{"id":2567,"date":"2013-03-02T10:43:08","date_gmt":"2013-03-02T10:43:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=2567"},"modified":"2013-03-04T13:42:15","modified_gmt":"2013-03-04T13:42:15","slug":"piero-della-francesca-at-the-frick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=2567","title":{"rendered":"Piero della Francesca at The Frick"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"piero\"<\/a>

Piero della Francesca | Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Angels (1480-1482)
Williamstown, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute<\/p><\/div>\n

Information wants to be free, as they say, but not all that<\/i> free. That\u2019s a credo and caveat for anyone who borrows content on the Internet and establishes attribution with a link. Outright plagiarism, though, is another thing, isn\u2019t it? On the other hand, The Wasteland\u00a0<\/i>contained large appropriations of words which were a few centuries overdue from the library. Eliot once said, Good writers borrow; great writers steal outright.<\/i> But he was an honest thief, and his footnotes were as funny and interesting and cool as the poem itself. Five centuries ago, Piero della Francesca left quite a bit of work unfinished and unsigned at his death, which meant, according to Vasari, that the parasitic Fra Luca del Borgo finished and claimed it as his own, as if he were Salieri trying to exact some glory, long in arrears, from Mozart. In Vasari\u2019s book, Luca steals credit for Piero\u2019s work and in the words of Vasari, he acted like those who \u201ccover their own ass\u2019s hide with the noble skin of a lion.\u201d (OK, full stop. Have I actually stumbled onto the derivation of this phrase? Did \u201ccovering your ass\u201d become public, as it were, with Vasari? If so, I hereby bequeath my accidental discovery to the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary. I\u2019m not about to pay the annual subscription of hundreds of dollars just to see if they trace the phrase back to Vasari or thereabouts, but knock yourselves out guys.)\u00a0 So apparently poor Piero suffered by losing authorship of his own original work. Let\u2019s put Richard Prince aside and imagine, in our own time, a mere work-for-hire craftsman who actually puts his own brand on a Koons or Hirst who, after the untimely death of said artists, \u201cfinished\u201d the work and claimed it as his own. But what would be the point? Money is what they\u2019re up to, so the studio worker would be better off if he forged a Koons signature, but claimed ownership, not authorship. So apparently, some things do<\/i> improve over time in the world of art, if only incrementally.<\/p>\n

But wait. As I read on, it turns out all of this posthumous plagiarism wasn\u2019t about painting. Vasari saves this crucial detail for end<\/em> of his second paragraph. He had been writing about Piero della Francesca\u2019s work under the influence of Euclid. It was about his . . . books<\/i>. If Vasari is to be trusted, Piero was as much a highly respected mathematician as he was a painter. He wrote many volumes, Vasari says, on geometry, but being, apparently, the genius that he was, he didn\u2019t finish anything but was too A.D.D. to tie up the loose ends, constantly essaying into new regions, maybe figuring he\u2019d get back to his calculations and diagrams eventually. But he didn\u2019t. He left it to the scavenger, Luca, to do all that and then put his name on all of it. He took Jay Mohr’s advice, Put your name on it!,\u00a0<\/em>but in a slightly different sense.<\/p>\n

Third paragraph in, we finally learn that Piero actually did some painting, apparently in his spare time. \u201cBesides excelling in the sciences, he also excelled in painting.\u201d Also. He also<\/i> was an excellent painter, when he could get around to it. Well, yeah<\/em>. At Painting Perceptions, Xico Greenwald writes\u00a0that Aldous Huxley<\/a>, called Peiro’s \u00a0Resurrection in Sansepolcro\u00a0<\/em>\u201cthe greatest painting in the world.”\u00a0For a few more pages, Vasari gives the man his due, but it isn\u2019t clear he thinks as highly as he might have about a fellow who couldn\u2019t stick to his knitting and maybe should have finished elucidating the cube, sphere and cone before he tried to show you how a round bald head, say, would look under a Northern Italian exposure.<\/p>\n

So, on the subject of spheres and cubes, it came as less of a surprise that, after learning that Piero was a geometer, it appears he might have been the first Cubist. (We\u2019re speaking about a painter who died before 1500.) On the second page of Vasari\u2019s brief bio, you\u2019ll find this description of a drawing he did, which enables the author to glide effortlessly from mathematics to art: \u201cNevertheless some of his writings on geometry and perspective have been preserved . . . and they show him to be inferior to no one in his own times, or perhaps in any other time as well, as do all his works which are full of perspective, most especially a vase drawn in squares and facets so that the front, back, sides, bottom, and mouth are visible; it is certainly a stupendous work . . . \u201c I do wish this drawing were also on view at The Frick, where Piero della Francesca is being marvelously represented right now by a rare exhibit of only seven paintings\u2014which I intend to see today on my trek across the city working my way from Delancey St. to the Metropolitan. I\u2019m dying to see this drawing because as much as I\u2019d love to witness a prefiguration of the early 20th<\/sup> century\u2014move over, El Greco\u2014I suspect it\u2019s more of an orthographic projection than a Cubist fusion of multiple perspectives. I wonder, though. And I wonder if it survives.<\/p>\n

More to come, maybe, and maybe not, on Piero, once I\u2019ve seen the paintings. None other than Mr.\u00a0Schjeldahl<\/a>\u00a0has already done a far better job than I could on a painter who nearly inspired him to quit scooting all over Italy on a Vespa and become a monk back in his young, wanderjahr<\/i>-ing days. If you have to subscribe to The New Yorker <\/i>to read his response to the exhibit,<\/i> it\u2019s worth it. (You’ll get all his other ones too.) Sorry, OED, but I subscribe only to the essential things that I can actually afford . . .<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Information wants to be free, as they say, but not all that free. That\u2019s a credo and caveat for anyone who borrows content on the Internet and establishes attribution with a link. Outright plagiarism, though, is another thing, isn\u2019t it? On the other hand, The Wasteland\u00a0contained large appropriations of words which were a few centuries […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nPiero della Francesca at The Frick - represent<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=2567\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Piero della Francesca at The Frick - represent\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Information wants to be free, as they say, but not all that free. 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