Piero Della Francesca 0714838527, 9780714838526

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Piero della Francesca

Marilyn Aronberg Lavin

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Painted wood.

Wechselburg Schlosskirche

Maxentius, for the office of emperor. There is no artificial framing at the corner, and portions of soldiers and horses seem to emerge from somewhere behind the altar wall. A captain on a rearing horse and a bare-headed trumpeter signal the charge. The impression of great numbers of soldiers is created by the many lances that project beyond the top edge of the fresco. Battle dress includes classical armour - moulded leather cuirasses, skirts and leg-guards - along with other more contemporary types in laminated steel, bearing butterfly knee-hinges in the latest Milanese fashion . All the

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Unlike his evil namesake, who ended his life in suicide, the new Judas, in complying, will be greatly honoured as St Helena's confidant and later as a Church official. They appear together in the next two episodes which are placed on the middle tier of the left wall. Like those involving Sheba, these scenes are arranged in continuous narrative, o~e taking place before a landscape and the other with an architectural setting (102). They represent the liturgical feast formerly celebrated on 3 May: the Invention or Finding of the Cross, and the Proofing of the Cross to distinguish it from those of the two thieves. While following traditional representations of the two episodes quite closely, Piero made a number of innovations. On the left, Helena and her entourage (including an elegantly dressed dwarf and the figure of Judas, who issues directions) gesture towards the workmen who have already discovered one cross and are about to bring up a second from a pit where a worker is half submerged. The mood of the scene is one of intense concentration as all the figures, standing in a rough semicircle, focus on the action, their shared emotion

101 Helena\ entourage.

cutting across differences of social status and ethnic origin.

detail irom the Prootin.r;

The top of the newly found cross overlies a remarkable cityscape that rises behind a saddle in the hills; in the cleaning of the 1980s and 1990s the hills were discovered to have been painted with oil. The town is clearly recognizable as Arezzo wit~ its girdle of crenellated walls, church towers and tiled roofs. Notwithstanding its realism, the view can also be seen as a series of beige, red and black cubes and triangles that draw the back and foreground together and graphically express the transfer of the cross's sacred efficacy from the holy site in Jerusalem to an actual place in Tuscany. These pictorial values are among those that make Piero so attractive to the modem viewer, but they surely also inspired awe in the fifteenth-century citizen and identified the town with a higher perfection, an ideal city where divine miracles could take place. On the right side of this tier, Helena, her women (101 ), a bearded man and nude youth veneraJe a cross held by a workman. Three men, presumably passers-by, observe on the right. They wear the

of the Crus:, (102

102 Finding of the Cross (lehJ; Proofing of the Cross (right). Fresco.

Apse, San Francesco,

Arezzo

type of costumes Piero often used, and the distinctive exotic hats worn over white turbans: one high, flaring and shaped like a stovepipe, another stiff and conical with contrasting brow-band, and the third mushroom-shaped and made out of fur. As in the

Baptism and the Flagellation (see 54 and 62), Piero draws on the repertory of contemporary Byzantium to und~rline the scene's Near-Eastern locale. Piero shows the moment immediately after Christ's cross is identified. Helena had all th'ree crosses placed on the body of a young man being taken on a litter to his burial, and when the 'true' cross touched his flesh, he arose and gave thanks. It is the sight of this miracle that brings the women to their knees. The story in the

Golden Legend says that at this moment the devil was vanquished and he ran off screaming in a loud voice. Once more, the worshippers in this church would have been encouraged to identify the finding of the cross (often called the 'devil's trap') with the civic cleansing of Arezzo by St Francis, when the devils fled the city 'screaming and crying out'. There is still a further level of meaning in this episode, one 0

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that relates Helena to the Virgin Mary in the neighbouring

Annunciation scene around the corner on the first tier of the altar wall. St Ambrose, a figure of whom is painted on the underside of the entrance arch, wrote that as 'Mary (who trapped the devil with her virginity) was visited to liberate Eve ... [so] Helena was visited that emperors might be redeemed'. Ambrose, the earliest of the Fathers of the Church, and the first author to report on the life of St Helena, then quotes her as saying: 'As the holy one bore the Lord, I shall search for his cross ... she showed God to be seen among men; I shall raise from the ruins the standard as a remedy for our sins.' In the Golden Legend's description of Helena's exploits, it is said that she found the crosses near a temple to Venus, which she had destroyed and then replaced with a new basilica. Piero makes reference to these details with an urban setting the likes of which had not been seen before in paint. The three-part church fa~ade,

decorated with roundels, coloured marble veneer and pedimental roof, combines Early Christian elements with new features from the Renaissance. Moreover, the narrow, receding Jerusalem street, of which he gives a partial view, is lined with contemporary Italian palaces. What is perhaps equally striking and historically provocative is the ghostly white dome with lantern, a part of which is visible above the houses. The form is neither that of the Pantheon (the most famous dome in the ancient world, but which has no lantern), nor the cathedral of Florence (the only modern dome complete in Piero's time, but which is not semicircular in outline; see 8). It could possibly refer anachronistically to the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, one of Helena's foundations. That structure had a semicircular shaped dome and a lantern, and was known in the west from charms and models brought back by pilgrims from the Holy Land. The fact remains that there was nothing of this sort yet built in fifteenth-century Italy, and fifty years or so later the architect Donato Bramante (1444-1514) would use the design in his project for the new

basilica of St Peter's in Rome. For three hundred years after its finding by St Helena the cross remained in Jerusalem undisturbed. Then, in the summer of 628 AD, in an attempt to steal its powers, it was carried off by Khosrow II, kin~.gi.the Sassanian Persians. The Byzantine emperor Heraclius came from Constantinople to rescue the relic, and a battle ensued . .;

This historical event is one of the few such cases fully described in the liturgy of the Western Church. The account is read on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cros~ (14 September), the day on which Heraclius restored the cross to Jerusalem. By pairing this battle with Constantine's on the opposite wall, Piero portrays both as justified 'holy wars', of the kind that was currently needed. While giving the battles parallel significance, he contrasted their form, changing the traditional iconography of the later combat in several ways. He made the Battle of Heraclius into a mass conflict as it had never been before (103). More usual were depictions of two knights clashing on a bridge such as Agnolo Gaddi's version

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