The quality of such sights as these, as I have more than once
repeated, requires to be diligently sought for, and extricated from
many things which overlay or mar it, throughout nearly the whole of
Florentine Renaissance painting. But by good luck there is one painter
in whom we can enjoy it as subtle, but also as simple, as in the
hills and mountains outlined by sunset or gathered into diaphanous
folds by the subduing radiance of winter moon. I am speaking, of
course, of Pier della Francesca; although an over literal school of
criticism stickles at classing him with the other great Florentines.
Nay, by a happy irony of things, the reasons for this exclusion are
probably those to which we owe the very purity and perfection of this
man's Tuscan quality. For the remoteness of his home on the
southernmost border of Tuscany, and in a river valley--that of the
Upper Tiber--leading away from Florence and into Umbria, may have kept
him safe from that scientific rivalry, that worry and vexation of
professional problems, which told so badly on so many Florentine
craftsmen. And, on the other hand, the north Italian origin of one of
his masters, the mysterious Domenico Veneziano, seems to have given
him, instead of the colouring, always random and often coarse, of
contemporary Florence, a harmonious scheme of perfectly delicate,
clear, and flower-like colour. These two advantages are so distinctive
that, by breaking through the habits one necessarily gets into with
his Florentine contemporaries, they have resulted in setting apart,
and almost outside the pale of Tuscan painting, the purest of all
Tuscan artists. For with him there is no need for making allowances or
disentangling essentials. The vivid organic line need not be sought in
details nor, so to speak, abstracted: it bounds his figures, forms
them quite naturally and simply, and is therefore not thought about
apart from them. And the colour, integral as it is, and perfectly
harmonious, masses the figures into balanced groups, bossiness and
bulk, detail and depth, all unified, co-ordinated, satisfying as in
the sun-merged mountains and shelving valleys of his country; and with
the immediate charm of whiteness as of rocky water, pale blue of
washed skies, and that ineffable lilac, russet, rose, which makes the
basis of all southern loveliness. One thinks of him, therefore, as
something rather apart, a sort of school in himself, or at most with
Domenico, his master, and his follower, della Gatta. But more careful
looking will show that his greatest qualities, so balanced and so
clear in him, are shared--though often masked by the ungainlinesses of
hurried artistic growth--by Pollaiolo, Baldovinetti, Pesellino, let
alone Uccello, Castagno, and Masaccio; are, in a word, Tuscan,
Florentine. But more than by such studies, the kinship and nationality
of Pier della Francesca is proved by reference to the other branches
of Tuscan art: his peculiarities correspond to the treatment of line
and projection by those early stonemasons of the Baptistery and the
Pistoia churches, to the treatment of enclosed spaces and manipulated
light in those fifteenth-century sacristies and chapels, to the
treatment of mass and boundary in the finest reliefs of Donatello and
Donatello's great decorative follower Desiderio. To persons, however,
who are ready to think with me that we may be trained to art in fields
and on hillsides, the essential Tuscan character of Pier della
Francesca is brought home quite as strongly by the particular
satisfaction with which we recognise his pictures in some unlikely
place, say a Northern gallery. For it is a satisfaction, _sui generis_
and with its own emotional flavour, like that which we experience on
return to Tuscany, on seeing from the train the white houses on the
slopes, the cypresses at the cross roads, the subtler, lower lines of
hills, the blue of distant peaks, on realising once more our depth of
tranquil love for this austere and gentle country.