Piero della Francesca's St.

Augustine Altarpiece
Author(s): Kenneth Clark, Roberto Longhi and Millard Meiss
Source: The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, Vol. 89, No. 535 (Oct., 1947), pp. 285-286
Published by: The Burlington Magazine Publications Ltd.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/869569
Accessed: 30-03-2015 03:51 UTC

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preparation, is well under way. The task of identifying
the various works of art has never been seriously under-
taken, and the catalogue will entail years of patient
research in many centuries and civilisations by a horde
of scholars before it approaches completion. The items
in the catalogue will be arranged under schools and not
according to the arbitrary disposition of objects in the
rooms. This is the only possible method. But no
attempt will be made, nor ever should be, to weed out
systematically the worthless from the valuable, the
copies from the originals, for to do so would be to weed
out the personality of Soane himself, so precious, so
infinitely rare. And all the haphazard groups of
vases and objetstrouvisin the sea, of Roman altars and
colossal busts, of Mannerist nymphs and Neo-Classic
pedestals, of gargoyles and cinerary urns, must, and
will, remain gazing vacantly across courtyards, frozen
into niches, welded to the cornices for which Sir John
designed them. B. N.
ENGLISH PAINTING AT THE TATE. By John Piper.
The riches of English painting are like the riches of
drawers full of gems rather than of palaces furnished
with more-than-man sized masterpieces. In the exhibi-
tion of Hogarth, Blake, Constable and Turner at the
Tate Gallery some of the best drawers have been laid
open. The Hogarths, Constables and Turners have
lately been shown in the United States and in Canada,
and the British Council has toured the Blakes in Paris,
Antwerp and Ziarich, though they are here greatly
reinforced from the Tate's own collection and from that
of Mr. Graham Robertson whose patient enthusiasm
allowed him to collect the richest and most " difficult "
Blakes at a time when they were not even currency
among artists, let alone the public.
In one way the exhibition is about the most important
one of English painting ever held: in its showing of
Blake and Constable as complete artists developing work
from the sketch to the far-pushed picture-more
important with English painting than any other,
because our mist and rain and spasmodic sun suggest
poetic pictorial ideas that can be embodied in lyrical
sketches but rarely pushed far from nature. In this
connection, the Turners here can be usefully looked at
soon after, or before, a view of some of the Petworth
sketches currently on view in the Print Room at the
British Museum. The two biggish late Petworth
paintings, the National Gallery Interiorand the Music
Party, gain enormously in our prejudiced eyes from
being seen in relation to the vivid sketch-book pages,
LETTERS
PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA'S ST. AUGUSTINE
ALTARPIECE
SIR,-I have received the accompanying letter from
Professor Roberto Longhi, with a request that it be
published in THE BURLINGTONMAGAZINE. It will be
of interest to scholars of Renaissance art, not only
for the suggestions it contains which, coming from so
eminent an authority, must command our attention;
but also for the news that his masterly work on Piero
della Francesca has now appeared in a second edition.
KENNETHCLARK.
DEAR SIR KENNETH,-You have given me a double
pleasure: that of having made known to the readers
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ShorterNotices
so un-grand in their " presence ", done by the country-
house artist before breakfast or after dinner. The
burning spars like the tails of falling rockets in the
Fire at Sea, the ochre heat of WindsorForest, reaping(it
looks like the summer that has just passed), the gaiety
and light of The Thamesabove WaterlooBridge are old
delights to be renewed here.
Our eyes are indeed prejudiced by an over-fondness
for sketches (and for developed weighty sketches, like
those last mentioned). It is as well to be reminded that
the inspired sketch is not our only good product, as we
are by the Hogarth room, but here, since we can only
see Hogarth as a great painter and not as a working
painter, there is a slight " museum " atmosphere. It
is not the present point.
Public opinion about Constable has clearly switched
over to favour the sketches. Many of the best of them
are here, hung in lively relation to the cleaned Hay
Wain and the big, nerve-racked Hadleigh, and there is
an opportunity to see at close quarters just what was
lost and gained when he developed his ideas indoors
at the easel. The Weymouth Bay, here also, is the perfect
half-way house between sketch and worked-up finality.
What was lost of course was most of the English atmos-
phere, with the riskily-saved dew and sparkle taking
on some chalkiness and opacity ; what was gained was
worth it, despite all, in its weight and consideration.
English landscape was always gusty, with gleams of
sun and showers, like Constable's sketches: it has
grown like his big paintings with their pervading
stillness (even Hadleighhas it, in spite of the picture's,
and the painter's, agitation), with their veiled sun and
inner calm, in which trees wait for the wind and
water waits to be broken by rain.
The Blakes are perpetually, and newly, admonishing.
Perpetually, because they prove finally that it does not
matter what a painter does if he loves enough. Newly,
because they provide us with a complete stock-in-trade
for contemporary painting whenever it is we happen to
live, if we have the sense to use it. Four square inches
of the rocky seat of the figure in the Newton would be
(and one can almost say have been) enough to inspire
all living English painters worth their salt. At any
rate, imitations of that rocky seat at second hand begin
to recur too often and it is time to learn different
and more troublesome lessons: for instance, how to
invest a sub-Stothard composition, Our Lady with the
Infant Jesus on a Lamb and St. John, with enough
tenderness and passion to make the forms seem rarely
inspired. The pictures are on view till October 30th.
of THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE, among whom I am
one, the very beautiful St. Augustine by Piero della
Francesca, now in Lisbon ; and that of having brought
to my notice the existence of an article by Millard
Meiss, who, as early as 1941 in the Art Bulletin, recon-
structed hypothetically the St. Augustine polyptych
from Borgo San Sepolcro and thus foresaw, most
acutely, the existence of the Saint now discovered by
you.
On account of the war Meiss' article has remained
unknown to Italian students, and for that reason it is
all the more curious to point out the similarity of views
expressed by him, and by me in the notes appended to
285
Letters
the second edition of my book on Piero della Francesca,
which was dispatched to the printer in October, 1942,
but published only a few months ago and, so it seems,
not yet known in England.
It may be of some interest to you and to readers of
THE BURLINGTONMAGAZINE to knowthatmyhypothesis
goes even further than Meiss'. That is to say, in the
notes on pages 186 and 189 of my 'volume, I put forward
the view that the three Saints in the Lehman and
Liechtenstein Collections, as well as the Crucifixionin
the Rockefeller Collection, also belonged, as a predella,
to the same altarpiece. The two small Liechtenstein
Saints are also, in fact, Augustinian Saints (one of them
is actually St. Monaca, the mother of Augustine), and,
what is more, they almost certainly come from the
nuns of Santa Chiara in Borgo San Sepolcro, who had
inherited the church of St. Augustine. As for the
Rockefeller Crucifixion,it accords in style and dimensions
with the other small panels and in general scheme is
perfectly adapted to figure beneath the central panel
of the Madonnawhich still remains to be discovered.
Yours sincerely,
ROBERTO LONGHI.
SIR,-I have just read Sir Kenneth Clark's very
interesting article in the August number of THE BURLING-
TON MAGAZINE on the magnificent panel by Piero della
Francesca which he has discovered in Lisbon. The
painting is one of the most exciting finds in recent years,
and, turning up at this time, helps to console us for some
of the losses of the war. Sir Kenneth refers very
generously to my discussion (Art Bulletin, i94.) of the
altarpiece to which the panel belongs and to my predic-
tion that the missing saint would prove to be Augustine,
but the actual form that Piero has given him is in many
ways a great surprise. The figure exhibits an astonishing
formality and intensity, comparable only to the Risen
Christ in Borgo. The latter, however, is a dominant
figure in an historical representation and not simply
one part of a polyptych. The St. Augustineis remarkable
also for its richness of pattern and apparently colour
(the article does not mention the colours Piero used).
All these concentrated qualities make the panel a
wonderful thing in itself, but they seem to disturb the
unity of the altarpiece as a whole and lead me to wonder
what sort of central Madonna could have withstood so
powerful a lateral saint, and also whether the St.
Augustinewas conceived or painted at a later date than
the other saints. Though the altarpiece was commis-
sioned in 1454, Piero had not yet received the final
payment in 1469, and another of his polyptychs, the
one in Borgo, was executed over a period of years, as
Longhi has pointed out.
The size, luminosity, and spatial vividness of the
scenes on the stole are the greatest surprise of all. They
show us in a dramatic way how far Piero strayed in his
later work from Tuscan, and particularly Florentine,
taste, and how at the same time he approached the
style of Van Eyck. Sir Kenneth has pointed to the
similarity between these scenes and the figures on the
stole of St. Donatian in Bruges. These extraordinary
scenes are really little pictures, pictures within a picture,
and as such they resemble nothing in the fifteenth
century so much as the scenes reflected in Jan van
Eyck's mirrors. In the latter part of his career Piero
was fascinated by colour, light reflection, and the
phenomena of vision. He was fond of painting, as I
have mentioned previously, gleaming armour and
precious stones, incomplete forms and figures, views
into secondary spaces, and now, closely related, pictures
within a picture. In all these respects he shows a basic
affinity to Jan van Eyck, whether or not he was influenced
by him.
Sir Kenneth Clark has pointed to instructive relation-
ships between several of the scenes on Augustine's stole
and a number of extant or lost works by Piero. Is
there not also some connection between the powerful
standing Christ in the mitre and Hercules in the
Gardner Museum at Boston ? In stature, posture, and
the position of the arms the figures are similar, though of
course the hands are different.
In discussing the connection of the panels with the
altarpiece Piero made for the church of S. Agostino
in Borgo, Sir Kenneth omits some vital evidence. He
says that St. Augustine " confirms absolutely Mr. Meiss'
hypothesis that these pictures formed part of the S.
Agostino altarpiece. Hitherto, this theory rested on only
one piece of evidence, that the saint in the Poldi Pezzoli
could probably be identified as St. Nicholas of Tolentino;
with the corollarythat as St. Nicholas was an Augustinian
saint, he and his companions must have been painted
for S. Agostino. This is slight enough evidence (although
no slighter than the flimsy foundations on which have
rested half our histories of fifteenth century art), but
Mr. Meiss' confidence in it has been justified." This is
all rather misleading. The presence of Nicholas of
Tolentino had already proved that the altarpiece was
made for an Augustinian church, but neither he nor
indeed St. Augustine is sufficient to identify the panels
with those painted in accordance with the documents
of 1454 and 1469 for S. Agostino in Borgo San Sepolcro.
For this identification I accumulated various kinds of
evidence, and I shall refer here only to the really con-
clusive fact that the donor of the altarpiece commissioned
in 1454 was a certain Angelus, and his patron saint, the
archangel Michael, appears in the place of honour in
the polyptych, bearing the unusual and very pointed
inscription ANGELUS. MILLARD MEISS ,

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