Roger Fry and the Re-evaluation of Piero Della Francesca

Book excerpt: Although 19th century art historians appreciated Piero della Francesca and Bernard Berenson and Roberto Longhi loom larger in Piero criticism, Roger Fry occupies a special place in the shaping of public opinion regarding the painter. From the time he first saw the Arezzo frescoes in May 1897 Fry was under the spell of Piero, considering him the greatest Italian painter after Giotto. Elam says Fry's role was to bring together the taste for Piero in English and Italian collectors with the admiration felt for the painter by 19th-century French painters such as Puvis de Chavannes. Fry's place as founder of the Omega Workshops and his enthusiasm for Cezanne made his reverence for Piero seem to be a modern taste. Using Fry's written work, some of it unpublished, Elam notes that Fry highly regarded both Piero's handling of paint and perspective and the lack of emotion in his work. The latter Fry wrestled with, considering it variously a strength and a limitation. Fry's own painting has been said to have an "intellectual clarity of construction" and his Quakerism made him distrust display. Perhaps he felt a personal as well as a critical affinity to Piero as a painter. This text from a lecture at the Frick Collection notes that Roger Fry advised Henry Clay Frick (Rembrandt's Polish Rider) and that the Frick owns several Piero-related works (acquired after Frick's death) but asserts no Frick-Fry-Piero link.