A crowd that could not be contained.
The Florentines crowded on each other to be able to observe the progress of the procession.
The Byzantine delegation, about 700 people, which participated in the Council to deal with the meeting of the Latin and Orthodox Churches, entered Florence in a triumphal way.
Never before had such magnificence been seen in the city: the procession of the Byzantines, accompanied by musical instruments, with John VIII Palaeologus and his legations of notables and dignitaries dressed in curious and very particular styles for Western taste, had been preceded by his fame.
With the Emperor were part of the delegation the brothers Demetrius and Thomas, the patriarch of Constantinople Joseph II, many bishops, theologians and intellectuals, including the future cardinal Basilio Bessarione, Isidore of Kiev and Gemisto Pletone.
Bessarion, not yet thirty years old, was the right man to deal with the Latins and convince his theologians that "it is much more convenient for us to be freed (by the Turks) than to free others (the Latins) from doctrinal error".
The Romei, the Roman heirs and the last despot of Byzantium, capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, entered Florence for the Synod of 1439.
Among the curious and excited spectators, two young aspiring painters were looking for an opening to be amazed.
And just as they were able to get on a cart, in front of them, a blond curly-haired teenager in a blue costume was passing by; on the horse followed a cheetah in chains.
The angelic boy was Thomas, the younger brother of John VIII.
Corteo dei Magi, Benozzo Gozzoli, 1459 Palazzo Medici Riccardi
The two aspiring painters were called Piero della Francesca and Benozzo Gozzoli.
This image of the procession was fixed forever in their minds and at the right moment, following different paths, it would resurface in memory, giving life to two immortal masterpieces: the Procession of the Magi and the Flagellation.
About ten years later ...
On the evening of May 29, 1453, "when the shaggy-haired shadow of the night, like the face of a Greek slave, descended on the day, the warriors of faith crossed the moat and placed shields and ladders as high as the sky against the walls of the towers ... the Turks entered the ruins of the Porta di San Romano. All the avenues, streets and alleys were full of blood and blood humor dripping from the corpses of civilians slaughtered and torn to pieces ”.
Isidore of Kiev to his friend and colleague Bessarione who was in Italy.
At the cry of "Allah akbar", Byzantium was destroyed.
A September 11 dated over five hundred years ago, and certainly much, much more tragic!
These two events, which took place over a period of just over a decade, convinced some art historians to put the passage of Byzantine Neoplatonic culture in the West in direct relationship, through some Byzantine delegates of the council, Giorgio Gemisto Pletone, Bessarione, and many others. intellectuals, with the decisive impulse for the development of the Italian Renaissance.
Bessarione was a Byzantine intellectual aristocrat, subsequently created "Eastern cardinal", who became a sophisticated diplomat, assuming a strategic role in the Roman curia, where he settled after the Council.
Seven years later, a Venetian galley sailed from Pilo, going up the western coast of the Peloponnese: on board the last despot of Constantinople, Tommaso Paleologo, his wife, three children, Andrea, Manuele and Zoe, all at a young age, and some nobles. The galley stopped in Patras and the head of Saint Andrew, patron saint of the Byzantine church, was embarked here.
After leaving his wife and children in Corfu, Tommaso Paleologo structures Italy, met with Bessarione and arrived in Rome. The throne of New Byzantium was destined for the last despot of the Morea. For this reason the new Pope Pius II and Bessarione, in 1460, had recalled "in temporary exile" in Italy. This event is witnessed by five canvases, designed by a Flemish painter, Bernhard van Rantwyck and now preserved in the Diocesan Museum of Pienza.
The first stage of our journey, aimed at "touching" Piero della Francesca, is therefore Palazzo Borgia in Pienza, home to the museum.
The Borgias and other cardinals were in fact almost "forced" by the new Pope Pius II, born Enea Silvio Piccolomini, to build their palaces in the city that saw him born.
Piccolomini, a cultured man, humanist, transformed the small village into the ideal city, according to the humanistic canons of his time: the trapezoidal square was radically redesigned by the architect Bernardo Rossellino, creating a single architectural complex between Piazza Pio II, the Cathedral, the Piccolomini, Borgia and Pretorio palace.
Pienza: piazza Pio II Museo Diocesano: Bernhard von Rantwyck, ante 1583
In the photo, the third canvas depicting the departure from the Rocca di Narni for Rome of the papal envoys (Cardinals Oliva, Bessarione, Francesco Piccolomini).
Bessarione is always represented with the black habit, to want to emphasize the fact that he is first of all a monk.
It should be remembered that these paintings were commissioned more than a century after the event by Francesco Maria Piccolomini, great-grandson of Pope Pius II.
It was probably Cardinal Bessarione himself who suggested to Thomas Palaeologus that he take the relic with him, which had an undisputed symbolic and political value and would have earned his lord many offers of asylum in the West, in addition to that of Pius II.
The defense of a relic could confer legitimacy on an empire, as the legend referring to Constantine (and to Heraclius a few centuries later) for the wood of the True Cross has it.
Facts narrated by the frescoes of the church of San Francesco in Arezzo.
And it is precisely to Arezzo that we head, the next day, in search of the first meeting with Piero della Francesca, but not before having appreciated the hospitality of Rigo, a quality farmhouse, located in a place with a high landscape value (and food and wine) of San Quirico d'Orcia.
The frescoes in the Bacci Chapel that Piero della Francesca dedicates to the Legend of the True Cross were presumably made between 1452 and 1466.
They represent various episodes of the wood of the Cross, temporally non-sequential episodes (the episode of the Crucifixion is missing: why on earth? Maybe because the frescoes seem to wrap around the great crucifix?).
Chiesa di San Francesco, Arezzo Cappella Bacci
In the box on the right that represents the meeting between the queen of Sheba and King Solomon (the queen says she had the revelation that a man will die on that wood and that following this event the kingdom of the Jews will end) , the latter is represented as a bearded man, with rich damask robes, yellow and blue to recall the papal robes of the patriarch of Constantinople: Piero gave King Solomon the features of Cardinal Bessarione.
Chiesa di San Francesco, Arezzo Cappella Bacci
In the following panel of the battle of the Milvian bridge, Constantine has the appearance of the Byzantine emperor John VIII Palaiologos.
For the image of the first official protector of Christianity, Piero was inspired by the Emperor of Byzantium: even the conical headdress that Constantine wears is typical of the Byzantine monarchs.
Piero probably referred to a Pisanello medal bearing the effigy of John VIII Palaeologus but surely, both for Cardinal Bessarione and for the Emperor, the artist remembered those memorable Florentine days when the delegation entered the city Byzantine.
"At the compositional level Piero follows a coherent division of geometric squares in each pair of scenes. The shapes all tend to become very bright geometric volumes, the colors are clear and calibrated, the light is white and abstract and responds to the laws of perspective like everything else.
The world represented by Piero is not the external one of nature but appears to be an abstract world, built by the rational mind of man ".
Ilaria Pugi
In short, the Middle Ages are behind us and the Renaissance, the new philosophical ideas, the Neoplatonism imported by the Byzantine exiles, dictate the new canons also for art.
During the years in which he painted the Bacci Chapel, Piero della Francesca received other commissions to be carried out in other cities of Italy.
But the time has not come for us to leave Arezzo: we move a few hundred meters to reach the Duomo.
We then enter the Cathedral of San Donato, going up the left aisle.
“He painted a fresco of Saint Mary Magdalene in the bishopric of that city, next to the door of the sacristy”.
Giorgio Vasari
Cattedrale di San Donato, Arezzo Maria Maddalena
It is hard not to be disappointed in front of this work.
Not for the work itself, but for its location.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, when Piero was certainly not spoken of in the terms in which he is spoken today, the cenotaph of a bishop was built who, practically leaning against the fresco, made it barely visible, obscuring it.
An offense to Piero's art.
Magdalene holds the ampoule of ointments used to sprinkle the body of Christ in her hand: it was painted in a very particular way, making it similar to a source of light.
“Mary Magdalene has her gaze lowered towards the viewer, deep and expressive and here she is not represented penitent but triumphant.
Its elegant, almost transcendent beauty makes it a true manifesto of the "dignity of women"
Ilaria Pugi
It is now time for a fleeting lunch, consumed in the Piazza Grande in Arezzo, and to return to the parking lot, walking in those streets and squares made famous by the many films set here, as many posters put up remind us: first of all those relating to "The life is beautiful ”by Benigni.
Piazza Grande Arezzo
Then back on the road towards Monterchi.
Not even half an hour separates us from the small village where Piero's mother was born, just enough time for a chat between us, to underline how, perhaps, the motivations of John VIII Palaeologus that led him to accept and sign the conciliation with the Pope, were dictated not so much by reuniting the two Churches (in fact, upon returning to Byzantium, many cardinals did not want to recognize the result achieved and refused to sign it) as by the need to find political-military support to face Mohammed II and the demands of the Turks to invade the Eastern Empire.
Musei Civici Madonna del Parto, Monterchi
In the same years as the execution of the cycle of frescoes in Arezzo, Piero della Francesca is in Monterchi to paint The Madonna del Parto.
The Madonna is pregnant and placed in the center of a canopy.
Two angels open the curtain to allow us to see it.
The fresco was originally painted in a local church, only after the Second World War, if I remember correctly, was it moved to the current museum.
We have to make a great effort of the imagination to think of her illuminated by the same light that Piero had chosen to emphasize the figure and her motherhood.
It seems that the fresco was created in just 7 days: to be malicious and looking at the two mirror angels, certainly made with the same overturned cardboard, you have to believe it!
The fresco is missing the upper, conical part of the canopy, which makes it more difficult, in my opinion, to perceive the depth of the scene.
But mathematics is everywhere: a multimedia guide offers us a summary of the use that Piero made of it in the fresco.
"The Renaissance owes Piero della Francesca to one of its highest concepts: the rational synthesis between man and God, between natural phenomena and mathematical rules.
His ability to treat pictorial matter and geometric theory in the same way represents the true synthesis of Humanism.
Precisely for this reason the painting called Madonna del Parto in Monterchi is an absolute masterpiece ".
From the website www.madonnadelparto.it
Scene from the movie "The first quiet night" by Valerio Zurlini, 1972
We are back on the road towards Sansepolcro
A text from 1454 reports the myth of the origins of San Sepolcro defined as the “new Jerusalem”: the presence of the Resurrection of Christ in the town hall "is charged with a strong civic sentiment and representation of the community" (Wikipedia entry).
The Resurrection Piero della Francesca, Sansepolcro Civic Museum
Here we are to close the magnificent day in the village where Piero della Francesca was born.
Before us is the work that Austen Henry Layard, in the mid-nineteenth century, made the world discover and opened the doors to the universal recognition of Piero, as an absolute artist of the Italian Renaissance.
Aldous Huxley, in 1924, called this fresco "the most beautiful painting in the world".
"With great intellectual acuity, Piero della Francesca managed to reconcile Brunelleschi's geometric perspective, Masaccio's sense of volume, Beato Angelico's luminosity.
Piero was interested in objects, all objects, and therefore also men, only in their geometric ideality: the human figure was conceived by him not as a representation of an individual, but in his absolute identity of form, light and color ".
Giuseppe Nicosì
How to recognize and represent a fact, the resurrection, which is beyond human understanding?
An interesting reflection on Federico Leoni's Resurrection.
The papacy of Pius II, 1458/1464, was characterized by "the high dignity of the papal magisterium, by the great humanist culture and by its energy expressed in the defense of Christianity from the Turkish threat".
In October 1458, in agreement with Bessarion, he convened a congress of Christian princes in Mantua to seek allies and financial resources for a future crusade against the Turks.
Faced with the lukewarm responses of the Princes, he implemented a widespread diplomatic policy to achieve his goals.
It was necessary to raise awareness of what we now call "public opinion" which should have put the rulers under pressure.
There was no Internet, TV and cell phones, he wrote and spread provocative letters, even offering the title of Christian Emperor to Mohammed II, if he was baptized, and then ... he called Piero della Francesca to Rome.
Piero was asked to paint a work that should have represented the manifesto of Christian indignation for what had happened and convince the unwary of the need for a new crusade.
Piero's masterpiece is represented by "The flagellation of Christ".
La flagellazione di Cristo Piero della Francesca Galleria Nazionale delle Marche di Urbino
We got to see this painting years ago in Urbino.
The scene of Christ's scourging represents the metaphorical image of the fate of Constantinople, martyred by the Islamic conquest.
Pilate who watches the scene almost helplessly is John VIII Palaeologus.
A perspective therefore over time (Piero imagines that Constantinople has not yet fallen: in fact the purple shoes, emblem of imperial power, are still at the feet of John VIII, while the Turk who assists and the Anointed of the Lord are painted barefoot) and in the space: in the foreground the confrontation between three characters in the act of elaborating political plans to save the Byzantine Empire from the Turks.
But who are the three characters?
According to Silvia Ronchey, art critic and Byzantinist, Piero's choice was to represent those who, more than others, were motivated and worked to save the Byzantine Empire: the bearded man on the left is Cardinal Bessarione , the young man in the center is Thomas Palaeologus, the Anointed of the Lord, and the third man, in a damask dress, could be Niccolò III.
Pius II died in Ancona in 1464 while he was waiting to embark on the Venetian galleys for Constantinople.
The crusade never took place again.
The Flagellation survived to amaze the world five hundred years later.
We do not go to Urbino but the next day we move to Todi, staying in the sixteenth-century monastery of the Santissima Annunziata.
Todi, square and refectory of the Monastery of the Santissima Annunziata
The panoramic road we face plunges us into the Tuscan and Umbrian hills, in a unique, uncontaminated landscape, almost the same as it was in Piero's time.
"In the past times that will never return, when distances could not be overcome without effort, this was on the one hand compensated by the possibility of making profound observations on the districts that crossed each other and on the other by the sweetness of the evening hours, when, from the top of the last hill passed, the traveler saw the quiet village where he was forced to spend the night, lying on the meadows beyond the stream, or even when at the long awaited turn of a road, in the dusty perspective he saw the towers for the first time of a famous city, languid in the sunset ".
The stones of Venice John Ruskin
Piero della Francesca had Domenico Veneziano as his teacher, but many great painters of the time inspired him; among these the "painter of light": the Beato Angelico.
Before completing the journey, we then reach Cortona, the birthplace of Angelico, to view the Annunciation.
Cortona, Museo Diocesano
It is a tempera on wood, probably painted in 1430 and preserved in the Diocesan Museum.
We are facing an absolute masterpiece.
The angel expresses himself with hand gestures and words that the artist renders as if we were in a modern comic. To distinguish the response of the Madonna, her words are painted upside down.
The vanishing point takes us back to the painted garden at the top left; in the box, the expulsion of Adam and Eve, a moment of rupture between God and Man that only Mary's acceptance recomposes.
Beato Angelico was a highly skilled illuminator: looking at the Annunciation almost seems like observing a work in 4K!
"A still nature as God created it, and an art that looks to reality, in which divinity is present everywhere and is revealed through the light.
Divine light, lumen not earthly lux, which dresses this masterpiece with golden reflections, which allows you to rise to understand the supreme idea of being.
An art made to think and not to contemplate ".
Maurizio Calvesi
An art made to think and not to contemplate: exactly the opposite of my experience in front of all these masterpieces.
The spiritual dimension is fundamental for the human being and can also materialize through other channels: art and philosophy or what we traditionally call humanism.
This I looked for in the journey, this I found in Piero's art.
Ps: Cardinal Bessarione, realizing the ambition to be able to reconquer Byzantium, managed, as a skilled and shrewd diplomat as he had always been, to guarantee the survival of the dynasty of his Lords by marrying Zoe Palaeologus with Ivan III of Russia.
The orthodoxy of Byzantium was safe.
Now old and feeling close to death, he made sure that his entire library arrived intact in Venice, where he formed the nucleus of the future Marciana National Library.
He died in Ravenna in 1472.
Piero della Francesca survived him for a few years.
He died in Sansepolcro on 12 October 1492.
The new world was upon us.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Piero's enigma 2006, Silvia Ronchey Rizzoli
The Legend of the True Cross 2004, Raffaella Cornacchini Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities