Both these books are welcome; and for this reviewer, at least, there can never be enough material about Piero della Francesca if it helps draw us nearer to understanding a painter whose memorable, orderly art is a balm for the soul, and who still stands like a giant among the creators of the Renaissance.

By his own admission, James Banker is less interested in the works of art than in the facts, some seemingly negligible, that create the context of the Quattrocento painter’s world. He is the historian, while Marilyn Aronberg Lavin is the iconographer, an acute interpreter of the painter’s work. Both offer a wealth of information, and both are labors of love. Lavin’s Piero della Francesca is the result of forty years’ research, supplemented by some excellent illustrations (in particular, details of the Arezzo frescoes after their cleaning in 2000); Banker has been mining the Sansepolcro and Florence archives—and finding gold—for over two decades. In an area where we still have very little information concerning the formative influences on a painter’s personality (an otiose question for some), Banker’s research in The Culture of San Sepolcro during the Youth of Piero della Francesca is exemplary, because where we cannot learn about Piero’s character—and may never be able to—he provides as much contextual information as possible about the artist’s family, education, and culture. Indeed one of the merits of this book is to convey factual history that is not only useful for the subject in hand, but which can be applied to other instances of European history during the early Renaissance. Firm documentation, rather than a character sketch (usually anachronistic when it is attempted), is what most art historians want, surrounded as we are by the fictional method prevalent today. A historical novel about Piero recently published in Italy tells us, incredibly, that he was “un uomo irrequieto, dal carattere difficile,” hardly helpful as an approach in an age where students new to art history—many of whom will read Lavin’s affordable and user-friendly book—are liable to announce that something is so “because I read it in The Da Vinci Code.”

Lavin’s account passes swiftly over the 1430s, while she commendably places Piero’s birth around 1413. This is important, as any understanding of his maturity when he reached Florence in 1439—where he was involved in the major fresco project of the period, the Marian chapel in Sant’Egidio—depends on how old we believe him to have been. Banker has now shown that it is very likely that he was born in 1412 (“Contributi alla cronologia e della vita e delle opere di Piero della Francesca,” Arte Cristiana 42, 2004: 248–58); he has also shown that in 1442 Piero need not have been in Sansepolcro, as Lavin and other authors state. Lavin is also right to emphasize early on in her book that Piero was not just an intellectual (an obvious but overstated fact) but a devout Christian (23), and it is precisely his grafting of new Renaissance spatial description onto traditional devotional simplicity that makes Piero’s images, like those of Angelico, so accessible.

Lavin is at her best when the context she provides is relevant in a plausible way. Thus in a discussion of the Arezzo frescoes she speaks of Saint Bonaventure’s sermons identifying Saint Francis with the Emperor Constantine, something that could have been common currency during the fifteenth century (123–24); and Constantine’s “Paleologan” headgear and aspect are regarded, sensibly, as conforming to a type, albeit of recent creation—rather than being a specific reference to the Fall of Constantinople (150). But as the text moves on, we are offered increasingly idiosyncratic readings of visual evidence, and one has to ask how much is hypothetical: What did Piero intend? Lavin is sometimes cautious in her phrasing (“he may have intended,” “he seems to have intended”), but modern and personal interpretation asserts itself emphatically. After a valid reading of the Arezzo Mary Magdalene, we are told it was “ironic that Piero literally clothes the Magdalene in virtue since by this time she was considered to have been a prostitute and therefore the lowest of the low” (190). Surely there was no irony here—the unknown patron no doubt simply requested the kind of majestic image Piero painted. (Had a penitent Magdalene been wanted, would it not have been requested?) We read that the slash of white in the blue gown of the simple, sublime Madonna del Parto is “almost vaginal in shape,” and that, “Any fifteenth-century viewer would have associated it with yet another manifestation of Mary’s role in the scheme of salvation. . . . This vaginal shape was used to represent the wound inflicted on Christ’s side” (195–96). This reviewer remembers meeting local Monterchi women in the 1980s who would still touch the fresco to ensure an auspicious pregnancy; I cannot believe they were radically different from their fifteenth-century forebears, nor that “any viewer” in the world, then or now, would make such associations.

A final example of this provocative approach appears in the discussion of the Brera Altarpiece, where the presence of the coral hanging around the sleeping Christ Child’s neck is considered “unusual, it might be said unnatural” and “gravity-defying” (275), its appearance likened to the human pulmonary tree, which it indeed resembles (and we are treated to a diagram of the trachea and bronchi). But could Piero or his patron have conceivably intended this kind of symbolism? In Quattrocento central Italy and the Marches, where this was painted, it would be hard to imagine a more common visual talisman in an image of the Madonna and Child; and the way the amulet juts out is not mysterious at all—it is the little crystal sphere, not the coral branch, that weighs down the necklace, while the branch itself is attached separately, and hangs from its gold clasp accordingly. A major concession is stated in the acknowledgements, where the author states that, “Some of my readings differ radically from other interpretations, and the reader is encouraged to take advantage of the bibliographies I have assembled for each chapter and come to his/her own conclusions” (350).

Much remains to be researched on Piero’s relation to his contemporaries in Northern and Central Italy, not to mention the ongoing evaluation of Early Renaissance protagonists such as Angelico and Lippi. Banker’s opening chapter, “The Political, Religious, and Economic Character of San Sepolcro, 1400–1440,” is typically comprehensive, using Piero’s native town, with its prosperous but complex economy, its contracts and notarial documents, as a broad canvas against which to paint his early years. This network of social indicators becomes the background for Piero’s “choices,” in Banker’s words, and there is no question that his formative period was conditioned by social, educational, and commercial phenomena. But as he gathered progressively more visual and intellectual baggage during his travel through the Northern Italian courts and Florence, he discarded some of what he had learned early on: clearly, he was no longer a painter along the lines of late Gothic masters such as Antonio d’Anghiari or Ottaviano Nelli, no more than the mature Raphael was a reflection of Perugino or Pinturicchio. In the end, while providing us with essential information about patronage and civic status, Banker’s approach is not without its limitations for the art historian, eschewing as it does Piero’s artistic roots in the world forever changed by Giotto, Masaccio, and Alberti, whose spirits, transformed by his own creative process, inhabit his vision of form.¹

A most useful section in Banker’s volume appears as an appendix, “Arguments against Locating Piero della Francesca’s Baptism in Any Church in San Sepolcro Other Than the Church of the Same Name,” placing the celebrated London panel in San Giovanni Battista rather than the Pieve or Badia (now the Cathedral). This appendix should be read in conjunction with a recent essay by Andrea De Marchi, “Matteo di Giovanni ai suoi esordi e il polittico di San Giovanni in Val d’Afra,” in D. Gasparotto and S. Magnani, eds., Matteo di Giovanni e la pala d’altare nel senese e nell’aretino 1450–1500, Atti del Convegno, Sansepolcro, 9–10 ottobre 1998 (Montepulciano: Le Balze, 2002): 57–76.

Banker is preparing a second book with a later chronological focus, which will no doubt further enlighten us about Piero’s subsequent life and career; his knowledge of Sansepolcro is unparalleled, and any future study of Piero must take notice of all his publications. Likewise, Lavin’s tireless championing of the artist’s work, in every detail, is important: since Piero crafted every carefully image so, we should show the same care in reading every one of his images if we are to understand the creative process behind it.