Heretics and Heroes Read online

  Alas, as one strains to see the painting today, there is little color, and much of the subtlety has been erased, washed away by the underwater effect and perhaps by time as well. In the words of Kenneth Clark, who was able to view the painting up close and out of its frame in the early twentieth century:

  She is beautiful enough even now … Anyone who has had the privilege of seeing the Mona Lisa taken down, out of the deep well in which she hangs, and carried to the light will remember the wonderful transformation that takes place. The presence that rises before one, so much larger and more majestical than one had imagined, is no longer a diver in deep seas. In the sunshine something of the warm life which Vasari admired comes back to her, and tinges her cheeks and lips, and we can understand how he saw her as being primarily a masterpiece of naturalism. He was thinking of that miraculous subtlety of modeling, that imperceptible melting of tone into tone, plane into plane, which hardly any other painter has achieved without littleness or loss of texture. The surface has the delicacy of a new-laid egg and yet it is alive.

  And something of Leonardo’s own self shines through so many of his portraits. This woman, this Mona Lisa, is also in some sense Leonardo. One of the miracles of his art is how deeply personal it is, how revealing of the artist who did not revel in self-revelation. Which is why we, after gazing at a succession of the artist’s depictions of faces, can spot Leonardo as the model for Verrocchio, as well as the inner self of Mona Lisa. Of the actual, exterior Leonardo, we have but one probable self-portrait—in red chalk—and, like his notebooks, it reveals little, except that Leonardo, then but sixty, thought of himself as much older than he was.

  (illustration credit 64)

  (illustration credit 65)

  We may find much more of Leonardo in his Vitruvian Man. This icon of the Renaissance has become in our time an icon for any number of things. One catches sight of reproductions of it at the offices of both medical doctors and homeopaths, on T-shirts and tattoos, NASA spacesuits, denominations of the euro, and computer operating systems. People who consider themselves humanists of one variety or another often employ it as a favorite symbol. I once taught at a “Center for Humanistic Studies” that used the Vitruvian Man as its logo. Throughout the Americas and Europe perhaps only troops of fundamentalist Christians would find it inappropriate to their organizational purposes.

  The image is called “Vitruvian” because it refers to the ancient Roman engineer Vitruvius of the first century BC who in his treatise on architecture showed how the ideal human (male) figure was constructed from a series of proportional measures and that these proportions could be projected beyond the body itself and used to create pleasing proportions in architecture. It was Vitruvius who came up with the idea of encompassing the male figure in a circle (with the central point his navel) and in a square. “The length of the foot,” wrote Vitruvius, “is one sixth of the height of the body; of the forearm, one fourth; and the breadth of the breast is also one fourth. The other members, too, have their own symmetrical proportions, and it was by employing them that the famous painters and sculptors of antiquity attained to great and endless renown. Similarly, in the members of a temple there ought to be the greatest harmony in the symmetrical relations of the different parts to the general magnitude of the whole.”

  Whether such a system is truly workable I am not equipped to say. In our time, which is postclassical, postromantic, and postmodern, we are more likely to emphasize the subtle and even the grotesque variations from one human body to another rather than a system of ideal proportions. But there is no denying the powerful attractions of a vision that makes man the measure of all things and even his architecture an expression of his humanity—a world made (or remade) to a human scale.

  Earlier attempts to interpret Vitruvius’s writings—and earlier artists’ sketches of the Vitruvian Man—had been failures. Leonardo, who had had little formal education, had taught himself Latin. He was the first to read Vitruvius’s Latin carefully enough to realize that all previous attempts at interpretation had misunderstood Vitruvius to mean that the circle and the square should have the same center, the human navel. By adjusting the position of the square, Leonardo succeeded in rendering the first correct reading of Vitruvius since antiquity. In this way, Leonardo made Vitruvian ideas of human anatomy and architecture accessible to the artists and architects of the Renaissance. Without this correction of Leonardo’s it is hard to imagine how the architectural works of Michelangelo, Bernini, Palladio, and even Christopher Wren could have come to be.

  Leonardo was the ultimate Renaissance man. Painter, sculptor (of lost works), engineer (who sketched out workable inventions such as the helicopter, the tank, the calculator, and many smaller laborsaving devices that were manufactured in his own time), scientist (incisive student of optics, the first to offer a theory of plate tectonics), anatomist, military strategist, theoretician of architecture, peace-loving ambassador, vegetarian, a man who bought caged birds in order to free them, he died in 1519 in the arms, it was said, of his student and passionate protector, Francis I, king of France.

  “In the normal course of human events,” wrote Vasari, “many men and women are born with remarkable talents; but occasionally, in a way that transcends nature, a single person is marvelously endowed by Heaven with beauty, grace, and talent in such abundance that he leaves other men far behind, all his actions seem inspired and indeed everything he does clearly comes from God rather than from human skill. Everyone acknowledged that this was true of Leonardo da Vinci, an artist of outstanding physical beauty, who displayed infinite grace in everything that he did and who cultivated his genius so brilliantly that all problems he studied he solved with ease.”

  To pursue Leonardo’s other interests would take us several books. We have, in all truth, barely touched on his importance as an artist. I can only regret the many omissions forced on us here and say that we will have one additional chance to bow our heads in Leonardo’s direction—as we have a closer look at some Renaissance approaches to female anatomy.

  There is probably no Renaissance artist more associated with the female form than Botticelli, whose celebrations of women’s bodies—at least in the early stages of his artistic journey—are second to none. Like every other artist, Botticelli did not emerge without precedent: there were indeed several earlier masters who influenced him. Of these we shall fleetingly consider two: Masaccio (born in 1401) and Piero della Francesca (born perhaps as early as 1415).

  Masaccio’s baptismal name was Tommaso, a name easily shortened to “maso,” very close to “masso,” Italian for bulk (or mass). The added “-accio” serves to further deprecate the person so designated. A good translation of “Masaccio” would be “Fatso,” which pretty much describes the one likeness we have of him as a broad-faced, brooding onlooker, framed by a dark doorway, in his own fresco sequence on the life of Saint Peter in the Brancacci Chapel of Florence’s Church of Santa Maria del Carmine.

  The wide panel in which Masaccio’s likeness is to be found [Plate 7] depicts a medieval legend that Saint Peter, before traveling to Rome and martyrdom, endeared himself to Theophilus, Roman prefect of Antioch, by raising the prefect’s son from the dead. By means of this miracle all Antioch received the gospel, the grateful Theophilus providing a church furnished with an appropriate bishop’s throne, where Peter could sit while expounding the new faith. (In the classical world teachers and others in authority sat rather than stood when they spoke to an audience; and Peter did sojourn in Antioch and make converts there. But the larger legend—of the miracle, the role of a bishop, and the building of a church—though it tells us a great deal about Renaissance Catholicism’s myth of itself, has no historical validity. In the time of Jesus’s apostle Peter, there were no bishops and no church buildings. These would be later developments. And the miracle itself is an ahistorical fantasy.)

  The panel very nearly returns us to the time—a century earlier—of the great Giotto, whose vibrant sense of color, rounded volu
mes of figures, and close human interactions on a single plane are clearly the models that light Masaccio’s imagination. At the same time, there are no undraped nudes in Giotto’s work, not even one so obviously prepubescent as Theophilus’s son.

  So let us turn to Masaccio’s extraordinary adult nudes, to be found in the same chapel. Masaccio worked on this sequence with an older master, Masolino, and, for the sake of comparison, it is worth our taking a look first at Masolino’s Adam and Eve [Plate 8], who seem to have been prepackaged to receive a PG-13 rating. They have no more human reality than Barbie dolls, their genitals might as well have been designed for assembly-line reproduction—and what are those slight protrusions on Eve’s chest supposed to be? Surely, not breasts? Okay, the proportions of the figures are fairly accurate and, uh, standard, but their bodies have none of the tactility of real flesh.

  Next panel [Plate 9]: Adam and Eve—painted by Masaccio—as they are thrown out of Eden. (Masaccio seems to have been, too.) The figures are less standard, even less accurate, than Masolino’s: Adam’s arms are far too short, his right calf is impossibly bowlegged; Eve’s arms are of unequal length and she is dumpier than in Masolino’s version, with a fat back and hefty haunches and an awfully thick right ankle. But they are alive, believable, fleshy!—and being pushed forward into all the horror of real life. Adam’s stomach, sucked in and emphasizing his vulnerable ribs, displays the tension of inconsolable grief; Eve’s hands, placed to shield her belles choses (and copied by Masaccio from the teasing poses of ancient Venuses), have been transformed into demonstrations of irremediable shame. Her breast, peeking out above her wrist, is a real breast; and Adam’s genitals are downright funky—not smoothly attractive, not ready for the style section of the Sunday newspaper, just their grotty selves. Never before had such nudes been seen or even thought of. How far they are from the ideal figures of the ancients, as well as from the self-censoring expressions of so many Christian centuries.

  You could say that Masaccio was inspired by the terrible event of the Expulsion from the Garden, which gives his depiction more drama and more forward force than was possible for Masolino, stuck with portraying the perfection and utter tranquility of the Garden itself. You could say that—but it doesn’t fully explain Masaccio’s embrace of these raggedy-limned but fully human bodies.

  Masaccio never finished his work in the chapel; it would be completed many years later by Filippino Lippi in accordance with illustrative instructions Masaccio left behind. Masaccio died at Rome three years after abandoning work on his frescoes and just short of his twenty-seventh birthday. According to gossip of the time, he was poisoned by a rival painter. Some, probably much, of his work was subsequently destroyed.

  The second influence on Botticelli that we must have a quick, morning-bus-tour glance at is Piero della Francesca. Piero, deserving of far more attention than we shall have space to devote to him, was an outsider in Florence, having been born in Borgo Sansepolcro (the Village of the Holy Sepulcher) at the opposite end of Tuscany in the vicinity of Arezzo. His extra-Florentine roots did not assist his fame: in his own time and for centuries thereafter, his works were treasured by local inhabitants in the towns where they were displayed, not becoming universally known much before their championing by the English critic Walter Pater in the nineteenth century. But unlike poor Masaccio’s, Piero’s was a long life: he died in his mid-seventies, though he seems to have stopped painting as much as twenty years before his death because, in all likelihood, he was going blind. In contrast to Masaccio’s sparse surviving output, works by Piero may be found throughout Tuscany, in Venice, Rimini, Urbino, Perugia, Milan, and even Rome (a nearly destroyed fragment of fresco) and hang today as far afield as Berlin, Lisbon, New York, Boston, Williamstown (Massachusetts), and especially London, where the English have been conducting a long-standing love affair with this artist’s work. Squadrons of British tourists may often be encountered throughout northern Italy in their sensible walking shoes, hard on the “Piero della Francesca Trail.”

  This national fascination with Piero actually saved a painting of his from destruction. In a collection of travel essays published in 1925, Aldous Huxley had called Piero’s Resurrection [Plate 10], the fresco that decorates the Museo Civico of Sansepolcro, “the greatest picture in the world.” In the last days of World War II, as British soldiers began shelling Nazi-occupied Sansepolcro with the intention of reducing it to rubble, their captain, Antony Clarke, was trying to recall where he had heard the name “Sansepolcro” before. Suddenly, he remembered reading Huxley’s description—of a fresco Clarke had never seen in a Tuscan village he had never visited—and he called off the shelling. Soon thereafter, the Brits received a message informing them that the Germans had already retreated from the neighborhood, so continued shelling was unnecessary. Thanks to Captain Clarke’s tenacious memory and discerning sensibility (and to Huxley’s extravagant praise), both the village and the fresco survived the war.

  Is Piero’s Resurrection the greatest picture in the world? Whether it is or not, it is surely a prime example of Piero’s treatment of human figures, which pop out from their two-dimensionality almost as if they were exceedingly subtle holograms. Even in their unruffled dignity and stillness—what Huxley terms Piero’s “passion for solidity”—they are hologram-like. Few poses in all of art are more definite, more authoritative, than the planting of Christ’s left foot at the edge of the sarcophagus (or san sepolcro), silent medium between Heaven and earth, life and death. The strapping Roman soldier in brown is Piero himself, and his head resting against the shaft of Christ’s banner (a Guelph4 banner, what else?) indicates the sleeper’s own silent hope of resurrection. For Huxley, the scene incarnates all the most noble qualities of the best ancient and the best Renaissance art. “A natural, spontaneous and unpretentious grandeur—this is the leading quality of all Piero’s work. He is majestic without being at all strained, theatrical or hysterical—as Handel is majestic, not as Wagner.” His risen Christ is not the usual portrayal, but in Huxley’s view “more like a Plutarchian hero than the Christ of conventional religion. The body is perfectly developed, like that of a Greek athlete.… It is the resurrection of the classical ideal, incredibly much grander and more beautiful than the classical reality, from the tomb where it had lain so many hundred years.”

  The other image of Piero’s that I would have us examine points in its singularity of subject to the singularity of Piero’s imagination: La Madonna del Parto [Plate 11], the Madonna of Childbirth, the only treatment of this subject in the history of art. Piero has surrounded his main figure, a patently pregnant Mary, with twin angels engaged in a ritualized drama of presentation. What they are presenting to us is a woman of severe dignity who is nonetheless about to deliver a child. The Italian parto can mean either labor or delivery. If Mary is in labor, she is not at this moment experiencing a severe contraction. On the other hand, in classical theology, she did not actually experience labor, since medieval theologians reasoned that a child passing through the birth canal would rupture her hymen, rendering the Ever-Virgin no longer virginal.5 Thus, they imagined, the infant Jesus appeared in her arms, having passed miraculously through the wall of her womb without the usual labor necessary to birth. If such speculation seems rather silly to our contemporary ears, it was something Catholic orthodoxy once took with high seriousness (and still does, at least among its more unhinged partisans).

  So what is Piero depicting here? I’d say we are looking at Jesus’s mother experiencing the first stirrings of his birth—which permits the artist to stay clear of the knottier aspects of the ascendant theology. He doesn’t need to allude to what happened next—though in his way he does prompt the viewer to speculate on that next stage of il parto. In the midst of such quiet dignity, is the woman about to fall to the ground screaming in pain? But theology aside, there is once again Piero’s uncanny ability to render aloof figures with an “unpretentious grandeur” that leaves us in awe.

  Piero’s uncommon sen
se of spatial depth emerged not only in painting but in architecture. His two Latin treatises, De Prospectiva Pingendi (On Perspective in Painting) and De Corporibus Regularibus (On the Rules for Bodily Masses), were among the most influential scientific and theoretical writings of his time. The panel in Urbino’s National Gallery labeled Ideal City, though not painted by Piero, is a vivid demonstration of his architectural ideas.

  Both Masaccio’s sense of the flesh and Piero’s respect for the architectural impact of the individual figure will find new life in the supremely lovely work of Botticelli, who also comes as close as any great painter ever did to the gorgeously pretty. What a celebration of bodiliness is the smashing, jaw-droppingly beautiful Primavera (Springtime) [Plate 12], a complex image that, like Leonardo’s much simpler Vitruvian Man, seems to sum up and ritualize an entire current of human experience.

  In a densely, darkly imagined orange grove, its ripe fruit ready to hand, its wildflowers springing to abundant life beneath our feet, there emerges a procession of renowned figures: Venus, goddess of Love, commanding her central place, blindfolded Cupid above her head (for attraction is always blind in the sense of irrational and unprovoked), aiming his arrows everywhere. The male figures—Mercury to our left, winged Zephyr to our right—serve as framing devices to the central tableau of women. The Three Graces, those ancient bestowers of beauty, charm, and the enjoyment of life, in arabesques of elegance dance their eternal dance. From the union of stinging but unavoidable Zephyr, the west wind of March, and the bedazzled goddess Flora,6 already in his blue embrace, there issues Primavera, already standing, or, more accurately, floating from her mother’s embrace toward the middle of the orange grove, Primavera crowned, necklaced, cinctured, and dressed in every conceivable flower (more than five hundred plant species have been identified in this panel) and scattering large blooms of white, pink, and deep rose from the ample lap folds of her diaphanous dress. What an assembly greets us here!