Without Form, the Intellect Cannot Judge and the Eye Cannot Comprehend: Philosophy, Theology, and the Artistic Method of Piero della Francesca

Abstract

Piero della Francesca was an Early Renaissance Tuscan painter and mathematician who engaged in deep dialogue with his intellectual surroundings. Having maintained an illustrious career throughout much of the 15th century, he found himself in the midst of the burgeoning scholarly ambience of the Early Renaissance in northern and central Italy. In the libraries and courts where he conducted his work, he encountered advanced learning in humanistic literature, art writings, optics, and mathematics, as well as natural philosophy and theology. Piero constructed his own method as a painter from material he had borrowed from all these disciplines, as both his writings and his visual aesthetic tell us. While there is a growing body of literature on the humanistic influence on Piero as well as in-depth scholarship on his work in optical perspective and mathematical speculations, there has been little inquiry into the place of philosophical and theological rationales in the development of his artistic approach. The objective of this essay is to fill this lacuna through an extended examination of the concepts and intellectual mechanisms that Piero incorporates into his painterly method alongside their sources in Islamic and Latin scholastic, humanistic and artistic texts. I examine key locales in Piero’s own writings in light of a close reading of the texts that had exerted direct and indirect influence on him, as well as the formal and material traits of his artworks and technique. This study begins with an art-historical investigation of his paintings and drawings, as the first chapter identifies two fundamental elements in his process of poesis: linearity and draftsmanship. The linear component refers to the usage of well-defined single lines for the distinct circumscription of figures and objects, while the drafted one denotes the gradual, emergent, and self-corrective approach to drawing that was typical of the Renaissance.This study primarily concentrates on the linear element, as I will show that its intellectual gnoseology in Piero has its roots in the Islamic-scholastic optical tradition, especially in the works of Alhazen (Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥasan ibn al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham) and Biagio Pelacani (also known as Blasius of Parma). This essay will also examine how artists of the 15th century, including Lorenzo Ghiberti, Leon Battista Alberti, and Francesco di Giorgio Martini, received the theory of these authors in their own writings and transmitted them to Piero. This lengthy investigation through Chapters II-IV will prove that Piero conceived of his painting, technique, and the forms of the visible world through a thoroughly Aristotelian lens, albeit one that is visually inflected thanks to the influence of Alhazen’s Peripatetic optical gnoseology. Piero also adjusted the Aristotelian framework by adopting the quantification of natural philosophy that Pelacani and his Oxford Calculator predecessors had pioneered. Piero’s greatest innovation on the Aristotelian tradition, however, is his technologization of Peripatetic epistemics: he puts forth a framework in which only the precise and measurable drawn lines of the perspectivized painting can offer us true knowledge of the visible world and its forms. In light of these findings regarding Piero’s gnoseology, this essay make an argument that Piero takes a metaphysical position that is more in line with the theologizing optics of the 13th-century scholastics than the materialist and arguably atheist worldview of Pelacani.Finally, the study concludes by addressing the other component of Piero’s artistic approach: draftsmanship. Chapter V shows that Quattrocento painters associated the drafted element with the new humanist literary ethos, and that draftsmanship came into synthesis with the linear component in Piero and other artists of the period, just as humanist poetics became melded with scholastic perspective in the writings of the artists in the period from those of Alberti to Leonardo da Vinci. Finally, through the humanist work of Angelo Decembrio, I will show that there is historical evidence suggesting that Piero and those in his intellectual surroundings were consciously aware of the linear-drafted dichotomy that guides this essay.