soldiers, sleeping in the noiseless twilight. Behind the green trees on the right the first exquisite frail light of dawn is coming to comfort the world, and with the return of the Prince of Life the first day of spring has come; already the flowers have blossomed and the trees have budded behind Him as he came out of the sunrise, and when he shall turn at last into the garden, where Mary will find Him, those bare boughs, that naked hill-side, that brown and sterile earth will quicken, too, even as the hills that He has already crossed. All the passion of the encounter with Death and the dead is graven on His face, and though men sleep He can know no rest; He is up before them, and the whole long day is waiting for Him…. For Piero has expressed not only the old magical truths of Paganism and Christianity, the joy of the world at the coming of Spring, the triumph of the Prince of Life in a world pallid with the fear of Death, but the subtler and more terrible thoughts, too, of the age of thought that was just then dawning on the world. …

 

It was as such things as these in my heart that I made my way back to Arezzo, and, regretting them, took my leave of Southern Tuscany.

 

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Arezzo

 Edward Hutton completed his tour of Siena and southern Tuscany with a long chapter on Arezzo. He devoted most of the chapter to an account of the works of Piero della Francesca that he found in its churches: the Legend of the True Cross, and an image of Mary Magdalen.  

 

Rome, Florence, Siena, Assisi are what they are because of the nature of the country in which they lie. It is the same with Arezzo. Her incommunicable allure strikes you at once as soon as you enter her gates—a certain smiling aspect, subtle and discreet and yet very charming and simple seeming in its welcome, its pleasantness and serenity. Yet nothing, I think, in the history of Arezzo…would lead you to expect an aspect so happy, so merely delightful. Nothing in her history! But I am wrong, for it was here both Maecenas and Petrarch were born. It would be impossible to doubt it even though we had no irrefutable proof of the fact, and indeed I think no men have better expressed their birthplace unless—well, unless it be Vasari, who was also an Aretine. These three men perfectly explain Arezzo; its orderliness, its delight, its extraordinary charm, its profound disregard of anything that matters, of anything but a certain décor and endless gossip. … (297)

 

It is as a city of profound quiet  that we find her today, set with trees and great open spaces within her fair walls of brick at the head of those three valleys at the foot of the mountains.

 

Full of monuments as she is to her illustrious dead, it is not to them but to her churches we look for evidence of her splendour. Nor are we disappointed, for her churches perfectly reflect her history—they are full of the best works of alien masters.

 

There is S. Francesco, for instance, which one comes to first on leaving the station: a Franciscan church, of course, built nobly in the Franciscan style in 1322…. But what we come to S. Francesco to see is not the work of such masters as these, but the strong and beautiful work of Piero della Francesca in the choir—work that one cannot better anywhere in Tuscany, nor, indeed, easily find its match.

 

The legend of the Holy Cross, its history from the beginning of the world until it was discovered by the Emperor Heraclius and later by S. Helena, which Piero della Francesca has painted here—by far the most considerable piece of work that he achieved during his whole life—is one of the most curious dreams of the Christian mind. No longer upheld in its entirety by the Catholic church, it is nevertheless true in its intention, since, for the Middle Age, at least, the Cross was indeed a lovely branch of the Tree of Life which is in the midst of the Paradise of God…. (306)

 

It is this golden legend that Piero has painted so vigorously  here in the choir of S. Francesco. How far are we in contemplating these frescoes from the passionate asceticism, the unearthly beauty of Fra Angelico or Simone Martini! It is as though a new desire had suddenly been born into the world—a desire for life where Simone, after all, would have been content with beauty. What magnificent vitality have those beautiful women, how valiant are those men, how puissant those angels! And, above all, Piero has filled heaven and earth with radiant light. It is in the clear and nimble air, in the fair white light of our real and beautiful daylight, that he alone of his contemporaries has dared at last to paint man and woman in all the sweet energy of life, full of that long breath of God which at dawn in a garden first gave us light…. (311)

One lonely and magnificent figure he left behind him at Arezzo in the Cathedral—a figure of S. Mary Magdalen, very noble and reticent. She adorns no altar, but in a quiet corner of the great church… she stands very sorrowful, she alone of all those clouds on clouds of saints really understands. Well, it is always so; we find Piero emotionally under the influence of the Middle Age, and yet himself perhaps a kind of emancipator or deliverer from its mysticism… For he, too, was occupied rather with his art than with the expression of ideas about religion. He was the first painter, perhaps, to study perspective scientifically. Problems of light, the action of light on beautiful faces or hair, the action of light upon light, would certainly seem to have fascinated him almost all his life long. And yet he has not discarded the ideas that were then gradually becoming less insistent in the world, but in all their modesty and beauty he has used them without question as a means of attaining a beauty bought with much toil and feverish endeavour. His Magdalen is not the ecstatic and splendid courtesan that we see in Titian’s canvas, but a beautiful and lonely woman, who will ever remember that lingering dawn in the garden, when, in the midst of her passionate  weeping, the gardener came so quietly and spoke her name, and in a moment she knew Him whom she had loved. (313)

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Perugia: Pinacoteca Vannucci

Edward Hutton devoted a lengthy chapter to the Pinacoteca Vannucci, Perugia'a picture gallery of Umbrian painting. He especially liked two famous altarpieces taken from their original locations. Looking at these magnificent paintings, it is hard to imagine what ordinary parishioners thought while attending Mass.

The Pinacoteca Vannucci, the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, on the top floor of the Palazzo Communale of Perugia, contains the most complete and representative collection of Umbrian pictures that has anywhere been brought together, as well as a number of early Sienese paintings and a few outstanding masterpieces of various schools; a Madonna and Child by Duccio di Buoninsegna, an altarpiece by Fra Angelico, and one by his pupil Benozzo Gozzoli, an altarpiece by Piero della Francesca and another by Luca Signorelli.

 

Unlike Florence and Siena, Umbria had no Giotto nor Duccio to point out the road she should follow in her art. Umbrian painting, which is not solely centered in Perugia, but which had several centres—Gubbio, Foligno, to name no others—in which it flourished, was really provincial in the true sense of the of the word. And it was from beginning to end the handmaid of the Church, and remained Christian when almost everywhere else art had become pagan. …

 

The two major single treasures of the gallery are the altarpiece by Fra Angelico and the altarpiece by Piero della Francesca.

Fra Angelico

The altarpiece by Fra Angelico is a masterpiece, indeed he never surpassed in feeling and quality some of the smaller figures. The Madonna and Child are enthroned under a baldacchino.  On either side are two angels, the foremost two offering baskets of roses. On panels at the sides are various full-length figures of saints: on the left S. Dominic and S. Nicholas, and these are the most exquisite; on the right S. John Baptist and S. Catherine of Alexandria, perhaps the work of an assistant. … Unfortunately, the face of the Virgin has been damaged; otherwise it seems to be in an excellent state, surprisingly bright in colour, and some of the figures of saints are of such beauty that I do not think Angelico ever surpassed them.

The large polyptych by Piero della Francesco is the other great single treasure of the gallery. It is a puzzling work. In the midst of a late Gothic altarpiece, the Madonna and Child enthroned in the centre with four full-length saints, SS. Anthony, John Baptist, Francis and Elisabeth at the sides, much in the form of Fra Angelico’s altarpiece here. Above in a seven-sided pediment, is the Annunciation; below are two rounds with figures of S. Clare and S. Agatha, and below in the predella three scenes: a miracle of S. Anthony, S. Francis receiving the Stigmata and a miracle of S. Elizabeth of Hungary. …

I find the main part of the altarpiece disappointing, as indeed are the predella scenes. But the Annunciation I find one of the most enchanting of Piero’s works. I can never leave it without returning again and again. And then how characteristic it is of the artistic moment dominated by perspective and the theories of Alberti and the practice of Brunelleschi, Laurana, Uccello and Masaccio! What that gracious and formidable angel is announcing to the Madonna, so classical in her monumentality and repose, is not the birth of Christ. but the rebirth, the renaissance, of Antiquity. It may well be that this is a work of Piero’s old age, but if so, your old men shall see visions.

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 179, 184-186.

San Sepolcro and Piero della Francesca's Resurrection

Edward Hutton concluded "Siena and Southern Tuscany" in Arezzo, but in that chapter he did include a side trip by rail to Borgo San Sepolcro to see the famous Resurrection by Piero della Francesca.

 

But the most beautiful of all these treasures to which Arezzo holds the key is Borgo San Sepolcro in the Tiber Valley. … There are very few things more lovely in the world than the upper valley of the Arno, but one of them is, I think, the upper valley of the Tiber. It is a landscape more virile than Umbria—a landscape by Piero della Francesca, in fact, and in Borgo it is his work you find, for the little town is his birthplace.

 

That “Resurrection of Christ” in the Municipio is perhaps the most beautiful representation of the triumph of Christ in the world. …

 

The fresco of the resurrection comes upon us with a kind of surprise; we had not suspected Piero of so much thoughtfulness. It is as though he had listened to some voice, or seen a vision, or on some fortunate day had been led away the captive of Love, … In the cold light of the earliest morning, mere sunless dawn as yet, Christ has risen and is standing in His tomb. His experience is in His face, the dawn of knowledge, perhaps of the sorrows of humanity. It is as though for the first time He had really understood the power of evil, to which, after all, we are so unwillingly the slaves, the hopeless misery of that state of imperfect love. The noise of Hell has furrowed His face, and He has only just escaped into our quiet world. Beneath that terrible and beautiful figure… lie four soldiers, sleeping in the noiseless twilight. Behind the green trees on the right the first exquisite frail light of dawn is coming to comfort the world, and with the return of the Prince of Life the first day of spring has come; already the flowers have blossomed and the trees have budded behind Him as he came out of the sunrise, and when he shall turn at last into the garden, where Mary will find Him, those bare boughs, that naked hill-side, that brown and sterile earth will quicken, too, even as the hills that He has already crossed. All the passion of the encounter with Death and the dead is graven on His face, and though men sleep He can know no rest; He is up before them, and the whole long day is waiting for Him…. For Piero has expressed not only the old magical truths of Paganism and Christianity, the joy of the world at the coming of Spring, the triumph of the Prince of Life in a world pallid with the fear of Death, but the subtler and more terrible thoughts, too, of the age of thought that was just then dawning on the world. …

 

It was as such things as these in my heart that I made my way back to Arezzo, and, regretting them, took my leave of Southern Tuscany.

 

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Edward Hutton: Siena and Southern Tuscany, New York, 1910. Pp. 316-318.

Arezzo and Piero della Francesca

Edward Hutton completed his tour of Siena and southern Tuscany with a long chapter on Arezzo. He devoted most of the chapter to an account of the works of Piero della Francesca that he found in its churches: the Legend of the True Cross, and an image of Mary Magdalen.  

 

Rome, Florence, Siena, Assisi are what they are because of the nature of the country in which they lie. It is the same with Arezzo. Her incommunicable allure strikes you at once as soon as you enter her gates—a certain smiling aspect, subtle and discreet and yet very charming and simple seeming in its welcome, its pleasantness and serenity. Yet nothing, I think, in the history of Arezzo…would lead you to expect an aspect so happy, so merely delightful. Nothing in her history! But I am wrong, for it was here both Maecenas and Petrarch were born. It would be impossible to doubt it even though we had no irrefutable proof of the fact, and indeed I think no men have better expressed their birthplace unless—well, unless it be Vasari, who was also an Aretine. These three men perfectly explain Arezzo; its orderliness, its delight, its extraordinary charm, its profound disregard of anything that matters, of anything but a certain décor and endless gossip. … (297)

 

It is as a city of profound quiet  that we find her today, set with trees and great open spaces within her fair walls of brick at the head of those three valleys at the foot of the mountains.

 

Full of monuments as she is to her illustrious dead, it is not to them but to her churches we look for evidence of her splendour. Nor are we disappointed, for her churches perfectly reflect her history—they are full of the best works of alien masters.

 

There is S. Francesco, for instance, which one comes to first on leaving the station: a Franciscan church, of course, built nobly in the Franciscan style in 1322…. But what we come to S. Francesco to see is not the work of such masters as these, but the strong and beautiful work of Piero della Francesca in the choir—work that one cannot better anywhere in Tuscany, nor, indeed, easily find its match.

 

The legend of the Holy Cross, its history from the beginning of the world until it was discovered by the Emperor Heraclius and later by S. Helena, which Piero della Francesca has painted here—by far the most considerable piece of work that he achieved during his whole life—is one of the most curious dreams of the Christian mind. No longer upheld in its entirety by the Catholic church, it is nevertheless true in its intention, since, for the Middle Age, at least, the Cross was indeed a lovely branch of the Tree of Life which is in the midst of the Paradise of God…. (306)

 

It is this golden legend that Piero has painted so vigorously  here in the choir of S. Francesco. How far are we in contemplating these frescoes from the passionate asceticism, the unearthly beauty of Fra Angelico or Simone Martini! It is as though a new desire had suddenly been born into the world—a desire for life where Simone, after all, would have been content with beauty. What magnificent vitality have those beautiful women, how valiant are those men, how puissant those angels! And, above all, Piero has filled heaven and earth with radiant light. It is in the clear and nimble air, in the fair white light of our real and beautiful daylight, that he alone of his contemporaries has dared at last to paint man and woman in all the sweet energy of life, full of that long breath of God which at dawn in a garden first gave us light…. (311)

One lonely and magnificent figure he left behind him at Arezzo in the Cathedral—a figure of S. Mary Magdalen, very noble and reticent. She adorns no altar, but in a quiet corner of the great church… she stands very sorrowful, she alone of all those clouds on clouds of saints really understands. Well, it is always so; we find Piero emotionally under the influence of the Middle Age, and yet himself perhaps a kind of emancipator or deliverer from its mysticism… For he, too, was occupied rather with his art than with the expression of ideas about religion. He was the first painter, perhaps, to study perspective scientifically. Problems of light, the action of light on beautiful faces or hair, the action of light upon light, would certainly seem to have fascinated him almost all his life long. And yet he has not discarded the ideas that were then gradually becoming less insistent in the world, but in all their modesty and beauty he has used them without question as a means of attaining a beauty bought with much toil and feverish endeavour. His Magdalen is not the ecstatic and splendid courtesan that we see in Titian’s canvas, but a beautiful and lonely woman, who will ever remember that lingering dawn in the garden, when, in the midst of her passionate  weeping, the gardener came so quietly and spoke her name, and in a moment she knew Him whom she had loved. (313)

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Edward Hutton: Urbino

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Urbino was the last stop on Edward Hutton's tour of Romagna and the Marches. It was not the most beautiful city he had seen but it had a fabled past.

Of Urbino, who can speak as he should or conjure up in words, for the pleasure of him who has not seen it, that dark and gaunt city crouched upon its double hill, never venturing to tower up into the sky, but stooping there gazing over the tangled valleys to S. Marino, to S. Leo, to Pesaro, to the great peaks of the Apennines and to the sea? Bleak and rain-sodden, battered by the wind, burnt by the sun, Urbino seems the last place in Italy to have nourished a court renowned for its grace and courtesy. … 

For, astonishing though it may seem, civilization, the ritual of life—life itself being, as some of those great candid minds of the Renaissance were not slow to observe, a kind of religious service-- was very punctually and strictly observed at Urbino in the sixteenth century.  Here on the hills, in this rain-swept, sun-baked place, the Renaissance in all its liberty, beauty and splendor, was played out in its curious medley of contrasts, almost like a play. The most learned and refined of all the courts of Italy, the court of Urbino gathered to itself all the wit and genius of this imperishable Latin people, filled itself with the finest scholars and the noblest gentlemen of Italy, while its Duke and Duchess lived a life that reads almost like a fairy tale, till Cesare Borgia blasted the place like a lightning flash and nothing was ever really quite the same again…. (276-7)

The Duke and Duchess named by Hutton are Federigo da Montefeltro (1422-1482) and his wife, Battista Sforza both pictured in this famous painting by Piero della Francesca that now hangs in the Uffizi. Federigo was succeeded by his son, Guidobaldo (1472-1508) who though driven out by Cesare Borgia returned to continue the courtly tradition. * (See Note)

Suddenly, almost as suddenly as Cesare Borgia had leapt upon Urbino, Alexander VI died. In a moment Cesare’s magical empire departed from him, and he himself was a fugitive. Guidobaldo returned to Urbino, and… passed the rest of his life among his treasures in the retirement of his court. It was then that the Golden Age began for Italy which in its expression and production has never since been equaled. Every sort of scholar came to Urbino; great poets, painters, sculptors, architects, engineers, doctors, priests, quacks of every kind, fools and nobles, dancing-masters and beautiful women, musicians and preachers flocked to the court of one of the most humane princes Italy had ever seen. It was then that Castiglione wrote his Cortegiano and his life of Guidobaldo; it was then that Santi entertained Piero della Francesca, that Melozzo da Forli came to court, and Luca Signorelli painted his work in San Spirito. … (284)

But who could hope to sum up the riches of this stormy, wind-battered, rain-sodden, sun-baked acropolis? This, at least, should not be forgotten. I mean the church of S. Bernardino. This is a little convent of the Zoccolanti which stands at the end of a dusty road on a hill-top opposite Urbino, from which there is a notable view of the city, but not of the palace. S. Bernardino stands under the cypress-ringed Campo Santo of the Urbanati. It has itself always been a graveyard, and here, in the little cruciform church under its blind, round lantern, a truly Bramantesque dream of a church all in rosy brick, the Dukes Federigo and Guidobaldo lie….

Church of San Bernardino**

It was there I took farewell of Urbino, before I set out down the long road for Pesaro, the railway, and home. All that way was pleasantly filled, as I came into the valleys, with great bullock wagons piled up with vast barrels or boxes with the family sitting on top, for it was the time of vintage. The happiness of all that!

At evening, my head full of songs, I came into Pesaro by the Rimini gate, thronged today with bullock-waggons loaded with grapes….and when a few days later I set out for home, it was in the new bubbling wine my health was pledged, and in the new pressed grapes I, too, drank to all my friends. (295)

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Romagna and the Marches, NY, 1925.

*Note: When he was still young, Federigo, who was destined to attain to so much splendor, was sent as a kind of hostage to Venice. It was while in that city that he came under the influence of Vittorino de' Ramboldoni da Feltre, the learned professor of Mantua. This great man was a Greek scholar of no mean attainment, and his ideal of education soon took possession of the greatest princes in Italy. He taught Greek, Latin, Grammar, Philosophy, Mathematics, Logic, music, and Dancing at the Casa Goija, the "House of Joy," where he had settled in 1425 at the invitation of Gianfrancesco II of Mantua.... such scholars as could not afford to pay him he taught for the "love of God." His pupils included the noblest names in Italy; all the children of the Gonzaga house were educated at Casa Goija, and no doubt met the Duke Federigo in the lecture rooms and the meadows. Later, Duke Federigo placed the great scholars portrait in his palace at Urbino with this inscription: "In honor of his saintly master Vittorino da Feltre, who by word and example instructed him in all human excellence, Federigo has set this here."

**Image courtesy of David Orme.