Piero's Light by Larry Witham

Author:Larry Witham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Firebrand Technologies
Published: 2013-12-02T16:00:00+00:00

In his notes on the Baptism purchase, Eastlake had said that the work was “characteristic” of Piero and his age.53 That age was being called either “primitive,” or the age that came before Raphael. Surprisingly, though, as late as the 1850s, nobody was talking about it as “the Renaissance” with the implication that it was a distinct period or turning point in history.

For centuries already, there had been some claims about the achievements of the era. This began with the way Petrarch contrasted his time—Italy in the fourteenth century—with the “barbarian” past. Vasari’s Lives would block off 250 years of Italian art for special treatment. Much later, the French Enlightenment figure Voltaire would speak of Vasari’s sixteenth century as a time when human reason began to awaken. The French term renaissance, which means “rebirth,” received its first formal use in 1855. In writing his multi-volume History of France, the romantic historian Jules Michelet titled volume seven Renaissance, which he defined as a rather dramatic break from medieval religion and “the discovery of the world and of man.”54 This was an apt definition of Renaissance humanism; but by now, European intellectuals were departing from the original Christian humanism represented by Petrarch early in the Renaissance, and later by Cusanus, Ficino, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the Renaissance Platonist who famously declared “the dignity of man” in 1486, a year before Piero wrote his last will and testament.55

Chopping history into periods, turning points, and great epochs has been a human inclination for as long as the written record has been available. Following the Enlightenment, this approach had become more documentary, and thus presumably more “scientific.” Such a periodization of history would never escape controversy (especially after the twentieth century). But it remained the most viable way to tell a story. From Winckelmann through Lanzi and Kugler, the story of art history was told by various periods. And now, in the shoes of the German school, one cultural historian would assert that, when it came to the greatest periods of all, the Italian Renaissance was a very large notch above the rest.

This was the claim of the Swiss art historian Jacob Burckhardt. In Berlin, he had become the prize student of Kugler and was co-author with him of some of the volumes in Kugler’s art-history Handbook. A native of Basel, Burckhardt was the son of a Protestant minister. In his first phase of university studies, he was persuaded that medieval history was the most significant crucible for the story of Italian art. During a stay in Rome, he further conceived of writing several short books on great periods in human culture, each one worthy of note for the ability to achieve a renaissance.

Burckhardt gradually focused all his thoughts on Italy, producing a major work on the art of the peninsula. This was a summary of his travels presented as The Cicerone: A Guide to the Enjoyment of the Artworks of Italy (1855). Under Burckhardt’s pen, Piero would attain a rather minor status; Burckhardt

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