'St. John the Evangelist' (1400–1495) by Piero della Francesca

Good evening, I am Xavier Salomon, the Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator at The Frick Collection. Welcome to Cocktails with a Curator. One of the most monumental, beautiful images of the Italian Renaissance at The Frick Collection is the Saint John the Evangelist by Piero della Francesca. This single figure, monumental, sculptural, set against the bright blue sky with this marble balustrade behind him, so absorbed in the reading of this beautifully foreshortened book. He is enveloped in this great dark red cloak. And I love the detail, for example, of the bejeweled hem of his green tunic at the bottom. Now, when you look at this work at The Frick, you could easily think that this is an independent work. But this is part of a group of objects that came from a single altarpiece, which was dismembered, probably, at some point in the sixteenth century. And The Frick is lucky to own three other pieces of this polyptych. All of these works arrived at The Frick Collection after the death of the founder, after the death of Henry Clay Frick in 1919. The Saint John the Evangelist was acquired in 1936, a year after the museum opened to the public in 1935. The two saints against a gold ground at the bottom were acquired instead in 1950. And the small crucifixion above arrived at the museum in 1961 as the gift of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Piero della Francesca is a fairly rare artist outside of Italy in public collections. The National Gallery in London has three great works of art by him, but that is really an exception. And The Frick is, therefore, very lucky to have four works by Piero in its collection. And we are only one of four institutions in the United States, four public institutions, that have works by Piero. The others in the States are the Saint Apollonia, which also came from the same altarpiece and is now in the National Gallery in Washington, the wonderful Madonna and Child with Four Angels, a very late work by Piero at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, and the fragment of a fresco showing the mythological figure of Hercules at the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum in Boston. In 2013, a curatorial fellow at The Frick, Nathaniel Silver, who is now the curator at the Isabella Stuart Gardner in Boston, assembled almost all of these works at The Frick in the Oval Room. We had every single work by Piero della Francesca in the U.S. The show was called Piero della Francesca in America, except from the Hercules from Boston, which unfortunately couldn't come because of conservation issues. You see here the Oval Room with the Clark Madonna in the middle, the Frick John on the right. On the left, there was another addition which we'll encounter later in this episode, which is the Saint Augustine from Lisbon, which was part of the same altarpiece as the Saint John. And on one of the other walls of the room, you had the four small paintings, the three from The Frick and the Saint Apollonia from Washington. Of course, if you want to know more about Piero della Francesca in America, there are a number of lectures and related programming, which are on our website at Frick.org. And for all of our shows and lectures, you can go to our website, and there's plenty of material there. Now, many scholars have worked on Piero della Francesca, and one of the greatest Italian scholars of the Italian Renaissance, Roberto Longhi, published a monograph on Piero. So did two of the giants of the Anglo-Saxon art-historical world, Kenneth Clark and John Pope-Hennessy. But very recently, this year, a new book, Biography of Piero della Francesca, has come out by Machtelt Bruggen Israels at the University of Amsterdam. And I've just finished reading this book, and it is very rare to find a book, an art history book, which gives you an altogether new view and new information about an artist as well-known as Piero. And I recommend all of you to read this book, because it is incredibly beautifully written, but also full of fascinating material on Piero. And it is rare for me to find a book that really makes you think of an artist as a different person. So because of the discussion of Piero today and Piero de Frick, the cocktail I'm drinking is a cocktail called The Saint. This is made out of bourbon, lily blanc, grapefruit juice, lemon juice, and ginger syrup. And I would like to raise a glass to Piero's scholars, the many scholars who've worked on Piero and the Piero's at the Frick, but in particular to Nathaniel Silver and Machtelt Israels. Cheers. Piero della Francesca was born in the Tiber Valley, in a small town called Borgo Sansepolcro, probably around 1412. This is one of his earliest known works, the Baptism of Christ in London at the National Gallery. And here you already see so much of what Piero will be known for, this geometrical view of the world where everything is placed in the right place, just so carefully conceived against this beautifully airy landscape. And landscape in Piero is always a very important feature. The attention to detail, which comes from Netherlandish works of art, and these statuesque figures, these great, severe, typical Piero figures. It is no surprise that Piero was a very beloved artist in the twentieth century, especially by modern artists who looked back to Piero in a number of ways and copied works by Piero. He worked on a number of fresco cycles, the one that survives almost intact is the Stories of the True Cross in the Church of San Francesco in Arezzo. And here you see it, obviously the crucifix is an earlier work which is placed in that chapel, but not part of the cycle. But you can see that the altar wall around the windows and to the right, the side walls, all have different registers of scenes of the story of the relic of the cross involving the Emperor Constantine and his mother, Saint Helena. The flagellation in the gallery in Urbino, in the Ducal Palace, is one of the most well-known and mysterious works by Piero. Generations of scholars have written about this work of art. On the left, you of course see the flagellation of Christ in the presence of Pontius Pilate. To the right, instead, these three, again, towering, monumental figures whose identity has been long debated, and there are many, many theories about who these three figures may or may not be. Again, MacTulpe Israel, in her latest book, comes up with a new proposal, which in many ways is a very reasonable and very convincing proposal. The most famous work by Piero, however, is the resurrection in Borgo Sansepolcro. This was done for the city hall of his birthplace and it has become one of the great, iconic works of Italian art from the fifteenth century. Piero was also a portraitist, and here I'm showing you some later works, the profile portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino, Federico da Montefeltro, and his wife, Battista Sforza. These are now in the Uffizi in Florence, and they're the most beautiful surviving portraits by Piero. But others also survive of Sigismondo Malatesta, the ruler of Rimini. And there are probably versions and copies of other lost portraits by him, one, for example, of the King of Naples. Piero was an artist who, even though he was born in Borgo Sansepolcro, he traveled a lot around Italy. He's one of these great traveling artists and he visited many courts of many of the rulers of the time. This is another work he made for the Montefeltro family. And you see the Duke of Urbino kneeling in his armor at the bottom right. And above you see the Madonna and Child surrounded by six saints. They're all set with four angels in this incredible architectural setting. And Piero was very interested in architecture, in antiquity, in decoration, but he was especially interested in perspective. And we have a number of surviving treatises by him, manuscripts, that show his studies, his interest in perspective, which by that point was a fairly new discovery of the modern world, but also geometry, mathematics, and a number of related sciences. So Piero was a very learned artist and he often plays with perspectival games within a painting. And you often see, as in the Frick painting, the book is seen from a very specific point of view and so is the head of the saint. Piero produced a number of religious polyptychs. And, of course, what we've just seen, the Montefeltro altarpiece, is a single image showing a Madonna with saints. It's known as a pala, an altarpiece. But a previous model of doing this was the polyptych, and that means a series of panels with quite complicated carpentry, which show a central image, usually of the Virgin, but sometimes of Christ or episodes relating to them. In this case, it's the Madonna of Mercy, the Madonna of the Misericordia, surrounded by four saints. You see two couples of saints on each side. And then on the sides, smaller saints in the pilasters, saints and religious figures above. And on the top part of the altarpiece, the Cimasa, in this case the Crucifixion of Christ. Below, there is the predella, which was the base on which the altarpiece sat. And here you see scenes from the life of Christ. This is the Politico della Misericordia, which Piero painted between 1460 and 1462, around the time he's painting the Resurrection in Sansepolcro. And it is painted for the city of Sansepolcro. Unfortunately, the original frame does not survive. This is a recent reconstruction. It's since been put together in a slightly different way. And what you see is how, in this case, Piero plays with the gold background of the main scenes of the polyptych, but then he uses a more naturalistic one in the lower level, in the predella. The altarpiece that's the focus of this episode comes from another church in Borgo Sansepolcro. Piero traveled a lot in his life. He's documented in all the great artistic centers of Italy. He is in Rome. He works there for the Pope. He works in Florence. He works in Ancona, in Ferrara, in Naples. And many of these works, unfortunately, do not survive. But for this church in his hometown, he has commissioned an altarpiece on the 4th of October, 1454. This is the Church of Sant'Agostino in Sansepolcro, which, in 1555, is ceded by the Augustinian order to the Poor Clares and becomes the Church of Santa Chiara of Saint Clare. And it is now not functioning as a church anymore. You can see that it had a number of transformations. This is the exterior, which looks quite battered. But the height of the church, the interior, both in terms of the volume of the church and in terms of the shape, has changed somewhat. And the reconstruction of it can only be a virtual one, really, today. But for the high altar of this church, a man called Angelo di Giovanni di Simone commissions Piero to paint an altarpiece in 1454. Piero, in fact, does not begin the altarpiece until 1468. So he's busy with other commissions, he's traveling, and it's only more than ten years later that he finally begins the altarpiece. And it's a complicated commission because what Angelo di Giovanni is providing is a ready-made support. Now, one of the most expensive things of a polyptych of that kind, apart from the pigments and the gold, was the carpentry, the woodwork. And, of course, to create a machine of that size and something that, you know, being made out of wood, had to be made with the right materials and the right way, is something that we often don't think about when looking at works of art in a museum, but it is a very, very important thing. And many scholars, including Nat Silver and Mac Tilt-Israels, have worked a lot on some of these issues with a number of other colleagues for paintings in central Italy and beyond. So the carpentry already existed, and it's the carpentry of an altar which was originally conceived for the Franciscan Church of Sansepolcro, the Church of San Francesco. It's then substituted with another altarpiece by another painter called Sassetta. That altarpiece, the first one, the abandoned one, the carpentry was based on another altarpiece which still exists, a fourteenth-century one, which is now on the high altar of what is now the Cathedral of Sansepolcro. So it's an old structure based on an old model that then Piero inherits in 1454 and starts working on in 1468. So in format it would have been quite backward-looking, but obviously what Piero does on the surface is a very different story. And Angelo di Giovanni di Simone is a rich man from Sansepolcro who continues to work in the Church because his brother, Simone, and his sister-in-law, Giovanna, had sponsored the apse of the Church. So the Saint John the Evangelist comes from this lost altarpiece, which would have been probably dismantled after 1555, after the Church goes to the Poor Clares. It's already described in the seventeenth century as dismembered, and fragments of it are described in private collections. So it's an altarpiece that probably lasted less than a hundred years. The Saint John was accompanied by the other works of the Frick, and you have the two small panels with the gold grounds showing a nun and a monk. What is interesting is, if you remember, in the Misericordia altarpiece, Pelliptic, Piero uses gold for the main scenes and he uses naturalistic backgrounds for the predella. Here he does exactly the opposite. The main tier is a naturalistic background, the predella is gold, and the sides as well, the pilasters. The woman on the left, the nun, has been identified as Saint Monica, who was the mother of Saint Augustine, the titular saint of the Church. The man on the right has traditionally been identified as Saint Leonard, another saint associated with the Augustinian order. But in fact he may be the blessed Angelo Scarpetti, who was a local religious figure who was actually buried in the Church of Sant'Agostino in Sansepolcro. Then there is Saint Apollonia, another of the saints of the altarpiece, this from Washington, who holds pliers and a tooth in her hands. And this very bizarre attribute relates to her martyrdom. She was supposedly killed by having all of her teeth extracted from her mouth as part of the torture she underwent. So she's, not surprisingly, the patron saint of dentists and people with toothaches. And here she is proudly displaying the tooth of her martyrdom. The predella at the bottom had probably, most likely, scenes from the Passion of Christ. The crucifixion is the only one surviving. The other ones are lost. But we know from early descriptions from the seventeenth century that there were three other panels which showed the flagellation, the deposition, and the resurrection of Christ. And we don't know if originally there were four or five. There is a debate about that. But, in fact, the crucifixion, probably somewhat cut down, is the only one surviving. In terms of the main tier, the saints on the sides of the central figure, you had, to the extreme left, Saint Augustine. And Saint Augustine, of course, is the patron saint of the Church, of the Augustinian Order. This is now in the Museo d'Arte Antica in Lisbon. And this is the one panel that did come to the Frick in 2013 and was shown with Saint John the Evangelist. Next to him was Saint Michael the Archangel in the National Gallery of London. And this is the patron saint of the patron of the altarpiece. Remember, he's called Angelo di Giovanni. So Angelo, his patron saint, is obviously an angel, an archangel, in this case Michael, shown vanquishing Satan, in this case this rather bizarre lizard-like creature. And you can see in the background that they're both set against a blue sky, but also that the marble balustrade decorated with porphyry and serpentine and precious marbles with a frame of white carved marble is continuous throughout. And to the right of the Saint Michael you have steps that would have led into the main central panel. To the right of that panel, and again you see the same steps on the bottom left of the Frick picture of Saint John, you add Saint John the Evangelist. And Saint John the Evangelist, who is the writer of the Gospel of Saint John but also the Apocalypse, is seen here as both the patron saint of Borgo Sansepolcro but also the saint that is connected to Angelo di Giovanni. Angelo's father was called, of course, Giovanni, which is John. And to the right you have Saint Nicholas of Tolentino, a recent Augustinian saint. So these two sets of four figures were surrounding a central image. And here you see a reconstruction which was done in 2013 by Nathaniel Silver. showing hypothetically where the small saints would have sat in the pillars. The same with the predella. The predella may be a fragment of the central part of the predella, even though there are different suggestions about where that would have gone originally. And you see the four saints, Augustin, Michael, John, and Nicholas of Tolentino, surrounding an empty central scene, because we don't actually know what was in the center for sure. The most reasonable suggestion is that it may have been a coronation of the Virgin. But we also don't know what was above, in the pinnacles, in the cimasa. MacDill's Israels, again, has come up with a new theory about what may have been in the cimasa, possibly a pietà, which would make sense. But it couldn't have been a crucifixion, obviously, because that was in the predella, but it could have been a number of other scenes. So this altarpiece still has many parts that are missing. If you have a Piero della Francesca in your attic, of course, please let us know. But we hope that one day maybe some of these scenes will be recognized. It is likely that most of them are lost for good, unfortunately. And this reminds us of the fact that so many of these polyptychs and altarpieces would have gone out of fashion and would have been effectively cut to pieces and sold as independent works of art. And this is how this single altarpiece for Sansepolcro is now divided up between Portugal, the United States, Italy, and the UK. So the attempts to bring all of this together have been made a number of times by the Polo di Pizzoli Museum in Milan, who did an important study on this altarpiece many years ago, then by the Frick with our exhibition in 2013, where we managed to assemble almost all of the altarpiece except from two saints. But really there still hasn't been an exhibition where all of it has been seen together, and I very much hope that that will be the case at some point in the future. The reconstruction of the church was recently attempted by an Italian scholar, by Giacomo Guazzini, who has very recently, this year as well, published a book on Sant'Agostino and Sansepolcro and on its decoration in the fourteenth and fifteenth century. And this is a virtual reconstruction that gives you an idea of what the structure of the church may have looked like, part of it still survives, but you also see bits of frescoes, and those are frescoes that survive either in the church, in the remains of the church, or in other institutions that we know came from that church. And so this gives you a little bit of a sense, and you have to imagine, of course, that all of this would have been frescoed and decorated with the high altar at the focus against the window in the apse. So the art-historical work on this altarpiece, of course, continues. As I say, I very much hope to be able to see it during my lifetime at least, reunited in its entirety. Who knows if more pieces may eventually come up or documents telling us more about what the other figures would have been. In the meantime, I hope you've enjoyed this evening and I hope you're enjoying your Saint cocktail. And I look forward to seeing you all for another episode of Cocktails with a Curator soon.