Piero della Francesca. De prospectiva pingendi. Edited by Chiara Gizzi, Venice, 2016

Review by Giovanni Mazzaferro
Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
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Piero della Francesca
De prospectiva pingendi - Edited by Chiara Gizzi
Venice, Edizioni Ca’ Foscari Digital Publishing, 2016.

De prospectiva pingendi - Edited by Giusta Nicco Fasola
Florence, Le lettere, 1984 (facsimile reprint of 1942 edition)

Piero della Francesca, The History of the True Cross, Discovery and proof of the True Cross,
Church of San Francesco, Arezzo
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Against National Editions of the Writings of…

I have no difficulty in saying it straight away. I am highly wary of everything which is labelled as the official National Edition of anyone’s writings. It happens that the implementation of such official endeavours can be equalled to those never-ending works to build up a public infrastructure, which are completed – if ever – only with large delays. Just think, for example, of the National Edition of the writings of Antonio Canova, for which only three volumes were produced since 1993 to date, or the collection of writings of Leon Battista Alberti, which also includes, without any sense, volumes of proceedings of conferences on him, confronting the public with the dilemma of whether to purchase them too or not (which, it goes without saying, I did not). National Editions, in short, are often initiated with great ambition and likewise often completed only among thousand difficulties.

The edition of the writings of Piero della Francesca is unfortunately no exception. If you search on the Internet, it is easy to read that "the national edition of the writings of Piero della Francesca is ready." The announcement was however made through a newswire by the Adnkronos news agency dating back to 22 March 1995. In that year, Giunti publishers released the Libellus de quinque corporibus regularibus. In 2012 the Treaty of the abacus was published. However, we are still waiting for the edition of De prospectiva pingendi. And the delay is really long, as it lasts from 1942, when Giusta Nicco Fasola published the first and highly famous edition of the work, reprinted in facsimile in 1984 by Le Lettere publishers in Florence, with the addition of introductory essays, among which stands the preface by Eugenio Battisti.

Piero della Francesca, The History ot the True Cross,
Adoration of the Holy Wood and the Meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, Church of San Francesco, Arezzo
Source: Wikimedia Commons

... but this plays in favour of the Gizzi edition of De prospectiva pingendi

For this reason, I would not hesitate to say that I did jump for joy when I have recently learned that Chiara Gizzi published a critical edition of the vernacular version of De prospectiva pingendi. If anything (as an inveterate bibliophile) I regret that the output was a digital edition (you can see it by clicking here). But nothing is perfect. Very modestly, the authoress has wished to limit the scope of her work, placing it as a forerunner of studies that will lead precisely to the publication of the critical edition of De prospectiva pingendi planned as part of the National Edition. However, I belong to the category of those who prefer the delivery of limited studies rather than the postponement of encyclopaedic studies. Moreover, I am really doing a disservice to the curator, when I define her work as "limited". It is still an impeccable edition. And, as well-known, the basic version of the De prospectiva pingendi - that now many critics agree in allocating temporally to the seventies of the fifteenth century - was that in the vernacular. After all, the main merit of this edition is to establish a text that originates from the transcription of the Parma sample (see below), but also captures the variants and the developments of the work, which are provided by other witnesses known to us. If anything, what is missing is a critical edition of the illustrations, which would be a huge job by itself. But everything else is indeed present.

Piero della Francesca, History of the True Cross, Battle between Heraclius and Chosroes,
Church of San Francesco, Arezzo
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Manuscripts

To date eight manuscripts witness, in whole or in part, De prospectiva pingendi: four are in vernacular and four in Latin. Those in vernacular are located in Parma, Reggio Emilia, the Ambrosiana Library in Milan and the Archiginnasio Library in Bologna; the Latin texts are at the Ambrosiana Library in Milan, in Bordeaux, at the British Library in London and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. According to the testimony of Luca Pacioli (which in substance has not been demented by the documentary evidence at our disposal) Piero della Francesca assigned the task to “master Matteo” to translate it from vernacular into Latin. "Master Matteo" was a countryman of him; criticism today tends to identify him with Matteo di ser Paolo d’Anghiari; the purpose of the translation might have been to align the dignity of the text to the social position of the personality to whom it was ultimately dedicated, most likely Federico da Montefeltro. In essence, therefore, there would have been a situation very similar to the De Pictura of Alberti, with an edition in vernacular for the use by the artists and one in Latin for the higher class.

That said, the manuscripts (both in Italian and in Latin), testify to the different phases of a work process, which the curator tries to place in chronological order. Of course, there are some milestones that have more weight, and this is undoubtedly the case of the Parma witness (Palatine Library ms. 1576), that of the Panizzi Library in Reggio Emilia (unknown to Giusta Nicco Fasola when she published his edition of 1942, it has signature ms. Reggiano A 41/2) and the Latin manuscripts of the Ambrosiana (ms. SP6 bis, already C 307 inf.) and of Bordeaux (ms. 616). The Parma specimen is a completely autograph, both in the text and the drawings; the other three are texts transcribed by a copyist, which however display corrections and marginal notes by the artist; the drawings are however autographs of Piero. In particular, the Reggiano and the Latin manuscript of the Ambrosiana were transcribed by the same copyist, who – if we want to trust Pacioli - could have been the above mentioned "Master Matteo".

Piero della Francesca, History of the True Cross, Annunciation
Church of San Francesco, Arezzo
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Piero della Francesca, History of the True Cross, Visione of Constantine
Church of San Francesco, Arezzo
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The manuscript of Parma and the Gizzi edition

It seems clear that the copies with text, annotations or drawings by Piero correspond to different stages of the work process. What Chiara Gizzi has managed (to me satisfactorily) to prove, thanks to a really important philological digging, is that the Parma manuscript (i.e. the most famous one) corresponds to a final level of the work arrangement. The Reggio version in vernacular would rather be the earliest version, to which all other copies in vernacular would refer. The Parma manuscript would most likely also have been produced after the Latin translation preserved in the Ambrosiana Library in Milan.

This in some way confirms the intuition of Nicco Fasola, who in 1942 argued that the two manuscripts of Parma and Milan had probably an antecedent. This antecedent, as it was said, could be the sample of Reggio or, even better, a further version, since in the latter case only the drawings are autograph.

Whatever is the case, Giusta Nicco Fasola made use of the Parma manuscript for her 1942 edition of the De prospectiva pingendi; the same thing did Chiara Gizzi, however offering a lay-out which is organised according to horizontal sections. At the bottom of each page are precisely shown and documented the variants derived from other witnesses testifying antecedent stages of Piero's work. Keep in mind, moreover, that there is a useful final glossary (almost forty pages) that explores the meaning and the use of the technical and scientific terms by the artist from Arezzo.

Piero della Francesca, History of the True Cross, Battle between Constantine and Maxentius,
Church of San Francesco, Arezzo
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Persective and Nicco Fasola edition

However, one should not avoid an attempt to provide a more general interpretation of the work. This has never been - it is clear - the original goal of Chiara Gizzi, and in this sense her edition cannot be considered disappointing. Ms Gizzi made a purely philological research, and had the ultimate rationale of re-establishing the text and describing the variants. I am referring hereafter, instead, to the famous preface by Giusta Nicco Fasola for her edition of 1942 and the essay that Eugenio Battisti has written to comment the same edition in the reprint of 1984. As evident from the reading of the introduction by Nicco Fasola, her interpretation was clearly inspired by Benedetto Croce’s idealistic method. In a few pages the curator spoke of "mathematical idealism" (p. 19), defined Piero as "an idealist who put the prism of geometric perfection in front of the changing sensible reality, whose appearances are fleeting and unsatisfying" (p. 20), and added that the painter "writes as a mathematician, solves issues as a surveyor, but expresses an ideal as an artist."

Yet, when she felt needed to distance herself from Croce, Nicco Fasola did it so without hesitation. It happened, for example, when the curator analysed the relationship between art and science and reviewed Croce's aesthetics with reference to the Renaissance. It has been said hundreds of times, about this, that Croce’s positions were pro-humanistic. His assessment was however wrong. Nicco has the clear perception that not only for Piero, but for example also for Leonardo and more generally for humanism, art and science were an indivisible entity. "The problem of the conflict of science and art does not exist in 1400-1500 because there was no difference among them, since the only distinction was between science and non-science, liberal arts and mechanical arts" (p. 10). Only with this view in mind, I believe, one can fully grasp why De prospectiva pingendi belongs to art literature, and not to mathematical or geometry treatises. Since one thing is beyond doubt (and it is also the reason why this work was so little quoted historically): we are facing a series of demonstrations and formulations having a clear geometric nature. Nothing is "literary", if by "literary" we emphasize the narrative or the argumentative frame of a text.

It is keeping in mind these aspects that Nicco Fasola, starting from Croce, looks at Panofsky and his Perspective as symbolic form of 1924, in which he clarifies the "relative" and not absolute character of perspective: "Perspective is a historical factor, a constantly changing spiritual processing and not a law, which is mandatory and has therefore no face and should only be proven" (p. 4). This also leads directly to Neoplatonism (and not of Platonism), and the abandonment of Medieval Aristotelianism. The space around us is no longer an element where the sky is more important than land, because it is closer to the reality of heaven, but a uniform element, where heaven and earth are equally distant and close with respect to the divine reality and where one may discover such reality, by encompassing it in basic geometric shapes. "Strictly speaking, we should talk only of individual perspective, which is what allows us to understand how scientific research took place in art in 1400 or in the following centuries. In fact, when we look at the masters of the first 1400 we do not see stepwise and progressive solutions of the prospective problems [...] If we are to contain the perspective in terms of art, we have to consider each solution as a legitimate and substantial, and is in fact tied to endless other factors that count in the expression of the painting [...]. The perspective compositions of Angelico or Lippi are not less accurate or less fully developed in comparison with those of Piero, and are indivisible from everything that constitutes the art of Lippi and Angelico. Perspective as science was born later, as a syntax for an already existing language" (p. 5).

These are fundamental concepts. Of course, it is possible and it is right to analyse the individual demonstrations, the different ways to represent the sensible reality, and the images and exercises proposed by Piero. But one cannot do it (only) in historical and evolutionary terms, checking what Piero knew or what he did not, what he invented and what he did not. It is not only technical know-how transpiring from the arduous reading of Piero della Francesca’s pages: it is a way of conceiving and representing the world through painting and due to prospective, and an extremely personal and subjective way of doing it; as such, a unique way. A way which, after centuries, still leaves us amazed in front of his frescoes.