Piero della Francesca and the Invention of the Artist (Renaissance Lives) [New ed.] 9781789143218, 1789143217

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p i e r o de l l a f r a n c e s c a

☞ Books in the renaissance

lives series explore and illustrate the life histories and achievements of significant artists, intellectuals and scientists in the early modern world. They delve into literature, philosophy, the history of art, science and natural history and cover narratives of exploration, statecraft and technology. Series Editor: François Quiviger Already published Artemisia Gentileschi and Feminism in Early Modern Europe Mary D. Garrard Blaise Pascal: Miracles and Reason  Mary Ann Caws Caravaggio and the Creation of Modernity  Troy Thomas Giorgione’s Ambiguity  Tom Nichols Donatello and the Dawn of Renaissance Art  A. Victor Coonin Hans Holbein: The Artist in a Changing World  Jeanne Nuechterlein Hieronymus Bosch: Visions and Nightmares  Nils Büttner Isaac Newton and Natural Philosophy  Niccolò Guicciardini John Evelyn: A Life of Domesticity  John Dixon Hunt Leonardo da Vinci: Self, Art and Nature  François Quiviger Michelangelo and the Viewer in His Time  Bernadine Barnes Paracelsus: An Alchemical Life  Bruce T. Moran Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer  Christopher S. Celenza Piero della Francesca and the Invention of the Artist Machtelt Brüggen Israëls Pieter Bruegel and the Idea of Human Nature  Elizabeth Alice Honig Raphael and the Antique  Claudia La Malfa Rembrandt’s Holland  Larry Silver Titian’s Touch: Art, Magic and Philosophy  Maria H. Loh Tycho Brahe and the Measure of the Heavens  John Robert Christianson

P I E R O DE L L A F R A NC E S C A and the Invention of the Artist m a c h t e lt b r ü g g e n i s r a ë l s

R E A K T ION B O OK S

Because of Frans

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd Unit 32, Waterside 44–48 Wharf Road London n1 7ux, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2020 Copyright © Machtelt Brüggen Israëls 2020 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers Printed and bound in China by 1010 Printing International Ltd A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn 978 1 78914 321 8

cover: Piero della Francesca, central panel of the Misericordia Altarpiece, Virgin of Mercy, 1460–62, gold, egg tempera and oil on poplar.

contents

Introduction 7 1 Pupil 11 2 Traveller 31 3 Rhetorician 65 4 Master 114 5 Citizen 131 6 Devotee 154 7 Courtier 186 8 Scientist 229 9 Patron 271 10 Monarch 302 References 311 bibliography 343 Acknowledgements 345 list of illustrations 347 Index 358

Introduction

P

iero della Francesca (c. 1412–1492) died on the eve of a new era, on the day Columbus reached America. Gone blind, the painter spent his last months in his birthplace, Borgo San Sepolcro, aided by a young guide, the future lantern-maker Marco di Longaro. In the words of the poet Zbigniew Herbert, ‘Little Marco could not have known that his hand was leading light.’1 Piero brought space, lumin­ osity and unparalleled subtlety to painting. He wrote books on perspective and geometry. He was a treasured presence at the courts of Ferrara, Rimini, Rome and Urbino. On his frequent returns to Borgo he worked for its city council, churches, convents and confraternities, as well as in his own house. In neighbouring Arezzo he painted his masterpiece, the fresco cycle of the Legend of the True Cross. His pursuits were taken up by artists of the stature of Leonardo da Vinci, authors such as Giorgio Vasari and mathematicians like Luca Pacioli. Then his fame dwindled, only to be revived by modernists and their critics. Ever since his rediscovery Piero’s solemn ratio and sense of the essential have been an inspiration for artists and a beloved subject of art-historical studies. Piero lived in a time that was aware it was forging epochal change. He considered painting a ‘real science’, while the 1 Piero della Francesca, Trumpet Player, detail of illus. 35.

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architect Leon Battista Alberti wrote that artists were progressing without masters, and the humanist Flavio Biondo coined the term ‘Middle Ages’.2 This mentality implied the fifteenth century’s radical break with the recent past. It indicated a historical awareness of a different period in a more distant past, Antiquity, which it aimed to revive and outdo in the present. It did not introduce the term ‘Renaissance’, which was invented in nineteenth-century art history, but it certainly did introduce and live the concept. There is a reality underlying the periodization of the early Renaissance. Intent on the revolutionary achievements of the present and not yet sidetracked by ideas of progression as canonized by Vasari in his Lives of the Artists of 1550 and 1568, fifteenth-century artists were intent on change. And change, as Aristotle knew, is mankind’s only measure of time.3 The Renaissance therefore was a historical movement and Piero was one of its most visually and vocally active protagonists. So, what was so radically new about Piero? Recent decades in particular have seen magnificent archival and historical work on Piero’s life and patrons, in particular by James R. Banker and Frank Dabell, and insightful investigations of his technique, in particular by Roberto Bellucci and Cecilia Frosinini. 4 Critical editions of his treatises have appeared. Unfortunately, a dearth of documents relating directly to his paintings and books has given free rein to interpretations and to a conception of his work as enigma. At the same time, an emphasis on the formal values of Piero’s art has procured him epithets such as impersonal and ineloquent.5 It seems time to readdress the contribution of the early Renaissance artist on the premise that he would have

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Introduction

painted to be understood and heard, not to create mysteries and silence. It seems time to assess his work on the premise that what makes art art is not the art historian, nor the patron, but the artist. In a given situation – historical, social, religious, intellectual and artistic – how did the artist solve the task at hand? How did he invent himself? How did he create his inventions? This book focuses on the works of Piero and uses close looking as its method. It tries to understand the intention of the artist in the hope that, if he were to read the book, he might actually realize that it is his works that are being discussed. Still, while Piero’s paintings need to be understood in their time, they also resound in ours. They are orphans in time. Therefore this book tries to re-enact the past in the present in order to bring that past, Piero’s paintings and, it is to be hoped, some of his intentions affectively near again. The individual chapters of the book reflect various roles whereby Piero invented himself as an artist and his art as an invention. As it is only by relative time and history that invention can be measured, roughly chronological lines dictate the organization of the book at the more capillary level of paragraphs. The first two chapters take Piero’s first surviving work as their starting point to reconstruct, retrospectively, how he came of age. When the book touches on periods in Piero’s life of which more works are known, the pace of the narrative has more thematic and chronological prompts to accelerate. The book therefore has two different speeds: one in which the surviving paintings allow a quicker chase of the workings of Piero’s mind, and another in which their absence forces us to imagine how it might have been. Where, like a restorer using

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tratteggio to suggest the missing parts, it tries to integrate the narrative, or make absences less flagrant. This book is because of Frans Brüggen, magician of time. Because he taught me to listen to time coursing in the silence. Because of our love and happiness. Because of Zephyr and Eos, our children. Because we lived in each other’s arms and he died in mine.

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Pupil

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egend has it that some thousand years ago the pilgrims Arcano and Egidio from Arcadia travelled to the Holy Land and Rome. When they embarked on their return, they carried relics of the Holy Sepulchre in their knapsacks. In the walnut forests of the upper Tiber valley they had a vision. A voice told them to walk no further and their relics were miraculously taken up into the tree besides them. There and then they founded the Town of the Holy Sepulchre with a chapel for their relics. Borgo San Sepolcro, therefore, was a new Arcadia and the visionary daughter of a road and a river.1 The road, the via Romea and its bifurcations, connects Rome, capital of Christendom, in the west to cities in the east such as Urbino, Rimini and the port of Ancona along the Adriatic coast, from where Arcano and Egidio probably planned to set sail. The river, the Tiber, springs from the Apennine Mount Fumaiolo and flows via Borgo and its lush walnut valley to the Tyrrhenian Sea. Beyond the Tiber’s source, to the north, are the cities of Bologna, Modena and Ferrara. At its mouth, in the south, is Rome. It was at this intersection, in Borgo, that around 1412 Piero della Francesca first saw the light. The town, its road and its river drew the pattern of his travels and life.

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origins In the fifteenth century Borgo had some 4,500 inhabitants. They traded in walnut, the preferred wood for furniture, in wool and leather, and in indigo, the blue dye extracted from the woad plant. They led an active social life organized in confraternities. Following the long secular dominion of the Malatesta family of Rimini ruling as papal representatives, in 1430 their town passed to direct papal jurisdiction. In 1441 the pope gave it to Florence, which the year before had helped him to victory over Milan at the Battle of Anghiari. At this crossroads of geographic and political spheres, early fifteenth-century Borgo had a climate auspicious to social mobility. A case in point is Piero’s father, Benedetto di Pietro della Francesca (1375–1464). He started out as a leather worker. Through business and marriages, he engineered a life as a rich and respected merchant. His early widowed mother, the matriarch Francesca, gave the family a distinctive surname to gloss common patronymics. In 1410 Benedetto married Romana (1391–1459), daughter of a certain Renzo di Carlo of the nearby hilltop town of Monterchi. Piero was their firstborn. Of Piero’s siblings, Francesco, Marco, Antonio, Vera and Angelica survived to adulthood. Fulfilling the dream of a good Catholic family, Francesco became a monk, entering the Camaldolese order at the local abbey in 1427. Marco and Antonio continued the family business and married well, as did their sisters.2 Piero married painting. It is hard to say how Benedetto took the news of his oldest taking up the brush, but the boy’s talents must have been apparent. They secured his father’s lifelong support.

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Pupil

As the son of a well-to-do family, Piero could attend the local grammar school for boys up to the age of fourteen. His classmates would have included his cousin Francesco di Benedetto del Cera, known as Francesco dal Borgo, Malatesta Cattani and Jacopo Anastagi; they would go on to be, respect­ ively, an architect, a bishop and a councillor of the Malatesta in Rimini. Maestro Girolamo da Fano and later maestro Jacomo da Gubbio would have taught them volgare, or Italian, and some reading knowledge of Latin. Piero had the benefit of a merchant father, double-dyed in geometrical and arithmetical tricks, to teach him abaco, or mercantile mathematics, for which no schools existed in Borgo. For the aspiring painter the town lacked a challenging master. Borgo had previously commissioned work by artists from Siena and attracted painters from neighbouring centres, including Ottaviano Nelli (1375–1444) from Gubbio and Antonio di Giovanni (fl. 1430–62) from Anghiari.3 Piero is first documented in Borgo as a well-paid twenty-year-old assistant of Antonio d’Anghiari. His apprenticeship would have started elsewhere, in his early or mid-teens, the only age at which the artisanal aspects of painting could be learned. His undocumented time as a painter’s apprentice can be read back from his first picture, the Baptism of Christ.4 the baptism Piero’s Baptism of Christ (illus. 2), now in the National Gallery in London, once graced the high altar of San Giovanni Battista in Val d’Afra in Borgo.5 The church served parishioners of southeastern Borgo and the adjacent valley of the Afra,

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a tributary of the Tiber. It had been built in 1381 as a simple, barn-like structure. Dreams for a high altarpiece materialized as of 1419, when a parishioner, Agnolo di Cisco, called Bovone, promised the profits from the sale of two houses to finance its carpentry. The creation of an altarpiece was a major event in Borgo. Only the high altars of its churches had polyptychs, whereas the side altars made do with murals, or simple statuary. On 21 December 1433 a local noble, Luca di Guido Pichi, saw to the execution of Agnolo’s last wish. Nicoluccio di Nicoloso Graziani, the church’s rector from 1433 to 1464, commissioned the carpentry. Fully paid for four years later, it was made by the woodworker Benedetto del Cera, the father of Piero’s cousin Francesco dal Borgo. The design was provided by Antonio d’Anghiari, who would also have been the designated candidate for painting it. During the long time it took to finish the woodwork the odds turned against Antonio. The shifting allegiances of Nicoluccio began to transpire in 1437 when he selected Piero as a witness to his last will. It was Piero who at an unknown moment started to paint the altarpiece. He painted a divine manifestation. True to the church’s dedication and the river life of its parishioners, he represented the key act of St John the Baptist. In the valley of the Jordan, John recognizes Jesus Christ as the Son of God and baptizes him (John 1:29–34). Primordially pale of skin, eyes downcast, hands folded in front of his chest, weight poised on his right leg, Christ stands frontally in a ford of the river meandering through a sun-bathed landscape. He is naked except for a white loincloth rimmed with gold-embroidered pseudo-Semitic script, which positions him in the Holy Land.

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Pupil

The water laps around his ankles as from the riverbank John steps in with a tilted bowl of turned wood in his raised right hand. From the bowl, water trickles over Christ’s head, shimmering between the strands of his fair hair. Above Christ, from the heavens behind the crown of the big walnut tree at his left side, a golden emanation showers down. In it the Holy Ghost descends as a white dove. The source of the divine light is hidden from the viewer by the foliage, but is visible to a procession of four men with Byzantine hats at the riverbank in the near distance. One of them has come to a halt and gives testimony, raising his gaze and arm to the sky. They are probably the priests and Levites sent from Jerusalem to question John. In the curve of the river between the priests and the Baptist, a catechumen is preparing for baptism by pulling his white tunic over his head. He cannot see and, unlike the priests, he is therefore unaware of the source of the divine emanation. Piero juxtaposes seeing and not seeing by painting the catechumen’s body struggling in its obscuring tunic arching over the amazed priest in the background. At the other side of the walnut tree, three angels attend in wonder attesting to the divinity of Christ’s nature, as the Baptism is considered his first manifestation as a divine being. An angel in stark red and blue at the far left is depicted from the back, but with its head turned in perfect profile to mirror the Baptist’s, its hand raised to mirror his. The middle angel, wearing a circlet of white and pink roses in its hair and donning a classical white peplos that leaves one shoulder exposed, as in the Wounded Amazon by the ancient Greek sculptor Phidias, is awestruck at the sight of Christ and clasps hands with its companion to the right. Dressed in woad-dyed dusty

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blue, this angel stands closest to the river and over its shoulder safeguards Christ’s pink robe. While leaning on its companion, it looks out of the painting from around the trunk of the walnut tree, arrestingly locking his gaze with the viewer’s. Light is reflected in the river, except for the ford on a slope of which Christ and John are standing. There are waterlines around their ankles and the pebbles show in the riverbed. John Pecham, a thirteenth-century theorist of optics, noted that contrary to oblique rays of light, which are refracted by a translucent material, rays at right angles penetrate it. To the Arab scientist of optics, Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham; c. 965– c. 1040), whose work was known in translation, the difference between reflection and transparency was as clear-cut as a sword being either deflected off a surface or penetrating it. Piero honed observation to optic theory and painted an abrupt transition where divine light hits the water at right angles. Light penetrating water without breaking it had become a metaphor for divine mysteries in, for example, Dante’s Divine Comedy (Paradiso ii.34–6). In the Baptism, the free passage of heavenly rays might be a figure of the mystery of God’s manifestation as light.6 In the distance, the river mirrors the sky, hills and background figures. The valley is in May attire, graced by verdant but still fruitless walnut trees that were as recognizable to Piero and his contemporaries as to their legendary pilgrim founding fathers. The broom scrub is blossoming. John has used some of its branches without removing the flowers to tie his tunic of camel-hair skin around his waist. Walnut saplings and plants indigenous to Tuscany, such as buttercups, black bindweed, verrain, liquorice, great plantain and myrtle, grow

2 Piero della Francesca, The Baptism of Christ, c. 1442–5, egg tempera and gold on poplar.

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in the foreground. Trees and trunks in the fields help the valley’s inhabitants to heat their houses, much as they help the painting’s space to recede measurably. They also reflect John’s warning to Jews who took Baptism without true conviction that ‘Every tree . . . that doth not yield good fruit, shall be cut down’ (Matthew 3:10, also Luke 3:9). The countryside represents the upper Tiber valley. At the far end a road leads up to a walled and turreted city reminiscent of Borgo huddled against the Apennines. It might represent the road that in the 1330s Bishop Guido Tarlati of Arezzo cut at a straight line through the landscape between Borgo and Anghiari after he had seized control of the two towns. Also biblically the road is made straight, as John had replied to the Levites’ query, with ‘I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, make straight the way of the Lord’ (John 1:23). The sun is climbing toward its zenith from the right, casting strong shadows on Christ’s torso and John’s right leg. The direction of the light corresponds to the light flowing in from a window in the south wall of the altarpiece’s church. Even in the shadows Piero renders light, but by omission. By leaving the thinnest of lines unpainted around his figures, especially at the shaded side, he keeps the underlying white gesso prepar­ ation exposed to represent the reflected light playing in the hair on the skin. It is a skill of great command in execution and foresight in planning that was also used by Netherlandish masters.7 Lucid flesh colours, over the lightest of green underlayers, have set the obfuscated skin of earlier tempera painting aglow. The painting’s tonality is blond, with its pale whites, blues and reds against foliage and fields in greys and once mossy-bright, but now browned copper greens.

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Pupil

Piero has a descriptive, realist eye in the service of meaning. There is consequential logic in what he chooses to represent and a sense of the essential in what he leaves out. Details such as the broom twig around John’s tunic and the concealed face of the catechumen are thematically precise and not redundant. The choice for blond colours, limpid lucidity, a blue instead of traditional golden sky, the landscape setting, reflections and transparencies serve the divine manifestation as unfolded in the biblical story. Piero’s imagination, true to both the Bible and the world of the beholder, provides the viewer with arguments for belief in a divine truth. There is symmetry, but not quite. Christ is placed exactly along the panel’s vertical axis, along which also the divine light and the Holy Spirit are aligned. Placed off-centre to Christ’s left, however, is a single tree rising to twice his height. Likewise, Piero uses the contrapposto reverberating through Christ’s body to disrupt symmetry, even in a detail such as the folded hands. Their delicate position with fingers almost touching allows for bravura foreshortening with a view of the thumbs. In conformity to his body’s contrapposto, Christ’s right hand is slightly higher than his left, enacting a subtle inclination towards the Baptist. Space is orchestrated with rigour. To achieve spatial logic in the modelling of cloths over bodies, Piero sometimes even painted the nude first and then costumed it. Christ’s thighs are visible to the naked eye under his loincloth. So are the catechumen’s head and arm under the tunic that he is wrestling to take off. Even though Piero seems to have known the figure in already fully clad state in a mural by Gentile da Fabriano (see illus. 4), he re-planned his by drawing the full

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nude before the tunic. John’s cheeks were painted before his beard, the tree’s branches before its leaves. The figure groups and even subsequent changes were prepared on individual cartoons, which were pricked for transfer to the panel by pouncing, or spolvero. The horizon runs through the town in the distance, with the result that the heads of the figures are delineated against the sky and the viewer is forced at kneeling height. The rapid decrease in dimension implies that the viewer is nearby, in devotional close-up. Piero’s placement of ever-smaller trees and ever-smaller clouds in an ever-paler sky achieves a measured space even in landscape. Piero is nature’s formal gardener. At the National Gallery in London the Baptism is shown in isolation. In books it is reproduced alone. It was, however, the predisposed centre of a Gothic polyptych (illus. 3). The deep holes in the sides of the main tier panels, into which rectangular iron bars were slotted for alignment, could only have been chiselled before the delicate operation of painting began. This shows that the Baptism was not an individual panel subsequently adapted to become the centre of an altarpiece, but was designed as part of the triptych from the outset. For reasons unknown, Piero did not complete the rest of the work. That fell, in the late 1450s, to a Sienese master of Borgo descent. Matteo di Giovanni (c. 1425/30–c. 1495) painted on the lateral panels sturdy figures of Peter and Paul against a gold ground, with several small figures in the piers and nowmissing quatrefoil-shaped pinnacles, and in the predella scenes of the Baptist and the coats of arms of the church works and their rector, Nicoluccio Graziani. In the gable above the Baptism was the image of God the Father in a

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roundel, completing the Trinitarian implications of Baptism, ‘in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit’. The predella, like Piero’s main panel, reflects the dedication of the church to John the Baptist. The saint was also patron of Florence, which had ruled Borgo since 1441. In that context, Peter and Paul might refer to the papal and Florentine victory at Anghiari on 29 June 1440, the feast day of Sts Peter and Paul.8 It seems that the full programme of the triptych was foreseen from the outset, a couple of years after the carpentry had been finished, and that it was drafted while the heat of the battle was still felt. It was probably not foreseen, however, that Piero would not paint all of it. 3 Hypothetical reconstruction of the high altarpiece of San Giovanni Battista in Val d’Afra in Borgo started by Piero della Francesca in about 1442–5 and finished by Matteo di Giovanni in the late 1450s, egg tempera and gold on poplar.

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sources How to explain Piero’s achievements in the Baptism, his earliest work, which include knowledge of a composition by Gentile da Fabriano (c. 1375–1427), sense of space and atmosphere, ease at pairing a Renaissance style with a Gothic triptych, awareness of Byzantine dress, giving structure by painting features even when they would be overlapped, an eye for landscape, intuition of the reflective qualities of water, generating luminosity by holding contours in reserve, and learned insights into the arts of Antiquity? How did Piero arrive at this point? Piero was a prodigy, or sought his education beyond Borgo, or – more likely – both. Travelling would certainly be a persistent characteristic of his adult life. It also was a perk that came with being an affluent merchant’s son, a social status that was more elevated than that of most aspirant painters of Renaissance Italy. Rather than look­ing for a specific magisterial master or source, however, we will heed the words of Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472). Poly­ math humanist, architect and theorist, Alberti wrote in the dedication of the first, vernacular version of his treatise on painting of 1435, Della pittura, that the artists of his day deserved the greatest merit for inventing new arts and sciences without the benefit of similar achievements shared by the generations immediately preceding them, whereas the artists of Antiquity had had models to imitate and improve upon. The inventiveness of the fifteenth-century artist transcends simple art-historical ideas of stylistic influence between masters or precedence between centres. It seems time to focus on the culture of Borgo and beyond from which Piero could

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have taken his cues, without losing sight of his talent, genius and originality. Already in the latter half of the 1420s the youngster may have been attracted by the bustling artistic activity that the return of the papacy from more than a century of residence in Avignon had brought to Rome, down the river from papal fiefdom Borgo. Gentile da Fabriano, the most famous artist of his day, with a style of chiselled refinement and exquisite technique, would have needed help on the scaffolds for the fresco cycle of the legend of the Baptist that Pope Martin v Colonna (r. 1417–31) had commissioned from him for the Lateran basilica.9 In his early Baptism Piero borrowed the figure of an undressing catechumen from Gentile’s rendering of the event. The nave frescos are long lost, but this one is documented in a drawing (illus. 4) by the workshop of 4 Workshop of Pisanello, drawing after Gentile da Fabriano’s now-lost Baptism of Christ in San Giovanni in Laterano in Rome, 1431–2, metal point and ink on parchment.

5 Masolino, central panel of the back of the Santa Maria Maggiore Altarpiece: Miraculous Foundation of Santa Maria Maggiore, 1428–30, egg tempera and tooled gold on poplar.

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Pisanello (c. 1395–1455), who in 1431–2 succeeded Gentile on the Lateran scaffolds. Piero’s deftness at using gold, the pale complexion and the mass of his figures, and the botanical and atmospheric exploration of his landscapes are indebted to the last works of Gentile. At Gentile’s death in 1427, if Piero was indeed in Rome and lingered on, Piero could have orbited around Masolino (c. 1383–c. 1436), the master of an elegant International Gothic inflected with a soft atmospheric sense of space, who frescoed a chapel in the Roman church of San Clemente. Masolino also finished the double-sided altarpiece for Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. It had been begun by the Florentine Masaccio (1401–1428), who paired the virile spatiality of his figures with the linear perspective he was taught by his compatriot, the architect Filippo Brunelleschi. Masaccio’s foreshortening of the Baptist’s leg in the latter altarpiece could have provided the ground for the leg of Piero’s Christ in the Baptism. Masolino’s use of clouds to render the sky perspectival in the same altarpiece’s Miraculous Foundation of Santa Maria Maggiore (illus. 5) could have informed Piero’s use of them in the Baptism. Masolino’s use of templates to repeat details of figures, of oil as a medium, of holding contours in reserve against the white ground, and of luminous white instead of green as an underlayer for flesh parts, would also have inspired the young artist from Borgo.10 Piero may have shared such an early Roman itinerary with a future colleague, the near contemporary Domenico Veneziano (fl. 1438–61), whose formative years are as shrouded in lack of documentation as Piero’s, but who may have trained with Gentile at the Lateran.11 Piero’s first documented activity dates to June 1431 and finds him in Borgo. In that year and the following, his father

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sees to collecting payments for his underage son (legal age arrived at 25) for humble tasks that other major artists often also undertook. In June 1431 Benedetto’s figliuolo painted candlesticks for the confraternity of Santa Maria della Notte. In August he made a banner on a pole with a gilt ball at the top, for which he and his father also made a trip to Arezzo to acquire the necessary materials. On 9 December 1432 Piero is first called pictor, or painter, when his father has it registered that Antonio d’Anghiari is owing a debt of no less than 56 florins to his son. The money was due for materials and work that had gone into the painting of the high altarpiece for the church of San Francesco, possibly since 9 October 1430, when Antonio had signed the contract. Benedetto may have taken the legal step to let a notary register Piero’s share, since Antonio did not proceed well with the commission and had so far used Piero’s services for free. The sum would have bought a small house in Borgo. It seems to indicate an almost egalitarian relationship between Antonio and Piero. In 1426 the Franciscans had commissioned from the carpenter Bartolomeo di Giovannino d’Angelo the woodwork for an enormous double-sided high altarpiece. They wanted it to look like the Resurrection Altarpiece (illus. 6) that the Sienese Niccolò di Segna had painted around distant 1348 for Borgo’s main church, the Camaldolese abbey of San Giovanni Evangelista. The finished carpentry for the Franciscans had been tested on the high altar and was still sitting there, unpainted, when in 1430 Antonio was asked to start work on the front. Antonio seems to have luxuriated in the thought of the commission, but did not bring anything much to fruition. The Franciscans were not amused. In 1437 Antonio

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was ignominiously discharged. The friars begged him to return the real estate that he had received as pre-payment. Antonio d’Anghiari slunk away from Borgo and set up shop in Arezzo. On 5 September 1437 a new painter, Sassetta from Siena (c. 1400–1450), came over to sign the contract for an entirely new, now disassembled and dispersed, double-sided structure to be carpentered and painted (illus. 7). It had to be like the one on which Antonio and Piero had worked and which was shown to Sassetta ‘already constructed and gessoed’. This is the sole indication of the work that Piero and 6 Reconstruction of the Resurrection Altarpiece for the abbey (now cathedral) of San Giovanni Evangelista in Borgo by Niccolò di Segna, after 1348, egg tempera and gold on poplar.

7 Reconstruction of the Borgo San Sepolcro Altarpiece (or Franciscan Altarpiece) by Sassetta, front and back, 1437–44, egg tempera and tooled gold and silver on poplar.

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Antonio had put into it, although they may also have made preparatory drawings and acquired gold and pigments.12 In the altarpiece for San Francesco, as later in the Baptism, Piero would have learned to wed styles new and old, to rhyme brash design with a Gothic polyptych. What profit would the partnership have brought the two painters? Antonio’s rather careless spindly hand has been detected in a fresco in Sant’Agostino in Borgo and suggests little stylistic affinity with Piero, master of restraint. Antonio’s mediocre talent would hardly have nurtured Piero’s. Working alongside Antonio would, however, have imprinted on Piero the tricks of Tuscan fresco and panel-painting traditions, with some local particularities such as the priming of wood supports with a layer of carbon black, possibly for insulation, before coating it with gesso (as in illus. 41, 52, 53, for example). Between 1432 and 1436, as Antonio d’Anghiari fell from grace, Piero seems to have tried his luck elsewhere. He may have travelled to Siena, if only to see his childhood friend Malatesta Cattani, who in 1434 had enrolled in the Sienese university. Here Piero may have got to know the work of Sassetta before the Sienese artist’s takeover of the Franciscan altarpiece in Borgo. Piero may have seen the Virgin of the Snow that Sassetta installed in Siena Cathedral in early 1433. In the angels holding the crown over the Virgin’s head, Sassetta plays a game of mirrored shapes, colour and lighting schemes that is the kernel of inspiration for the angels who open the pavilion in Piero’s later Madonna del Parto (see illus. 49). The predella of Sassetta’s altarpiece contains landscapes under blue skies that are streaked with clouds scanning aerial space, as in Piero’s Baptism. Sassetta’s Assumption (destroyed; formerly held in the

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Kaiser-Friedrich Museum, Berlin), probably started in 1436, has a Virgin with hands folded in the same subtly asymmetrical way as Christ’s in Piero’s Baptism. Sassetta’s use of pricked cartoons for entire compositions would have nurtured Piero’s craving for command of the design process.13 Piero worked with Antonio in Borgo again in 1436, painting banners for the towers of the city walls and shields with the coats of arms of Pope Eugenius iv Condulmer (r. 1431– 47) for the city gates. Piero’s work in Borgo, the debacle of the altarpiece for the Franciscans notwithstanding, made an impression on his fellow townsmen, as in 1437 we find him witnessing the testament of Nicoluccio Graziani, who would commission him to paint the triptych for San Giovanni d’Afra, of which the central panel would become the Baptism. But he didn’t paint it quite yet. On 8 January 1438 Benedetto once again acted as his son’s administrator in dealings with Antonio. Benedetto not only settled the affairs of the Franciscan altarpiece for good, he also received 60 lire for work and materials that Piero had put into other collaborative work with Antonio in Borgo and surroundings, all now lost: murals in the Laudesi chapel of San Lorenzo in the Badia, a panel for the church of Sant’Angelo in nearby Citerna, and an Annunciation for a certain Antonio da Marcena in the church of Sant’Agostino. This was the end of Piero’s partnership with Antonio. Piero was over 25 years old and therefore adult, so his age was no longer the reason that his father stood proxy. Piero had left Borgo.

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he Council of Ferrara and Florence of 1438–9 attracted Piero like a magnet. Attempting a union of the Latin and Greek churches in the face of Ottoman expansion, it found among its participants dignitaries from west and east, including Byzantine Emperor John viii Palaeologus (r. 1425–48). The Byzantines were a feast for artists’ eyes. Pisanello was allowed near the emperor to do his portrait for a medal (illus. 8).1 He recorded him wearing the skiadion, the tall domed imperial hat with large brim. The painter and medallist also drew the extravagantly dressed imperial retinue (illus. 9). fer r ar a and flor ence It is likely that Piero joined the older artist in Ferrara at the occasion of the Council. Piero used impressions of its Byzantine attendees in the background of the Baptism (see illus. 2), where he painted priests with unusual hats, including one in the shape of an inverted truncated cone, a Byzantine kalimavkion. The Florentine bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci (1421–1498), who witnessed the Council once it had relocated to Florence, recorded the current idea that Byzantine

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dress had been unaltered since Antiquity.2 Piero would use it in his early work whenever he wanted to situate his narrative in the antique times of Christ. In 1439 Piero was in Florence.3 He was living with Domenico Veneziano, whom he may have known from the apprenticeship years spent together in Rome. In 1438 Domenico had written a letter to Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici in Ferrara asking for a job in Florence. He was disappointed on failing to obtain the commission for the high altarpiece for San Marco, which went to Fra Angelico. He was, however, allotted a worthy alternative at Sant’Egidio, the church of the city’s main hospital. Between 1439 and 1445, under the patronage of Medici banker Tommaso Portinari, Domenico painted on the north wall of its main chapel a cycle of the legend of the Virgin comprising the Encounter at the Golden Gate, the Birth of the Virgin, and the Marriage of the Virgin. Only a few, detached fragments survive, including the sinopia of the lowest scene in which the figure of the Virgin has been drawn in the nude so that she might be more convincingly costumed 8 Pisanello, portrait medal: Emperor John viii Palaeologus with, on the reverse, The Emperor and a Member of His Retinue on Horseback, c. 1438–43, cast bronze.

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in fresco (illus. 10). Domenico’s Adoration (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin) gives an idea of his style of these years, courtly in the tradition of Pisanello, with attention to lush detail, and not yet quite the painter of light that he would soon become. The chapel decoration also saw the involvement of an artist of a previous generation, Bicci di Lorenzo. An indication that Piero may have briefly joined the team, or orbited around it, is a record of 12 September 1439 in the hospital’s account books: he brought a small payment for the work to Domenico. It is how we know that they were staying together. Now aged about 27, Piero could have visited the workshops of Florentine colleagues, such as Paolo Uccello (1397–1475), who already used spolvero for figures and experimented with perspective in extreme degrees. 4 An example of the latter is the painted cenotaph of 1436 of John Hawkwood in the 9 Pisanello, Figures from the Retinue of Emperor John viii Palaeologus, the Emperor on Horseback, Head of a Horse and an Arabic Inscription, 1438, pen and ink on paper.

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cathedral, which uses a di sotto in su view of the tomb to create the most imposing effect, but, to avoid distortion, skips to a frontal view for the equestrian group on top. Another is the set of panel paintings of the Battle of San Romano, which Uccello painted in 1436–40 for the Florentine Bartolini Salimbeni family (for example, illus. 11).5 They have landscapes in which depth is measured by fallen soldiers and broken lances. In the church of Santa Maria Novella, Piero would have seen the Trinity with the Virgin, St John the Evangelist and Two Donors of 1425 in which Masaccio, aided by Brunelleschi, had treated the picture as an opening in the wall and applied the new art of linear perspective to near perfection. Although Florence was an artistic greenhouse, Piero never took root there. In the 1440s, just like Alberti, Piero alternated between the buzz of innovation in Florence and the intellectual vibrancy at the court of the Este family in Ferrara. Alberti wrote about perspective in his treatise on painting of 1435–6 and, judging by Pisanello’s perspectival drawing (Département des Arts Graphiques, Louvre, Paris, inv. 2520), spread the word of that new art in Ferrara, much as in Florence.6 We can 10 Domenico Veneziano, sinopia from Sant’Egidio, Florence: The Marriage of the Virgin, c. 1439–45, sinoper on plaster.

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imagine him discussing it with Piero. On 6 September 1440 Piero was in Modena, which was part of the Este dominions. He was witness to the contract of his fellow-Tuscan Michele da Firenze (c. 1385–c. 1455), a collaborator of Pisanello in Verona. Following the success of a polychrome terracotta altarpiece finished earlier that year for the new church of Santa Maria degli Angeli at the Este delizia, or country estate, of Belfiore near Ferrara, Michele was asked to repeat the feat for the high altar of Modena Cathedral (illus. 12). By 1482 this highly Gothic work had already been moved to a side chapel, whereas some fragments of the polychrome Belfiore Altarpiece have been tentatively identified with reliefs in the Seminario Arci­ vescovile in Ferrara. The style of Michele’s work may have been Gothic, but his material, terracotta, was a Renaissance reinvention of an art last practised in Antiquity (Pliny the Elder, Naturalis historia, or Natural History, xxxv.43–6).7 According to Vasari, Piero also worked for the Este in Ferrara, decorating various rooms in their Palazzo di Piazza. 11 Paolo Uccello, Niccolò Mauruzi da Tolentino at the Battle of San Romano, c. 1436–40, egg tempera and oil on poplar.

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The programme vanished by the beginning of the next century with the modernization of the building. All members of the Este family occupied separate apartments and Piero appears to have worked in that of Leonello (1407–1450), who as of 1441 was marquis of Ferrara and lord of Modena.8 Two paintings of about 1530–40 depicting chivalric battle scenes (illus. 13, 14), now in Baltimore and London, have so many 12 Michele da Firenze, Altarpiece of the Statuettes, 1440–41, polychrome terracotta, Modena Cathedral.

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idiosyncrasies in common with Piero’s later Beheading of Chosroes (see illus. 35) that they have been plausibly recognized as copies of Piero’s work in the Este palace.9 One of them shows Leonello (illus. 14). They might depict the Second Punic War’s Battle of Zuma at which the strategic genius Scipio Africanus defeated Hannibal. Such imagery was described at Ferrara by the early 1440s.10 With his military and humanist upbringing, Leonello basked in the example of the generous and art-loving general praised first by Livy and then by Petrarch. Alternatively, their subject might be culled from chivalric romance, as one of the knights is black, corresponding to the literature’s convention of depicting pagans as Saracens or black Africans. The Este family read chivalric tales for pleasure. Dozens of such texts are present in the list of their manuscripts drawn up in 1436. Niccolò iii (r. 1393–1441) named many of his children after heroes and heroines of romance literature, including Melia­­­duse (Meliaduns), Leonello (Lionel), Borso (Bohort), Ginevra (Guinevere) and Isotta (Isolde). Leonello’s first wife was Marghe­­rita Gonzaga (1418–1439), who in the Palazzo di Piazza at Ferrara had a ‘Lancelot chamber’, doubtlessly referring to medieval French Arthurian romance.11 Court culture at Ferrara would have taught Piero that classical heroes found their complement in honour-bound chivalric literature. A setting could be Renaissance and medieval at the same time. The copies of Piero’s Ferrarese battle scenes suggest they had high horizons and high mountains, much as the Battle by Uccello (see illus. 11). Piero also seems to have taken from Uccello the device of using foreshortened bodies of fallen soldiers to scan the ground. His interest in depicting horses from their impressive behinds was likewise dear to Pisanello

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(see illus. 9). A spectacular encounter between rearing horses, just as in one of the Ferrara battle scene copies, is carved on the antique Phaeton sarcophagus (illus. 15) that once lined the steps leading up to the Capitol in Rome, where Piero and Pisanello may have seen it.12 The Este court humanist Angelo Decembrio appears to describe Piero and his battle paintings when he writes in his De politia litteraria (On Literary Polish) of the 1450s, set in the context of the court of Marquis Leonello in Ferrara during the years 1441–4: 13 Venetian artist working for Ferrara, after Piero della Francesca (?), Battle Scene, c. 1530–40, oil on panel.

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The art of subtle poets and painters is nearly the same, and they have this same refinement, that they do not make full display of all the faces of all the men or beasts they describe, or of their hands, their feet, or of the full figure of their bodies, but show some involved with others, or hidden, or turned away, or lying prone, and others entire and erect, as we often see in pictures of battles.13 Piero is extremely ambitious in applying the kind of variety in expressive poses that Alberti in On Painting (ii.40) appreciated in istorie, or narratives. He created a tangled hand-to-hand battle of mounted and foot soldiers that can nonetheless be unravelled in a patient visual puzzle, because he fully conceived of figures even where they would overlap. Decembrio continues to comment how the marquis, an avid collector of ancient gems, admired artists of classical

14 Northern Italian artist, after Piero della Francesca (?), Battle Scene, c. 1530–40, oil on panel.

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Antiquity for representing the nude, as the natural shape of men, God’s creation, is constant and not subject to the fashion of the day.14 Leonello would therefore have appreciated how the deeper artists of his own time first proportioned bodies and their postures to accord with nature before costuming them. In his wood crucifix (c. 1415) for Santa Maria Novella in Florence Brunelleschi had sculpted Christ in the nude before draping a cloth soaked in gesso around his loins.15 Alberti had subsequently advised in On Painting (ii.36) that ‘for a clothed figure we first have to draw the naked body beneath and then cover it with clothes’. This is what Piero did, in, for example, the catechumen and Christ in the Baptism, and later in Christ on the Cross in the Misericordia Altar­ piece, the virtues in the Triumph of Battista Sforza and Pudicitia and the child in the Senigallia Madonna (see illus. 2, 41, 68, 69).16 The marquis also collected pictures by Netherlandish masters, who in courtly circles were considered the greatest painters of their day.17 In Ferrara Piero could have seen a 15 Ancient Roman sculptor, front of a sarcophagus: The Fall of Phaeton, 2nd century ad, marble.

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now-lost triptych by Rogier van der Weyden (1399/1400– 1464) with Adam and Eve, the Deposition and a suppliant. It is not clear when the Este acquired it, but the humanist Ciriaco d’Ancona described it in 1449.18 Later, in 1450, the marquis ordered certain pictures, ‘certe depinture’, from the painter in Brussels, who would also portray Leonello’s son Francesco (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).19 Piero may have culled ideas about representing gold brocade and the reflective water surface from Rogier or other Netherlandish artists (illus. 16). Piero was a close observer of Italian nature, but the silvery rendering of the Jordan in the Baptism most likely springs from a Netherlandish source eagerly absorbed at the Ferrarese court. Likewise, his method of holding luminous contours of figures in reserve indicates familiarity with the technique of Netherlandish masters. In addition to chivalric literature, gems and Netherlandish art, Leonello treasured portraiture on medals and in painting. In 1441 he staged a contest between Pisanello and Jacopo Bellini, who both had to portray him. Piero would have remembered the images in rigorous profile when he had to do lordly portraits. Maybe it was in this period that Piero frescoed a chapel in the Ferrarese church of Sant’Agostino, which belonged to

16 Jan van Eyck, bas-de-page of fol. 93v of the Turin-Milan Hours: The Baptism of Christ, 1422–5, egg tempera and gold on parchment.

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Observant Augustinian nuns and was founded in 1425 and consecrated in 1441.20 The murals were already ruined by humidity in Vasari’s time and the church was demolished in 1813. In 1442 Piero was once more immersed in the Florentine art world. That is, if he is indeed the ‘Piero di Benedetto’ – unusually named in a foreign context without reference to his home town– who on 12 April of that year brought a small payment to his colleague Filippo Lippi (1406–1469).21 He may in some way have assisted with the spatially complex Coronation of the Virgin (Uffizi, Florence) for the high altar of the monastery church of Sant’Ambrogio in Florence on which Filippo was then working. the baptism and borgo again By July 1442 Piero may have come back to Borgo, when he was selected a member of the Consiglio del Popolo, even though it did not meet that year. We have followed the prodigy who after a formative absence of three years has arrived at the point at which he could have started to paint the Baptism. His experience in Ferrara and Florence taught him several of its characteristics: an appreciation of the structural importance of painting features even when they would be overlapped, an eye for landscape, the reflective qualities of water, the luminosity generated by holding contours in reserve, and learned insights into the arts of Antiquity. That he finished only the Baptism, the central panel of the triptych for San Giovanni d’Afra, may have to do with the lure of fame in and beyond his home town. In Borgo the Baptism was of lucid novelty. Like a lamp in the dark attracting

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moths, it inspired other commissions. On 11 June 1445 the Confraternity of Santa Maria della Misericordia asked Piero, who was present in Borgo, to paint an altarpiece on a new wood structure. It had to be shaped like the unpainted carpentry of an earlier attempt of 1428. The confraternity promised Piero 150 florins, which it hoped to obtain mainly through gifts of the local Pichi family. Work became protracted because of the complicated finances and Piero’s restlessness. In 1450 the new wood structure still had not been made and in 1454 the confraternity asked Piero’s father to reimburse an advance payment of 1446 if his son did not return to Borgo immediately. So, after finishing a panel of one altarpiece and accepting the commission for another, Piero left Borgo again. urbino, pesaro, lor eto, bologna and naples In the latter half of the 1440s there are few indications of Piero’s whereabouts. Vasari had little difficulty in filling in the gaps, but his evidence is hard to corroborate. Piero would have first done paintings with small figures for the ‘old count’ of Urbino, named here as Guidubaldo di Montefeltro (b. 1472; r. 1482–1508), but possibly intending Federico di Montefeltro (b. 1422; r. 1444–82). Vasari may have alluded to the Flagellation (see illus. 37). Piero would also have worked in Pesaro, where in 1445, with the help of Federico di Montefeltro, power passed to Alessandro Sforza (1409–1473), Federico’s future father-in-law and a captain of fortune and Maecenas like him, of whose commissions preciously little remains.22 In a sacristy of the shrine of the Virgin in Loreto, Piero would have collaborated with Domenico Veneziano. According

to Vasari’s vita of Domenico this happened before Piero’s Florentine interlude, but according to the vita of Piero this was after it. The two masters would have completed only part of the vault and left the rest unfinished because of the plague, leaving it to Piero’s pupil Luca Signorelli (1441–1523) to complete it later. Loreto was and is a site of liquefied devotion. 17 Central Italian artist, after Piero della Francesca (?), King Alfonso v of Aragon, called the Magnanimous, 1450s, egg tempera on panel.

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It is where angels had allegedly flown an image of the Virgin. Countless votive gifts accumulated at her feet. As of the 1470s it was even believed that in 1291–5, after the Saracen invasion of Palestine, the Virgin’s foundation-less house in Nazareth had been flown by angels to Loreto for safekeeping. Also as of the 1470s, that house was encased in the present sanctuary. At the time when, according to Vasari, Piero visited Loreto the church amounted to little more than the house. The sacristy where Signorelli worked in 1484–7 did not yet exist.23 Vasari’s claim that Piero worked in Loreto is as without foundation as the Virgin’s house in Loreto. In addition there is the testimony of Piero’s compatriot, the mathematician Luca Pacioli (1446/8–1517), who in his De divina proportione (On the Divine Proportion, i.19) of 1509 lists Bologna among the places where Piero was active. Nothing remains, but there might be truth to it as in the 1470s Giovanni Testa Cillenio, a poet at the Este court of Ferrara, in a book dedicated to Giovanni ii Bentivoglio, lord of Bologna, called Piero ‘divine’.24 Finally, a portrait by a fifteenth-century central Italian painter (illus. 17) – now in the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris and showing King Alfonso v of Aragon (1396–1458), who in 1443 had taken possession of Naples – suggests in its profile, volumetric thinking, black background (see illus. 22), armour and crown like the Queen of Sheba’s (see illus. 28) – but not in the arm, mace or architecture – that it is based on a lost original by Piero.25 The king may have sat for Piero, possibly in 1448, when Pisanello was also called to the Neapolitan court.26

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fer r ar a again A restless traveller, Piero probably once more returned to Ferrara. Such is suggested by the close fraternal friendship that, according to Pacioli (On the Divine Proportion, ii.71), he struck with the intarsia worker Lorenzo Canozi da Lendinara (1425–1477), ‘supreme in perspective in his time’. Both would write a treatise on the subject, but Lorenzo’s does not survive. For most of the time from 1449 until 1453 Lorenzo and his brother Cristoforo were part of the team that decorated the studiolo at Belfiore begun by Leonello d’Este and finished under his successor Borso, but sadly destroyed during the Venetian siege of Ferrara in 1483, when its contents were dispersed. Piero was involved, if only backstage, in the studiolo’s pictorial cycle of the Muses, following a programme drafted in 1447 by the court humanist Guarino Guarini (1374–1460). Differ­ ent painters, including Angelo Maccagnino, Michele Pannonio and Cosmè Tura, executed the panels of the cycle. The Poly­­ hymnia (illus. 18), now in Berlin, is of uncertain attribution, but may have been done to Piero’s design.27 She is shown di sotto in su, stepping up with the rim of her pink skirt describing an undulating foreshortened circle. She comes from cultivated fields in the hills below a cloud-scanned sky. Her dress is bound up all’antica, under her bosom, and she rests on a spade, holds a vine branch with grapes, and has a hoe slung over her shoulder. Polyhymnia is the muse of religious hymns and rhetoric who would have invented agriculture. In the painting she performs a pastoral.

18 Artist active in Ferrara at the design of Piero della Francesca, Polyhymnia, after 1447, egg tempera on panel.

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ancona By 1450 Piero resided in Ancona, the great natural port and ancient Roman settlement on the Adriatic.28 On 18 March of that year he was in the Palazzo Ferretti witnessing the last will of Simona del fu Feliciano di Vannuccio, widow of count Giovanni di messer Francesco di Liverotto Ferretti, a scion of Ancona’s most respectable family. Piero’s residency in Ancona meant that he could execute murals. In the cathedral of San Ciriaco, which dominates the port from a high acropolis, he painted, according to Vasari, the Marriage of the Virgin. Such a mural still existed in 1583, when a certain Antonio di Giovanni Maria Camerata of Bergamo wanted the place of the ‘figure Sancte Marie et Sancti Ioseph’ for a new altar, but was stopped by the bishop because of the ‘splendid and antique images of saints which are an ornament to the church and much pleasing to the people of Ancona’. Whatever trace survived of Piero’s image was lost, along with its chapel, when Ancona was bombarded by the Austrian navy in 1915. Piero could have taken his cue from the composition of the same theme that Domenico Veneziano’s team did in Sant’Egidio in Florence. A lone visual testimony of Piero’s time in Ancona survives: a small panel painting for devotional use depicting St Jerome in the Wilderness (illus. 20), now in Berlin. It was in Ancona in 1472, when the painter Nicola di maestro Antonio (fl. 1465–1511) repeated it in the lunette of an altarpiece (illus. 19) for the chapel of San Girolamo in the local church of San Francesco alle Scale. The altarpiece’s patron was a distant relative of Simona, whose testament Piero had witnessed. He was Girolamo di Antonio di Simone Ferretti

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(first doc. 1433 – d. between 1474 and 1477), a merchant of fabrics, cotton, paper and iron. Girolamo Ferretti must have been so proud of his name saint as depicted by Piero that some twenty years after its creation he decided to render the composition public by copying it in his chapel. Nicola di maestro Antonio, a painter of exasperated nervousness, rendered it with reverential fidelity. 19 Nicola di maestro Antonio, Ferretti Altarpiece: Virgin and Child Enthroned with Sts Leonard, Jerome, John the Baptist and Francis with, in the lunette, St Jerome in Penance before the Crucifix, 1472, egg tempera on panel.

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Piero’s panel is a picture in which landscape outdoes the figure. The bottom right corner with St Jerome kneeling in penance before a crucifix is dwarfed by the eremitic landscape. As in the Baptism, the hills are those of central Italy. Devoid of any cultivated fields, they have become the wilderness of St Jerome. Spiralling cloudlets and a meandering stream lead the eye into the distance. As in the Baptism, Piero is the master of an off-centre composition. A big tree stands somewhat to the right, behind the cave of Jerome, followed at the other bank, one bend down the stream, by a little forest. In the distance, yet smaller trees skirt the river where there is a simple chapel. It is starkly lit from where the valley bends to the left, disappearing against the distant hills. A path leads from Jerome’s dwelling through a pebbly ford in the river to the forest on the other side. The river reflects its own banks, the trees and the sky with a watery shine that Nicola di maestro Antonio could not master and instead rendered with metal foil. The sunlight scatters in the foliage of the treetops. Piero painted the inner core of the big tree’s crown, added blue spots of sky where it would show, and otherwise left the gesso bare. Beneath the subsequently added twigs and leaves, the white ground gives the effect of shimmering and mysterious light. Jerome kneels in penance in front of the rocky hill, at the opening of his cave. He is bare-chested, dressed in a grey sleeveless tunic bound at the waist by a green twig. His extreme deprivation and old age show in his balding head and iron-grey beard, meagre state and sagging chest. His neck cranes from shoulders bent from a life of reading. He is on his knees with arms lightly parted, a stone for chastising his chest in one hand, a circlet of prayer beads in the other, looking

20 Piero della Francesca, St Jerome in the Wilderness, 1450, egg tempera on chestnut.

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intently at a cross (almost invisible because of abrasion) on a halved tree trunk at the painting’s far right edge. He has only just taken this posture of penance after reading the books on the bench behind him. In a semicircular niche in the rock a leather pen case hangs from a nail above more books. Some volumes have the oblong format of oriental books, others the standing format of western tomes such as the Vulgate. Bookmarkers show the passages that Jerome deems of interest. Apart from the books in leather bindings with copper mounting, Jerome’s attributes, such as the simple bench and even simpler cross, accord with this hermit’s life, as do the bare hills of this Italian version of the Syrian desert behind him. It is a credible rendering of a life of deprivation. Piero proudly signed and dated it ‘petri de / bvrgo m[agistri] / opvs . mo / ccccol’ on a Venetian-style cartellino or piece of paper attached to the tree trunk with Jerome’s improvised cross. The cartellino’s lower corner has detached and curled, revealing a blob of red sealing wax for fixing it to the tree. Piero used a deserted landscape and allusions to literary, devotional and penitential activities to render the essence of Jerome’s sainthood. All the more superfluous seem the saint’s customary attributes of the lion and cardinal’s hat, which, in fact, Piero did not need in his later rendering of Jerome (see illus. 47). In the Ferretti painting lion and hat are both out of scale and have become more transparent than the rest of the painting. When doing the landscape Piero held his figure in reserve, but not the clumsy lion and hat. Since the lions in the Berlin St Jerome and the Ferretti Altarpiece are siblings, I would venture to say that the attributes were added to Piero’s painting by Nicola di maestro Antonio, a master who needed

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more substantial clues than Piero’s essential minimalism. He may have added to Piero’s painting when he worked on the altarpiece. Piero had conceived of the picture as a landscape with a studious saint seeking solitude and ecstasy rather than as the image of a figure. It is a landscape tradition introduced around the same time by Bono da Ferrara and Mantegna and soon taken up by Giovanni Bellini in his versions of the subject in Venice. Girolamo Ferretti’s misunderstanding is an indication that he was not the panel’s first owner. Humanists treasured depictions of Jerome, the translator of the Bible and the saint who sought the countryside in exchange for the hectic city. Piero’s panel was independent, as is attested by the gessoed and painted side edges of the original applied frame, of which only a top element once affixed with two small wooden pegs is missing. Piero may have started to paint it for Francesco Ferretti (d. 1449), the son of Simona whose testament he witnessed, a lettered man who corresponded with the Sienese humanist Francesco Filelfo, and possessed various such conas a cammera depictas along with books of classical literature. rimini Further north along the Adriatic, linked to the pope by vassalage, to the court of Ferrara by family ties, and to the city of Florence by military alliance, Piero’s next stop on the path to fame was Rimini. It was ruled by one of the most intrepid condottieri, or mercenary captains, of his day, Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta (b. 1417; r. 1432–68).29 A man of strategic prowess, he made his fortune in the endless wars and shifting

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alliances that enflamed the Italian peninsula up to the peace of Lodi in 1454. His fall came at the hands of Pope Pius ii Piccolomini (r. 1458–64), who in 1462 excommunicated him on charges of blasphemy, idolatry, simony and tyranny, and thrice burned him in effigy in the squares of Rome. When Piero arrived, however, Sigismondo’s power and aspirations were still unblemished and unfettered. A vicar of the pope, he hoped to become a hereditary marquis. In 1433, aged fourteen and still the youngest of rulers, he had hosted Sigismund of Luxembourg on the latter’s return from his coronation as Holy Roman Emperor in Rome, and been knighted by his imperial namesake. Sigismondo had married in 1434 Ginevra, daughter of Niccolò iii d’Este of Ferrara, and in 1442 Polissena, daughter of Francesco Sforza, the future duke of Milan, before finding the love of his life in the late 1440s in Isotta degli Atti, whom he made his wife in 1456. He assembled a court of scholars and artists that included Roberto Valturio, who wrote a treatise on warfare, Basinio da Parma, who knew Greek and praised him as a Homeric hero, and the polymath Matteo de’ Pasti, who served as his architect and medallist. In 1437 Sigismondo started to embody his power in Rimini by building a citadel, the highest mark on a noble estate. Castel Sismondo was probably ready to live in by 1446. A year later Sigismondo turned his attention to the construction of commemorative chapels for himself and Isotta in the local church of San Francesco. It would eventually result in its complete overhaul at the hands of Matteo de’ Pasti and a team of other sculptors including Agostino di Duccio, turning it into a temple known as the Tempio Malatestiano, dedicated in Latin and Greek to God

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and the city, and bristling with humanists’ tombs, heraldry, frivolous putti and gracious virtues.30 Alberti would provide designs for the exterior in 1450 and start construction around 1453, cladding the Gothic church in marble. Fifth-century Sant’Apollinare in Classe in nearby Ravenna was stripped of its breathtaking marble revetment to provide the new Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini with shimmering sheathing and statuary. Sigismondo’s dreams had soon escalated to such marble splendour, but initially he considered contracting a painter to live at his court and paint in the chapels. He had consulted Giovanni di Cosimo de’ Medici in Florence about a painter, but wrote back in April 1449 that the construction of the chapels was too ‘fresh’ and that it would be work thrown away to start painting them too soon.31 He still wanted the artist to come, live and die in Rimini and work for him for an annual salary. Since, according to Giovanni, the artist, who remains unnamed in the correspondence, was in need of money, Sigis­ mondo promised he would look into other jobs that could be done before the painting of the chapels was started. The painter they had in mind was probably not Piero, who had no recent ties with the Medici. Piero arrived in about 1451, more likely upon Ferrarese or Neapolitan recommendation, and was welcomed by his former classmate Jacopo Anastagi, who served at court in Rimini. Sigismondo used Piero’s services as a portraitist. Infatuated with the portrait medal (see illus. 8), he also wanted his effigy painted in rigorous classical profile. The vogue for medals was introduced by Leonello in Ferrara based on humanist interests in coins and cameos, and, in analogy with ancient

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practice, a political sense of the possibilities offered by such serial diplomatic gifts or foundation tokens. The portrait that Piero did of Sigismondo may even have been the model for the medal dated 1446 to commemorate Castel Sismondo, but struck at the earliest in 1449, when its medallist, Matteo de’ Pasti, arrived in Rimini (illus. 21). Piero would have been acquainted with Pisanello’s portraits and with profile portraits against a black background through Gentile da Fabriano and he may already have experimented with the format for Alfonso the Magnanimous (see illus. 17).32 Sigismondo’s portrait on chestnut wood, now in the Louvre, is Piero’s study of a human bust as a composite of geometrical solids (illus. 22).33 A cylindrical neck rises out of a conical body to support a head in which the hair is a semisphere with the cut of the hair intersecting the jawline at right angles. Such abstraction goes hand in hand with loving observation of minute detail to render an image of stern grace. Sigismondo has short, loose flowing, chestnut-coloured hair, billowing at the neck. The stiff collar of a white shirt, or cami­ cia, encircles his neck above his red-gold brocaded velvet dress, or farsetto. Worn on top of it, his fur-lined sleeveless day-coat or giornea is of gold brocaded velvet that differs only slightly 21 Matteo de’ Pasti at the design of Piero della Francesca (?), portrait medal: Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta with, on the reverse, Castel Sismondo in Rimini, dated 1446, made c. 1449–51, cast bronze.

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in hue and pattern from the farsetto’s. Sigismondo was buried in similar attire of a purplish brown colour, described as morello, as was discovered at the opening of his tomb in 1757.34 Parallel, individual yellow brushstrokes indicate gold threads that catch the light but disappear where there is shade, leaving it to the purples of the velvet to indicate the fabric’s pattern, according to Alberti’s observation that ‘as the light disappears, so also 22 Piero della Francesca, Portrait of Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, c. 1451, egg tempera and oil on chestnut.

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do the colours’ (On Painting, i.9). The fabric had imperial lustre because Pliny had written how the emperors of Antiquity dressed in Tyrian purple. Piero rendered purple by daubing dashes of red lake over blue. The grey fur rims he picked out with white highlights following the direction of the hair. In the face the skin has a rosy hue and its smoothness betrays the addition of oil as a mellifluous medium championed in Netherlandish pictures, which Piero could have seen in Ferrara. Sigismondo’s eye stands out in relief because light plays between the lower eyelid and the aquiline nose. Coming from the top left the illumination does not extend below the sitter’s jaw, which nonetheless brightens up with reflected light that Piero caught by leaving a sliver of the gesso ground exposed between the paint layers of shadowy skin and background. Crosses have been deliberately scratched through Sigismondo’s eye and mouth and thrice through his cheek. This may have happened after Pius ii had turned the wheel of Sigismondo’s fortune and the portrait was removed from the ruler’s dwelling, for which it was probably meant. Piero would have based the portrait on a drawing that he also used for his mural dated 1451 of Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta Kneeling before St Sigismund (illus. 23). Piero painted it inside the sacristy of the chapel of St Sigismund in the Tempio Malatestiano.35 The little room sits between that chapel, immediately to the right upon entering the church, and the chapel of Isotta, dedicated to St Michael or the Angels, both built between 1447 and 1452. It is accessed from the nave through a small door closed with many locks and surmounted by a disc of porphyry. The now detached fresco was on the inner wall and part of the vault above the

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door, overlooking the sacristy’s altar and cupboards. Through a grate it communicated with Sigismondo’s chapel, its altar with a marble statue of the titular saint, its little plank holding the embalmed body of Sigismondo’s infant first heir Roberto, who had died in 1438, and Sigismondo’s own tomb installed to the chapel’s side against the counterfacade.36 As is suggested by the grate and its locks on the door, as well as by the votive dedication of 1449, by which Sigismondo presented the entire church out of gratitude for having survived the dangers of the Italian wars, the sacristy possibly held votive gifts. Piero’s fresco would have basked in their reflection. The setting turns the fresco into a votive image showing Sigismondo kneeling in perpetual adoration before his seated name saint.37 The idea to present supplicant and saint at an egalitarian scale, as later also reiterated in Piero’s St Jerome and a Supplicant (see illus. 47), was rare in Italian painting, but had occurred before in Netherlandish devotional images, such as Jan van Eyck’s Virgin and Child with Chancellor Rolin (Louvre, Paris). To the right, seen through a round opening in the wall and against a blue sky, is a view of Castel Sismondo. It was the iconic view of the citadel, that Sigismondo privileged also in the medal possibly designed by Piero and cast by Matteo de’ Pasti, copies of which he placed in the chapel foundations (see illus. 21). In the fresco, an inscription in an early form of humanist lettering, painted as though chiselled into the window frame around the citadel, states its name and year of first use, 1446. The name of the citadel as much restates the name of its builder as the name of its dedicatee, St Sigismund, as fortresses were usually dedicated to a saint for protection. Castles, like cities, were also actively offered as votive gifts.

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In 1437 Sigismondo Malatesta and Alessandro Sforza had accompanied Niccolò iii d’Este in a pilgrimage to Loreto to offer a 6-kilogram silver model of Ferrara to implore the end of the plague in the Este city.38 Such gifts were exhibited in the courtyards, churches or sacristies of the sanctuaries to which they had been donated. In the Rimini fresco, the insertion of the citadel seen through a window is Piero’s ingenious way of making it clear that this is a votive offering from Sigismondo to St Sigismund, without compromising the unequivocal appearance of reality with a diminutive model. Even the greyhounds might be part of the votive gift, not unlike the wax effigy of a dog given by the king of France to the church of St Martin at Tours. The epigram De imagine Sigismondi (On the Image of Sigismondo) by the humanist Giovanni Antonio 23 Piero della Francesca, Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta Kneeling before St Sigismund, 1451, fresco, egg tempera and oil on plaster (detached), Tempio Malatestiano, Rimini.

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Campano (1429–1477), who visited Rimini in 1459, compares the value of Piero’s fresco to that of a votive gift in gold: Live long, o wall, that the true image of Prince Sigis­ mondo may endure for many years; though it should have been made of precious gems and gold, it is no small honour to this place that it should have been painted here.39 Piero’s St Sigismund is not the youthful ruler of tradition, but an older man with a Hungarian hat evocative of Emperor Sigismund, who was portrayed by Pisanello, among others. Sigismondo Malatesta pays respect to his patron saint, distinguished by a halo. At the same time, as if taking part in an audience, Sigismondo also kneels in courtly adoration of the imperial namesake who had knighted him. Dressed in brocade with a blue ermine-lined mantle and endowed by the royal trappings of sceptre and orb, resting under the hand and on the knee, rather than held up in a classical pose, the saint is perched on a cloth-covered sella curulis. This was the seat associated with emperors of Antiquity, as its lack of comfort implied that the commander-in-chief could barely spare a leisurely moment. It rests on an Anatolian carpet, much appreciated in Renaissance Italy, with a so-called small Holbein pattern of rows of octagons on a green ground. Sigismondo is dressed in a giornea that might have been a purple gold brocade as in his portrait and burial attire; the many a secco layers of the fresco are now, however, abraded, impoverishing its former rich materiality. Behind Sigismondo are the two greyhounds facing in opposite directions, a white one watching the saint

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with him, possibly as a sign of fidelity, and a brown one with longer coat and a white spot on its chest watching his back, possibly as a sign of vigilance.40 They are curled to match each other’s shape. Greyhounds are sighthounds used for the hunt and for company. They are a sign of nobility, not only because of their gracious build, but above all because, as first explained by Alberti in his De familia of 1443 and later by Baldassare Castiglione in Il libro del cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier, i.22) of 1528, hunting was close to warfare, which was the foremost task of the aristocracy. Court goldsmiths were employed to make the greyhounds’ collars and several fine exemplars mounted in silver were inventoried after Sigismondo’s death.41 The hall in Piero’s fresco is decorated with swags of laurel and fruit and the central one has a band of the Malatesta four-petalled white flowers around it, which also recur among cornucopia in the stone frame through which we look into Sigismund’s audience hall. Above the central swag is a shield showing Sigismondo’s coat of arms quartered with his initials. In the fifteenth century shields were no longer used in combat, but only in the most chivalric of activities, the tournament. As in other armorial decorations of the Tempio Malatestiano, the shield in the fresco is a tournament shield, with an indentation at the top left for couching the lance for combat – and for transmitting Sigismondo’s courtly aspirations. Through the stone frame we look into a room that has elements of the panelling in the Tempio’s chapel of San Sigismondo, but is essentially a classical architecture that Piero painted (and maybe invented) before Alberti built it, possibly following conversations in Ferrara. It is the playful way in which the front wall overlaps the curled tails of the dogs that

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suggests the lateral extension and depth of the marble hall. We see part of the back wall, decorated with fluted Corinthian pilasters raising an entablature and framing slabs of verde antico marble (now all but effaced, since Piero, probably to create the most shiny marble effect possible, executed them a secco by adding oil to the binder), which must have offset Sigismondo’s profile as much as the black background in Piero’s independent portrait of him. The central marble wall panel is thrice the width of the visible parts of the marble panels to the sides. In the right one is the roundel with the view of Castel Sismondo. The pavement has rectangular dark slabs divided by white bands along sightlines that converge to the right of Sigismondo’s elbow in a point along the vertical axis of the composition and on the horizon running through the view of Castel Sismondo. The height of the horizon is therefore also the reason why the trompe l’ il roundel is placed in the lower half of the marble slab and not at its centre. The implied viewpoint does not correspond to the reality of the narrow sacristy, where the viewer had to look up to the wall above the door, but ideally has the viewer float in front of it, humbly lower than Sigismondo and lower still than his saint, but just above the dogs. Whereas the architecture and perspective are rigorously symmetrical, the placement of the figures adheres to Piero’s off-centre aesthetics and to a stepped crescendo leading the gaze via the dogs, to the donor, and finally to the saint at the dexter side. To achieve such compositional rigour, Piero used an underdrawing, or sinopia in black on an older, smooth arriccio layer, which allowed him carefully to position his pricked cartoons for the final patch-wise applied intonaco layer, which has many spolvero marks. It is a votive fresco with refined

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chivalric allure, in which the figure of the saint merges with that of the emperor, the figure of the donor with that of the vassal, and the votive offering with reality. The fresco is inscribed in studied classical lettering on the step of the stone frame, including the painter’s signature and home town ‘petri de bvrgo opvs mccccli’. His authorship was part of the mural’s message. Piero was one of the most travelled artists of the Renaissance. Among the earlier generation, only Gentile da Fabriano matched the extent of his peregrinations and itinerant fame. Piero’s services were probably diplomatic currency among rulers. By travelling he came to understand the pride of city states and the refinement of court. He also acquainted himself with Antiquity and a variety of artistic styles, which enabled him to incorporate, supersede and inculcate local traditions. 42 He is not only the chronicler of Tuscan peasant life and landscape. 43 That Piero is close to reality has to do with the humanist tenet that nature was closest to God’s creation and closest to the human proportions and the heroic nudity of the art of Antiquity. Piero’s reality is cutting edge and courtly in its sense of proportion and truthfulness. Piero recreates creation from scratch to approximate divine truth. It is a radical and clearly felt break with the immediate, more formulaic past. Travelling between Italian centres, Piero was the magisterial bard of a new, rational painting.

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he fame that Piero gathered in two decades of travel made patrons closer to home keen on having more of him. In Arezzo in May 1452 a worthy opportunity presented itself. A new master had to be found for the mural decoration of the main chapel of the church of San Francesco (illus. 24), which had remained largely unfinished upon the death of the Florentine painter Bicci di Lorenzo (1373–1452). The commission went to Piero. Frustrated and bypassed, in January 1454, the confraternity of the Misericordia in Borgo summoned him to start their altarpiece instead, commissioned nine years earlier. Frustrated and resigned, the overseers of the church of San Giovanni d’Afra asked Matteo di Giovanni to complete Piero’s Baptism triptych. Piero had climbed the tempting scaffolds at Arezzo. The public for the murals included the Franciscan friars who said their prayers in the choir-stalls in front of the main chapel. It also included the Aretines coming to church for Masses and sermons, and visitors to the tomb of the convent’s blessed founder Benedetto Sinigardi (1190–1282). The ancient sarcophagus with his body had relocated with the Franciscan community when it moved to town in 1314 from the first Franciscan settlement at Poggio al Sole, outside

24 The main chapel of the church of San Francesco in Arezzo with murals by Bicci di Lorenzo of 1447–52 and Piero della Francesca of c. 1452–7 and the Cross by the Master of St Francis of the 1270s.

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the city walls. According to the order’s custom the body of the blessed may have been placed under the free-standing high altar, which stood at the front of the main chapel. From Poggio al Sole also came the monumental painted cross created in the 1270s by the Master of St Francis, which would have been hung over the choir screen across the nave, separating laity and clergy during liturgies and litanies. Between the screen’s entrance and the choir-stalls was the tomb of the local Bacci family. They helped finance the decoration of the main chapel, which, started in 1377, had been the last part of the building to be completed.1 Piero’s patrons were the heirs of the Aretine textile and successful apothecary Baccio di Maso Bacci (d. 1417): his son, the cloth merchant Francesco (c. 1382–1459), and his grandsons, the cloth merchant Andrea di Tommaso (c. 1410–1467) and the apothecary Agnolo di Girolamo (c. 1417–1481). In his testaments of 1411 and 1416 Baccio had asked his heirs to provide glazing and murals. They rose to their task three decades later. the cYcle of the true cross at ar ezzo When in 1447 Bicci had set to work, the friars and the patrons chose the Legend of the True Cross as a theme. It is the millen­ nial history of the wood of Christ’s Cross, from its origin as a twig in Paradise, to its felling and burial by King Solomon, use in the Crucifixion, apparition to Emperor Constantine, rediscovery by St Helena, appropriation by the Persian king Chosroes, and restitution to Jerusalem by Emperor Heraclius. Under the headings of the feasts of the Invention (3 May) and Exaltation (14 September) of the Cross, Jacopo da

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Varazze told the story in his popular Golden Legend of about 1265. The same feasts were discussed in Pietro Amelio’s 1365 offices and in Anastasius Bibliothecarius’ Historia Ecclesiastica. All three books were at hand in the Aretine convent library.2 The Legend of the True Cross graced the chapel of St Helena at Santa Croce in Gerusalemme in Rome and several main chapels of Franciscan churches in central Italy, including at Santa Croce in Florence with Agnolo Gaddi’s cycle of 1388–92.3 Francis had been much devoted to the Cross, culminating in his receiving the stigmata, the wounds of the crucified Christ, on the very day of the Exaltation of the Cross. Closer in time, in 1425 the Franciscan Bernardino of Siena had preached a fiery sermon in Arezzo, condemning the citizens for their pagan and lucrative baptisms in the healing waters of the local Fonte Tecta, over a kilometre to the east of the city. They accused him of not being well disposed towards them and expelled him. In 1428 he returned, determined to eradicate their heathen practices, preached in San Francesco, asked the friars to fabricate a cross, and proceeded to demolish the fountain in its name. That this contemporary victory of the Cross was deeply felt is also clear from its depiction in 1463 by Piero’s pupil Lorentino d’Andrea (c. 1430–1506) in a side chapel in San Francesco. The Bacci were first import­ ant culprits and later participants in Bernardino’s actions. There­fore they and the local Franciscans would have judged the Legend of the True Cross a worthy and timely topic for their main chapel, especially when Bernardino died in odour of sanctity in 1444 and the following year the city sent its testimonial of the destruction of the Fonte Tecta to the canonization committee.4 Bernardino, who was declared a saint

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in 1450, is depicted on the reveals of the lancet window in the main chapel (see illus. 24, 25). Bicci di Lorenzo had decorated the chapel facade with the Last Judgment. Unusually, it includes, next to the Just, an angel carrying the Cross and by the Doomed an angel presenting a twig as a prelude to the True Cross iconography.5 Bicci frescoed the chapel vault with the Four Evangelists. At the top of the window reveals he painted Angels in Adoration of the Holy Spirit, suggesting a Christ figure was planned for the now-lost glazing of the window beneath. In the intrados, or interior curve of the entrance arch, he finished painting Gregory and Jerome, two of the Four Doctors of the Church, standing in aedicules or niches. To unfold the Legend of the True Cross, Piero had the enormous walls of the chapel at his disposal (illus. 25). The theme was already a given, but its organization and narration were up to the new artist. Piero spent much time preparing drawings for the overall composition, the separate scenes, the figures and the placement of the colours, which all needed different technical treatment. On the basis of his drawings, he prepared full-scale cartoons for the figures and horses. He pricked the cartoons along the contours of the figures for transfer by spolvero, placing the cartoon against the freshly plastered wall and pouncing charcoal dust through the little holes. For the architecture he used incisions and snapped cords in the wet plaster to transfer the design. His preparations were so exhaustive that he hardly made a single adjustment on the wall. That Bicci completed the vault frescos in one go indicates that solid scaffolding had been erected that filled the full width, depth and height of the chapel. Piero worked his way down

25 Scheme of the decoration in the main chapel of San Francesco in Arezzo.

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storey by storey, starting with the lunette-shaped fields below the vault. The three tiers in which he subdivided the walls decrease gradually in height by about 30 centimetres in order to appear equal in height for somebody standing at floor level. The pontate, or zoning of the scaffolds, show in the layering of the application of plaster on the walls, in correspondence to the painted architraves between his scenes. This layering also shows that midway on each storey he used subsidiary scaffolding. The 230 giornate – or areas of plaster that could be painted within a day before they dried, carbonized and turned into a strong and matte surface – overlap each other from left to right across the walls along each chapel-wide pontata. This indicates the chapel-filling nature of the scaffolding, the work sequence and Piero’s right-handedness. He could not have prepared the plaster and paint on his own. The vastness and complexity of this mural cycle induced Piero to ask his pupils Giovanni da Piamonte (fl. 1456) and Lorentino d’Andrea to assist him on humbler and more visible tasks. The imprints of the cloth of sacks of wet sand that they placed against the plaster to prolong its humidity and therefore workability reveal that he battled against time. Piero consumed much time by finishing his painting to a greater extent than many artists before him, with additions done in tempera, sometimes with extra oil, a secco, as though his fresco was a panel painting. This way he could apply colours that could not be used a fresco, render certain areas more lucid, even out colour differences due to the overlap of giornate, or add particularly fine detail. Starting at the drawing table and then unravelling from the top to the bottom of the chapel, the Legend of the True Cross was an enterprise that took years.6

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The frescos are not unblemished. Cracks in the walls and losses in the paint are the result of earthquakes, lightning, water infiltration, the hazardous foundation on a vaulted cemetery, the weight of the bell tower, and centuries of use, including by Napoleon’s soldiers. Sulphuration of the frescos led to pulverization of the paint and has been tackled in various restorations over the centuries.7 The last restoration, during the 1990s, yielded many clues about Piero’s method and brought out his colouring. It is as vibrant as butterflies in a spring garden. Just below Bicci’s vault, Piero’s new art kicks in. On an illusionistic stone arch, an elegant classicizing palmette border, with flowers enlivened with gilt roundels in relief, made of wax and pitch, lines Bicci’s crowded and flat late Gothic one. On the intrados of the entrance arch Giovanni da Piamonte added the missing figures of Augustine and Ambrose to the Fathers of the Church, repeating Bicci’s Gothic niches, but straightening them out perspectivally and replacing their front columns by corbels to create more space. The figures on the insides of the piers below the intrados have no niches, but painted framed slabs of different colours of marble as backdrops. At the top left is a blindfolded cupid with bow and arrow possibly representing Sacred Love. He may have been paired with Profane Love at the top right where there is now a lacuna. Such a pairing would repeat the logic of a good left, or heraldically dexter, side and an evil right or sinister side instigated by Bicci’s Last Judgment on the chapel facade. Below Sacred Love are figures of the Franciscan St Louis of Toulouse and Dominican St Peter Martyr (both by Lorentino), whereas at the right, in the lower position, only the fragmentary figure

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of St Michael the Archangel (by Piero) remains. Below the Last Judgment on the chapel facade, Piero added the coats of arms of the Bacci hanging from red ribbons. They cast shadows in accordance with the fall of light from the window in the chapel’s back wall, which, exceptionally, faces south, not east. Piero divided the lunette of the back wall horizontally in two. At the top is a simple sky in continuation with that behind Bicci’s Angels on the window reveals. Below, he painted at the left a rosso da Verona marble slab and at the right a night blue one possibly of Portoro marble, once again continuous with the window reveals with now fragmentary vases with lilies. Against each stone slab he placed a young, barefooted man in tunic and mantle (illus. 26). Giovanni da Piamonte did the one at the left. The one at the right is a magisterial figure, a 26 Piero della Francesca with Giovanni da Piamonte, Enoch, and Piero della Francesca, Elias, c. 1452–7, fresco, egg tempera and oil on wall, San Francesco, Arezzo.

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slip of his broad mantle swept back over his shoulder to reveal an empty scroll, light fondling him from behind. Their high position and the vases of paradisiacal lilies situate them in heaven. They might be the prophets Enoch and Elias, who were thought to have been spared death and to have been transported bodily to Paradise. On the last day they would serve as the apocalyptic witnesses and convert, respectively, the Gentiles and the Jews. Enoch represented the laws of nature, Elias those of scriptural revelation. Piero may therefore have represented the prophet at the right with a scroll. Like Piero, Taddeo di Bartolo in 1410–15 in the Collegiata in San Gimignano had included them in a Last Judgment context, as had Bartolomeo di Tommaso around 1449 in the Cappella Paradisi in San Francesco in Terni. The patristic tradition of Enoch and Elias was well known in Arezzo, as allegedly the Blessed Benedetto Sinigardi had been miraculously transported to Paradise where, after he had announced the arrival of St Francis, Enoch and Elias had given him a tour.8 Piero’s prophets open the theme of the triumph of Christianity over the infidel. They also lead the visitor’s eye, as both look intently at the beginning of the Legend of the True Cross in the lunette on the right wall. Opening the cycle about the wood of the Cross in an appro­­­ priate key, a monumental tree rises against a cloud-streaked sky, standing guard over the Death of Adam below (illus. 27). At the right, Eve, shown as about nine hundred years old, all sagging shoulders and sagging breasts, seeks support on a walking stick as her dying husband has sunk to the ground and rests his head against her hand. Of the first two humans,

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who were expelled from Paradise and destined to be mortal after eating from the tree of knowledge, he has to go first. Three of their children, either nude or clad in animal skin or fabric, in correspondence to three phases in the evolution of mankind, listen to his plea to go ask for mercy at the gates of Paradise. Seen from behind, the nude boy leans pensively on the crutch that Adam has discarded. He assumes the elegant pose of the statue of the mythological divinity of amorous desire, Pothos, by the Greek sculptor Skopas, which Piero could have read about in Pliny’s Natural History (xxxvi.25) and seen copies of in Rome. The son clad in fabric, Seth, reappears in the distance, conveying his father’s last wish to an angel. Instead of the balm of mercy, he receives a twig of the tree of knowledge. As Seth returns – and this is the left-hand portion of the scene – Adam has already died. His body lies with the head close to the picture plane, audaciously foreshortened, for all of us to see. Seth kneels and plants the twig in his dead father’s mouth. A sister of the girl who stood composed in the earlier scene has loosened her hair and opened her arms and mouth in loud grief. More mourners approach from the left, their ranks closed by a young couple who exchange the most charged of gazes, as they face the graceless age ahead before the twig will become a tree from which Christ’s salvific cross shall be cut. It is the classical semi-nudity of the first family, timeless as God had created them, in which Piero found the modernity, naturalness and truthfulness that he craved in his art. He does so in a monumental pace, with his figures closing ranks in a single tier in the foreground of the pictorial stage, and Seth and the Angel credibly smaller in the background.

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The arrangement of heads at the height of the horizon, or close to it, ‘horizon-line isocephaly’, is a compositional device that the ancient Romans used in their reliefs, for example in the scenes on the triumphal arch of Marcus Aurelius in Rome. Masaccio reintroduced it in the Tribute Money in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence. Alberti explained it in his treatise on painting (i.20) by discussing how ‘in churches we see the heads of men walking about, moving at more or less the same height, while the feet of those further away may correspond to the knee-level of those in front of them’. By comparison Agnolo Gaddi around 1380 rendered the Death of Adam in Santa Croce in Florence by using a steep perspective so that his figures are individually visible, but appear stacked as in the shop front of a fruit seller. Agnolo also omitted foreshortening so that Seth in the background looms as large as the 27 Piero della Francesca, The Death of Adam, c. 1452–7, fresco, egg tempera and oil on wall, San Francesco, Arezzo.

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foreground figures. Piero has his ideal viewer hover in front of each of his scenes at eye level with his figures. It engenders the beholder’s engagement. In this case, it also allows Piero to leave the top part of this outdoor composition to landscape, to nature, giving breathing space to the overall chapel composition. As in almost all the scenes, Piero made his clouds puffy by using the bare, ivory-hued intonaco and painting the light parts with bianco di San Giovanni, the only white pigment that can be used in fresco but which is notoriously difficult because it is transparent and invisible when applied. Unlike most trees in the other scenes, the monumental species in the Death of Adam is not done in full fresco, but had a secco foliage. The leaves have now peeled off, leaving the ground layer in view, as well as the tree’s branches standing lacy against the sky. For perfect three-dimensional logic and as though really constructing in space, Piero fully painted the branches, even though he knew he would partially cover them. In the scene overleaf (illus. 28), the sequel of the legend unravels from left to right, picking up thousands of years later in the Israel of King Solomon. Two squires pause for a chat as they guard four horses under a tree. One horse is depicted from behind as Piero had seen in the work of Pisanello and Domenico Veneziano, and is a rare white stallion, a regal mount. An albino, with white skin, white hair and blue eyes, it was not fit for battle, but all the more for royal display. The horses have side-saddles. These visual clues disclose that a queen and her ladies-in-waiting have just dismounted. The Queen of Sheba (probably modern-day Yemen) has come to the kingdom of the Jews because she has heard of the wisdom

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of their sovereign, Solomon. When she arrives at the river Siloe, close to the palace, the wood beam serving as a bridge reveals itself to her inner eye as the wood upon which the Saviour of the world will one day hang. Her ladies gather in a half circle behind her and an African court dwarf holds the train of her mantle, as she kneels in adoration and casts her shadow and prayers across the beam. Over her brown travel dress she wears an ultramarine blue mantle lined in white. Her crown rests on hair that has been parted and pulled over two horn-shaped structures at either side of her head, a style representing the high Burgundian court fashion that was all the vogue in Italy. The ladies-in-waiting have hair dressed in a similar way, or bound tightly around their head pulled back from the forehead and bound in a modish corona, or ring, with white ribbon, as well as transparent white veils that cover their ears. All have high-waisted, flowing dresses, some with trailing mantles, lined in white fur, with a dagged border, or with sleeves with an open front seam, or finestella, showing the garment beneath. After the funerial mode of the lunette scene, Piero has here shifted to the courtly and the feminine. The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba takes up half the pictorial field and closes with the wood beam placed at a slight angle. The other half is taken up by a marble loggia in which the queen meets Solomon. Their courtiers gather in two hemicycles to their sides. Solomon had tried to use the beam when constructing his palace. As it kept miraculously moving, proving either too short or too long for its purpose, he had had it thrown over the river. The queen has come to share with him her ominous insight of its future purpose as the Cross of Christ, who will replace Solomon as religious leader. Small

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wonder that Piero has filled the Meeting of the Queen of Sheba with King Solomon with a sense of monumental foreboding. Painters had often represented interior views by unreal­­­ istically removing one of the walls of the building. Piero makes the situation credible by depicting not Solomon’s palace, but its open loggia. It has composite, fluted columns rising to monumental height to support the architraves under the ceiling and has a back wall of coloured marble slabs, as in

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the Rimini fresco (see illus. 23), reminiscent of the marble revetment of antique buildings like the Pantheon. The full depth of the loggia and the height of its back wall could not have been easily gauged, had all the courtiers with their long flowing robes hidden the bottom of the back wall from view. Piero therefore had the courtier in the left foreground, looking at the meeting in profil perdu from underneath his ring-shaped turbaned hat or mazzocchio, sweep his mantle over his shoulder, 28 Piero della Francesca, The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba and Meeting of the Queen of Sheba with King Solomon, c. 1452–7, fresco, egg tempera and oil on wall, San Francesco, Arezzo.

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leaving part of the back wall in view. The side of the loggia is seen under an angle that is so acute that only slivers of the back two columns appear next to the front column. The reason is that it is close to the central vanishing point of Piero’s perspective. As later in his Flagellation (see illus. 37), he uses the device of a central common vanishing point at the junction of two adjacent episodes to set them apart. In the loggia the Queen of Sheba and her ladies are approaching from the direction opposite to that of their pastoral Arrival. The two episodes therefore balance out. Adding to the symmetry, Piero has depicted the faces of the queen and two of her ladies-in-waiting using the same cartoons as in the previous episode, but inverted. The ladies have changed their travel dress for formal attire.9 The queen has changed her blue cloak and brown dress for a royal white mantle and gold-and-white brocade dress. One hand planted on a bent knee, she is rising to her feet, her head still inclined, as she has greeted Solomon and paid reverence to his wisdom. Solomon, who had been posing royally, with thumbs stuck in his belt, has in turn recognized the wisdom of the queen and given her his right hand to urge her back to her feet. Would she have stood, she would have been taller than him. Yet his nobility needs no height, as the rabbinical black ring of his hat and the perfect solid cone of his wide mantle, once red-and-gold brocade, over a blue robe give an aura to his portly stature. Like the queen and her ladies, Solomon and his courtiers wear fashionable fifteenth-century court dress. Like the queen’s, the king’s cloth of gold, which was imported from Mongolia, was reserved for rulers. The court of the righteous Solomon includes a lawyer, dressed in a distinctive long red woollen

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gown and ermine-lined red cap. The figure at his side, looking out of the picture with big sunken eyes from underneath a black hat, might, according to fifteenth-century conventions of self-portraiture, be Piero. The legend continues to the left of the previous scene on the chapel’s back wall. In the Burial of the Wood (illus. 29), courtliness has made way for burlesque. Against a cloud-streaked sky and a couple of hills, a group of workmen strains to raise the wood beam to insert it in a pit, as Solomon hopes that by burying it the Queen of Sheba’s vision may not come true. The wood cuts a diagonal across the picture plane. The digging, evident from the unearthed animal skeleton lying at the men’s feet, must have been exhausting, but the lifting is even more taxing. They are working as a team trying to hoist the beam with their shoulders, hands and sticks. The presence of a fourth workman beyond the picture frame at the right is evident only from his stick. The effort makes one bite his upper lip, the other his under lip, while for freedom of movement they have loosened their over-jackets, sleeves and trousers: clothing was composed of detachable elements in this period. As the man in front strides forward, his underpants shift, leaving his scrotum in view. He is the one shouldering the wood and finds his head right in front of its halo-like grain, mocking him as a fake cross-bearing Christ. Another has a Bacchic circlet of vines in his hair. The humour, luminosity and voluminosity of the scene is Piero’s, but the coarse execution, including details such as worm-like hair, indicates that Piero here set his assistant Giovanni da Piamonte to work. In an elevated position on

29 Piero della Francesca with Giovanni da Piamonte, The Burial of the Wood, c. 1452–7, fresco, egg tempera and oil on wall, San Francesco, Arezzo.

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the chapel’s main wall for all to see throughout the full length of the nave of San Francesco, such a choice was surely deliberate. Piero may have opted to delegate it to his assistant because he wanted the scene to be in a different, burlesque key. Selecting the scene was in itself a statement, as it is absent in earlier cycles and is a free elaboration on the scanty literary account, which records no more than Solomon’s order for the wood’s burial. It was revolutionary that Piero and his patrons reserved an entire scene for genre, for simple, normal men working themselves into a sweat in the open air. The scene gives a derisory view of the Jews who did not want to believe in the power of the Cross. It would have held up a mirror across the nave to the fifteenth-century Aretines who, likewise, had been slow to commit themselves to the Cross instead of their pagan Fonte Tecta. The diagonal of the wood beam in the Burial leads the eye to what is chronologically the next scene, the Annunciation (illus. 30) at the bottom left of the chapel’s back wall. For the first time the cycle moves to the left side of the chapel and for the first time it enters an era of Christian religion. Although the Annunciation is not part of the Legend of the True Cross, it has a reasoned place in the salvific context of the Aretine narrative. As the archangel Gabriel brings the Virgin the message that she will carry God’s child, he holds not his usual lily of purity, but a palm branch. According to Dante (Paradiso, xxxii.112–14), it alludes to the trees in Paradise, which, by accepting her place in Salvation, the Virgin helped unlock. The palm branch in the hand of the Annunciate Angel had been used by Ambrogio Lorenzetti at Montesiepi, near Siena,

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in 1334–6 and possibly already by his brother Pietro in the altarpiece of 1320 for the Pieve of Arezzo. It had been dear to Aretine painters ever since.10 Apart from the presence of the branch of a paradisiac tree in the Annunciation to tie the scene to the main narrative, another reason for including the Annun­ciation may have resided in the Angelus, a popular prayer addressing the Incarnation that was recited after compline by the oblates in convents. The antiphon was written by the Blessed Benedetto Sinigardi, whose tomb Piero’s frescos probably surrounded. The architecture of the Virgin’s house and courtyard draws a cross through the field of the picture, dividing it into four quadrants for God the Father, the Angel, the Virgin and the upper storey of her house. God appears half-length from a cloud while opening his hands to emit golden rays. The Angel steps forward in perfect profile. Its white wings and shirt are modelled by leaving the intonaco bare to make up the shadows, applying bianco di San Giovanni for the midtones, and adding a secco the highly covering white lead pigment for the highlights. It stands out against the flat marble wall of a courtyard with closed door. A third dimension comes into play in the Virgin’s part of the picture. In a tour de force of perspective that contrasts with the left-hand side of the scene, Piero places the Virgin, turning towards the Angel, in her groundfloor loggia in front of the open door to her bedroom. The chests, arched canopy and curtain of her bed can be made out, but the patterning of the bedroom walls confuses the eye. This type of block pattern, here with a floral band at the top, was as commonly used for painted wall decoration in the second Pompeian style of the first century bc as in early Renaissance

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Italy. Examples include the frescoed wainscoting of Cennino Cennini’s chapel of about 1388 in San Lucchese at Poggibonsi and of Taddeo di Bartolo’s Cappella dei Nove of 1406–7 in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena (see illus. 39). In the Annunciation the pattern adheres to the same vanishing point as that of the composition, putting the viewer’s eye to the test and underlining as much the Virgin’s movement towards the Angel, as the ambiguity of pictorial space. In equivocating surface and space, Piero might be playing with the concept of Incarnation as the divine made human, or the invisible made visible. Likewise, emphasizing flatness, at the top of the Virgin’s house in front of the arched window, the pole for hanging fabrics casts a shadow parallel to it. Playing with space and meaning, the shadow bends over the half-opened shutter of the window (the Virgin being biblically compared to a barred window) and runs exactly through the iron ring suspended from the hook on which the pole rests, perhaps allusive of the virgin conception. Flatness and volume underscore the states before and after the Virgin conceives, and so does the subtle, classical swelling or entasis of the loggia’s column in the composite order that sets the fields of Gabriel and the Virgin apart. Piero did not use such entasis in, for example, the composite columns of the palace of Solomon, and it might here serve to underscore the Virgin’s body soon to swell with pregnancy. Whereas God and the Angel have invented, biblical garments and free-flowing hair, the Virgin is as modish as the Queen of Sheba and her ladies. Coiffed with a corona like them, but with a chaste veil hanging down to her shoulders, she looms large in her ample azurite blue mantle lined in fur, bordered with pearls and gold

30 Piero della Francesca, The Annunciation, c. 1452–7, fresco, egg tempera and oil on wall, San Francesco, Arezzo.

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ribbon, and tied with several loops of a lace over the heavy drapery of her pink wool dress. Whereas the Angel stands in front of a door from an earlier era with Gothic carved panels, the Virgin’s loggia is all’antica. Piero merged the concept of a new era of the history of Salvation with the idea of the Renaissance in the history of men. That, theologically, the era has only just begun is clear from the Virgin’s finger between the pages of her book of hours, indicating that seconds earlier, before the Angel arrived, she was still reading. The cogwheels of time are shifting audibly. Piero’s cycle skips the Crucifixion, the most important mo­ ment in the history of the Cross. It was already present in the shape of the monumental Cross in the nave, and possibly as a scene in the now-lost stained glass of the lancet window. The chronology of the story continues in ad 312 with the nocturnal Vision of Constantine (illus. 31) to the right of the Annunciation, at the other side of the window. The dark haze of night is suddenly illuminated when a white angel dashes in from the front upper left. He proffers a tiny crystal cross to Emperor Constantine, who rests in bed in the opening of a tent. It is his visionary dream of victory in the sign of the cross, ‘in hoc signo vinces’, before he will encounter Maxentius, his rival to the Roman throne. It will lead to his acceptance of Christianity. The angel, flying in from the top front, head down, with outstretched arm held ahead, is another full-fledged sample of Piero’s mastery of foreshortening. It is placed against a ray of divine light that sets its contours ablaze and makes its wings radiant, while by contrast its white dress appears grey.

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Constantine’s tent is a sample of Piero’s reduction of reality to its geometrical essentials. The pole has become a cylinder, the tent a cylinder-plus-cone. A servant wakes at Constantine’s side, resting his head on his elbow on the bed. Offset by the sudden light of the angel, at the left there is a dark profil perdu silhouette of a soldier standing guard with upright lance. His companion at the other side stands on lookout behind his shield, surveying the other direction. Consonant with a setting in Christian Antiquity, Piero depicted them wearing parade armour in a Roman style used by the Byzantines.11 Entirely executed in decorated cuir bouilli, or hardened leather, it consists of a torso-shaped corselet, rarebraces, or upper-arm defences, and groin protections, called pteryges as worn on the shoulders and kremasmata as hanging from the waist. In Roman times such cuirasses were made in metal, known as musculata, and worn by the higher ranks. Piero could have seen them, for example, on Trajan’s column in Rome. He might have noted their Byzantine successors in leather in use during the Council of Ferrara and Florence. They had also long been known in Italy, for example appearing on fourteenth-century sculptures of warrior saints in Venice. Likewise, the domed and brimmed helmet, or chapel-de-fer, worn by the sentinel in the Vision, was employed by both Byzantine and Italian soldiers to deflect blows from a weapon such as the mace that Piero’s soldier is holding, away from the hat and shoulders. Behind Constantine’s tent the tops of others and the expanse of the sky indicate the extent of the army camp in the dark. It is one of the first night scenes in Italian painting. Before him, Sassetta did a nocturnal rendering of the Agony in the Garden (Detroit Institute of Arts) for the Franciscans

31 Piero della Francesca, The Vision of Constantine, c. 1452–7, fresco, egg tempera and oil on wall, San Francesco, Arezzo.

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in Piero’s native Borgo, and randomly punched stars in the silver beneath the dark ultramarine of his sky (see illus. 7). Piero has no random stars, but proper constellations. They are depicted not as they appear from the earth, but inverted, as though seen by an observer outside the universe or on a celestial map. It is a night sky such as would have appeared in Rome on 27 October, the anniversary of Constantine’s vision.12 Piero shows his knowledge of the stars as they appear and as they were studied in his time, reviving the astronomy of Euclid and Ptolemy. In the early 1430s, when Piero and Alberti may have both been in Rome, the latter had made peep boxes, one of which represented dawn and the other night with several constellations in the sky.13 The Encounter of Constantine and Maxentius (illus. 32) is to the right of the Vision of Constantine, in the lower field of the chapel’s right wall. Two rival emperors meet near Rome on the banks of the Tiber. From the left, Constantine, seated on a regal white mount, with the hat and physiognomy of the last heir to the Roman throne, Johannes viii Palaeologus (see illus. 8), calmly leads his cavalry. In his outstretched hand he holds the tiny crystal cross that had been proffered by the angel of his vision. At this simple gesture, the rival emperor, Maxentius, with similar headdress and white horse, flees across the river with his troops. One knight still strains to get his horse out of the water. Other mounted soldiers flee at such speed, the legs of their horses paired at full gallop, that their lances, banner and standard are forced at an angle. At the bottom right, where the composition is much damaged, but is known through a drawing of 1832–42 by Johann Anton Ramboux

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(Kunstmuseum, Düsseldorf ), a horse has fallen, projecting its still mounted rider into our space, perpendicular to the picture surface. By contrast and as a sign of the peaceful triumph of the Cross, the horses of Constantine’s army proceed at a walk with the exception of a grey horse in the foreground, rearing up in a levade, whose bellicose rider wields a mace menacing the last of Maxentius’ men to disappear. The dense forest of horse legs is a harmonious symphony, as are the raised lances silhouetted against the sky surrounding the proudly erect yellow standard charged with the imperial eagle. In the back row a trumpet player with tight embouchure sounds victory. Constantine’s knights wear the Byzantine Roman-style armour associated with Christian Antiquity. At the same time, there are seven knights in full fifteenth-century plate armour that Piero, accustomed to Netherlandish painting, rendered so shiny as to reflect its red leather straps. The mathematician in Piero went to extremes in representing the feathers and white spheres on top of the helmet crests, which are more fit for a fifteenth-century chivalric tournament camp than for the Roman battlefield. Crests in the shape of dragon wings with long feathers attached at the tips had also figured in Piero’s battle scenes in Ferrara (see illus. 13, 14). He rendered the salient horse trappings a secco with red glazes of Garanza lake and of copper green over white lead. The mix of armour underscores how fifteenth-century modernity aimed to encapsulate Antiquity. To Piero’s contemporaries it would have made the Constantinian victory seem alive, though hardly a realistic depiction of what battlefields looked like in their time.

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Oblivious to all the knightly display, the Tiber meanders between the armies. It reflects the trees, houses, men and mules on its banks, as well as the swans floating on the placid water like an omen of peace. Piero would have seen refined play of light and reflection in panel painting by Netherlandish masters such as Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden (see illus. 16). His achievement is to translate the effect to the mural medium. This he did by using panel painting techniques. On top of fresco parts, he painted the houses and other elements

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along the shores in egg tempera using bianco di San Giovanni for the whites, while painting their watery reflections in an oily and therefore more glossy medium in which he applied the opaque white lead. Maxentius, whose figure is now unfortunately fragmentary, has a red cape and mail over plate armour. To Piero’s contemporaries, his evil nature would have transpired from the dark colour of his horse, his army’s red standard emblazoned with a dragon, and a banner charged with a black African’s head. 32 Piero della Francesca, The Encounter of Constantine and Maxentius, c. 1452–7, fresco, egg tempera and oil on wall, San Francesco, Arezzo.

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The rider in the foreground with a tattered shoe was another ‘barbarous’ figure. Vasari, who saw the mural before the losses, describes him as a semi-nude archer mounting his skinny grey horse without a saddle, alla saracina. In the radiant sign of the cross the scene represents a triumph over evil, which as the Legenda aurea has it, came about ‘without bloodshed’. Piero places the next episode, the Raising of Judas (illus. 33), on a different wall and level, on the back wall, to the top left of the window, balancing the Burial of the Wood on the other side. After his victory Constantine asked his mother Helena to find out where Christ’s cross was buried. A Jew by the name of Judas knows the secret, but, realizing its excavation will mean the triumph of Christianity over Judaism, refuses to share it. Helena has him cast in a dry well until he speaks. The fresco shows the moment when a bamboozled and mollified Judas is stepping from the wellhead. Two men have pulled him up by a rope tied around his waist and running through the pulley of a huge tripod straddling the well. Facing them at the other side of the well, their boss, like the others clad in short fifteenth-century garb, but with a hat and judge’s stick, grasps Judas by the hair. In the rim of his hat he carries the mandate in which Helena addresses him as ‘prudenti viro’. The Jew rests one hand on the wellhead and grasps the judge’s diagonally striped stick with his other. The scene would have called to mind comic situations of furtive lovers and thieves, such as those told in Boccaccio’s Decamerone. Whereas the wood was buried in the companion scene at the other side of the window, here the secret of its whereabouts is revealed. Piero renders this opposite action by the

33 Piero della Francesca with Giovanni da Piamonte, The Raising of Judas, c. 1452–7, fresco, egg tempera and oil on wall, San Francesco, Arezzo.

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upward motion of the ascending diagonals of the tripod and the upward motion of the Jew, who will eventually convert to Christianity and become bishop of Jerusalem. As in the Burial, Piero entrusted Giovanni da Piamonte with the execution of the Raising. Like his master, Giovanni frescoed the composition before adding a secco features such as the wood texture of the tripod. Those layers are now abraded, eroding the scene’s spatial complexity. Originally the tripod overlapped the clouds that now seem to float in front of it, whereas its front leg overlapped the figures and the well. In all other episodes the incidence of the light coincides with the light streaming in from the chapel window, but here it comes from the opposite direction. It seems a slip of Giovanni’s brush. Or is it? It makes the world topsy-turvy. Might it be a deliberately unsettling, derisory touch? The following episodes of the Discovery and Trial of the Crosses (illus. 34) are in a scene to the left of the Raising, in the middle tier of the adjacent left wall, starting at the left. The setting is the hill of Golgotha. Looming in the background is Jerusalem, rendered under the guise of Arezzo huddled against a hillside and seen from the east, from the very spot where Bernardino had destroyed the Fonte Tecta in the name of the Cross. Helena, in the long black gown and white veil of a widow and wearing a triple-crowned conical hat worthy of an Empress Mother, cranes her neck to witness the extraction of the crosses of Christ and the two thieves who were crucified with him. Like the Queen of Sheba in the fresco on the facing wall, she has the company of a court dwarf (white and male, hatted and bearded, this time) and a hemicycle of

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fashionable ladies-in-waiting. There is also a Roman official who might be Judas after he had been converted. Across the pit stand the workmen with hoe, spade and an already extracted cross. Another worker is helping to lift the second cross. A turbaned companion, standing up to his waist in the pit, hands it to him. The workman with heavy black beard resting on his spade is clad in black and white, just as Helena. Like the peasants in the Burial he has loosened his clothes and rolled back his hose for the effort. Unlike them, there is nothing derisory about him. Everything in this workman’s pose and gaze is digni­fied and absorbed in the happening. Humanists such as Alberti in On Painting, Antonio Averlino, called il Filarete (1400–1469), in his treatise on architecture written in Milan in 1460–64, or Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa in De docta ignorantia (On Learned Ignorance) of 1440, treasured ‘unlearned men’ and their judgement for what they might teach them about the common denominator of the workings of nature. Accord­ ingly, Piero endows the delver and Empress Mother Helena with equal gravitas. As in the double scene dedicated to the Queen of Sheba across the chapel, the backdrop is half landscape, half architecture, continuous, yet set apart by a central vanishing point right next to the facade of a building. Whereas for emphatic clarity earlier painters sought repetition in the narration of two episodes within a single scene, Piero avoids it. The third cross is not present in the Discovery of the Crosses at the left, but emerges in the Trial of the Crosses to the right, which in turn does without the other two. In the end this is the True Cross. Helena and her courtiers are now on their knees. They are in awe of the divine power of Christ’s Cross. It can be told

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apart from the crosses of the thieves, as it resuscitates a young man on his funeral bier. Four Romans, distinguished by the Byzantine headgear that to Piero was a seamless continuation of the dress of Christian Antiquity, had been carrying him down the palazzo- and tower-lined streets of a fifteenthcentury city and have placed him on the ground for Judas to

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try the Cross. As it works its miracle, one of the four carriers has taken off his hat and is kneeling and praying, while the others, although dumbfounded, are still on their feet. The one called back from the dead shows his muscular back as he rises and echoes with outstretched arms the shape of the Cross held above him. Its resurrecting force acquires additional 34 Piero della Francesca, The Discovery and Trial of the Crosses, c. 1452–7, fresco, egg tempera and oil on wall, San Francesco, Arezzo.

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upward urge by the little vista under its transverse beam, revealing the diagonally foreshortened corbelling under the projecting red-brick roof of a house. With its marble temple, palazzi (such as Piero also drew as an example in De prospectiva pingendi, see illus. 83) and hemispherical dome with lantern (such as Alberti had designed but not built at the Tempio Malatestiano), the city is composed of the imagined past, the fifteenth-century present and the planned future. According to legend, Hadrian had erected a temple on the site of the Crucifixion to stamp out Christian worship, which nonetheless would eventually seal its fate. Its marble sheathing and pediment show antique precedent, whereas the harmony of its three arched openings, oculus glazed with bottle bottom glass, and Venetian-style verde antico discs with a gold ball at their centre, shows Piero’s knowledge and emulation of contemporary architecture. Below the Discovery and Trial of the Crosses the cycle continues with the extremely loud Battle of Heraclius and the Beheading of Chosroes (illus. 35), a double scene that reads from left to right in a ferociously dense rhythm. It propels us to the year ad 628, in which the Christian emperor Heraclius wages war on the Persian army led by general Rhazates. Heraclius is incensed by the Persian king Chosroes, who has stolen the Cross from Jerusalem where Helena had left it. Worse, he has appropriated it to present himself as a Trinitarian God. As Heraclius’ army encounters Chosroes’, weaponry and heraldry are silhouetted against the sky scanning the pace of the battle. Arrows are piercing the sky, just like Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) in his notebooks would recommend for a battle

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scene. Their direction implies that there are archers among the viewers in the chapel, who are therefore in the middle of the conflict. There is a wild array of swords, maces and war hammers as used by fifteenth-century cavalry, of guisarmes or bladed pole weapons of a type wielded in battle by peasant recruits, and of lances that would have found better use on the tournament field. Flaring standards with a rampant lion, an imperial eagle and a Roman Capitoline goose indicate where Heraclius’ three companies, each led by a knight in full body armour, are pushing forward, while at the other side the Persian standards of a scorpion and a black African are torn or going down. The Christian army’s banner of a white cross on a red field is proudly erect as it faces the infidels’ collapsing banner of the Ottoman moon and stars. Below the doomed banner is the culmination of the battle in which Rhazates’ horse gallops at full speed into the thicket of the battle towards the dagger that Heraclius, mounted on his white horse, plunges into the rider’s throat. Piero’s art is not still. It presents the essential moment indicative also of what preceded and will follow. Piero’s art is the still. Across this battle scene, 49 figures are engaged in combat and eleven more enact Chosroes’ beheading. It is like an ancient battle sarcophagus, only more structured. Piero maintained clarity and purpose in the thick of the fight. He achieved a rhythm by dividing the action into soldiers acting in tandem or fighting man to man. An unarmed trumpeter with an inverted conical Byzantine Roman-style hat sounds the attack with puffed cheeks, side by side with one of the knights in full panoply (see illus. 1). At the centre of the battle, two of Heraclius’ knights ride side by side, one attacking a foot soldier, the other

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a mounted adversary. A knight in full panoply brings his sword down onto the head of a soldier in padded white costume who was about to counter. The slain man’s companion, a simple band of textile around his head, watches in horror. In the foreground a semi-nude swordsman raises his weapon to parry the blow of a triple-ball flail wielded by a shouting Persian. At the centre of the thicket, repeating a motive beloved in Roman art such as Piero could have seen on Trajan’s column in Rome, a

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soldier falls to his knees with his shield vainly raised over his head, as his adversary grapples him by the hair and is about to deal the final blow. No matter how intricate the overlapping, the head of every single soldier or horse corresponds to a set of legs below. Even the severed head at the lower left of the fresco glances with dead eyes at the beholder from between its own legs, mirroring the fallen mounted rider at the opposite side of the chapel in the Encounter of Constantine and Maxentius. 35 Piero della Francesca, The Battle of Heraclius and the Beheading of Chosroes, c. 1452–7, fresco, egg tempera and oil on wall, San Francesco, Arezzo.

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The antiquarian attention again goes beyond compo­ sitional borrowings to include the adoption of Byzantine Roman-style armour. However, as in the Encounter of Constantine and Maxentius, no person of either Antiquity or Piero’s time could have witnessed or participated in such a battle. By combining the real and the imagined, Piero is articulate about the historical context of a scene that he wants to revive in the present. The reflection of light from the lancet window in the plate armour and weapons implies that the ancient battle is taking place in the chapel, as do the arrows flying through the air. The battle’s culminating moment, the killing of Rhazates at the hands of Heraclius, partially overlaps the next episode, taking up a small portion at the right of the fresco. The killing, carried out with a dagger in the shape of a cross, takes place directly next to the True Cross, which has been erected on Chosroes’ throne cart and pulled onto the battlefield. In addition to the Cross, the cart has a rooster mounted on a column and, in front of a cloth of honour in pink, achieved by laying red Garanza lake over white lead (its pomegranate pattern now faded), is an imperial sella curulis. This is where Chosroes exhibited himself as God flanked by the Son (the Cross) and the Holy Spirit (the rooster). Right now, however, there is no Persian king on the throne. Having lost the battle, he kneels in front of the cart and is about to be decapitated by the executioner, who has already raised his sword. Piero emphasizes Chosroes’ blasphemy by painting his face exactly like God the Father in the Annunciation immediately to its right. The candelabra supporting the cart’s aedicule, which according to the classical architectural rules of Vitruvius should be columns,

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also betray the fickle nature of the king’s claims. Heraclius supervises the beheading alongside three men wearing the long woollen mantles, red hats and, in one case, brocaded sleeves that are distinctive of the Tuscan fifteenth-century mercantile elite. They probably are the commissioning members of the Bacci family, Francesco and his nephews Andrea and Agnolo. They may have chosen this position within the cycle to underline their militant faith in the True Cross and their denunciation of idolatry. The Legend’s last scene, Heraclius Returns the Cross to Jerusalem (illus. 36), is in the lunette at the top of the left wall. As the Sun sets, Heraclius approaches Jerusalem to restore the Cross to its proper place to work its salvific power. His court dignitaries all wear ample mantles, the kalimavkion or an equally Byzantine dome- or mushroom-shaped hat (see illus. 9), and sewn boots of soft leather. The emperor, however, is barefoot, in apostolic dress, and has reverently removed his kalimavkion, leaving the white cloth around his head upon which it rested. He is carrying the Cross in his bare hands. At first he had arrived in full regalia, on horseback, but when the city’s gates defiantly and miraculously closed, he understood he had to be as humble as Christ, who had been crucified on the very Cross. The city’s dignitaries meet him outside the city walls. One is about to lift his hat and kneel down, while the others are already bareheaded and on their knees. An old man hurries from the city to join their ranks. Without his small figure, the city walls would not appear nearly as large, nor as far removed from the reception committee. The further out of the city a ruler was welcomed during a regal entry, the greater his status.

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The reverent welcome here concerns the Cross, raised high against the sky. Two trees, one behind each figure group, underline the composition much as the Cross’s origins. The sky is streaked with clouds as in most other scenes. Unlike them, with the exception of the nocturnal Vision, it is not full day. The Sun is setting and at the horizon the heavens are tinged yellow and the lower clouds pink. Piero painted the blue of the sky over a grey underlayer, and not over the bare intonaco, in accordance with the darker hue of sunset. At the end of the day, in a true Aristotelian unity of time, place and action, Piero’s Legend of the True Cross, even though it unfolded over many thousands of years, has come to a close. The chronology of the Legend criss-crosses over the chapel walls.14 That erratic storyline might be said to be the murals’ 36 Piero della Francesca, Heraclius Returns the Cross to Jerusalem, c. 1452–7, fresco, egg tempera and oil on wall, San Francesco, Arezzo.

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melody. Piero, much like a composer such as Guillaume Dufay (1397–1474), famous for a complex polyphony in music, also sought harmony among the scenes of the cycle. By narrating the story with clarity in its individual scenes, but without sequential logic, he must have trusted his public to know the story, so as to improvise freely on its base. Essentially, Piero’s narrative unfolds from right to left (see illus. 25). This might seem remarkable, because it is natural to start on the left in countries where script reads from left to right. In churches, however, the right wall, as observed by some­ one standing in the nave and facing the high altar, was known liturgically as the Epistle side as the biblical Epistles were read here. The left side, facing north in an oriented church, was the Gospel side, as the darker side needed greater power to ward off evil. Consequently, imagery from the Old Testament was often placed at the Epistle side, New Testa­ment stories at the Gospel side. Therefore, in Piero’s cycle, the earliest episodes of the Legend relating to Adam, the Queen of Sheba and Constantine, which pre-date the triumph of Christianity, are at the right. Those pertaining to Helen and Heraclius, who had accepted Christianity, are at the left. The turn is on the short end-wall. Its pre-Christian right is distinguished by Jews bury­ ing the Cross and Emperor Con­stan­­­tine’s vision of the power of the Cross. Its Chris­­tian-era left has the Annunciation and a Jew converting to Christianity. This is the peripeteia of the story unfolding on the walls. Humanity leaves the era of expectancy and enters the time of assurance of a life after death, to be allotted on the Last Day as represented on the chapel facade. Resisting the urge of chronology and within this overall division in a left and right side, Piero organized his scenes

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har­monically. On each tripartite lateral wall, from the bottom up, the sequence corresponds to the Vitruvian superimposition of orders. Piero knew the Roman architect’s written work and would paraphrase him in his last treatise. Alberti had already reintroduced a built superimposition of classical orders, such as appear in Rome’s Colosseum, in the Florentine Palazzo Rucellai (started 1446). The lower Doric order was thought to be invented by conquerors to reflect the strength and grace of a man’s body. The middle Ionic order would have been modelled on the proportions of female bodies. Finally, the Corinthian order was a memorial to the dead, because its capital was inspired by an acanthus growing up from a basket on a young girl’s grave. Piero transposed the architectural shape and meaning of the Vitruvian superimposition to a pictorial mode. Masculine battle scenes face each other in the bottom tier of the sidewalls, actions of queens appear in the middle, and triumphs over death are displayed at the top. On the chapel’s back wall Piero also paired scenes. At the bottom are angelic apparitions or revelations of Christian faith to the Mother of God and an emperor. Above, two scenes pertain to revelation, but now to lowly people involved in lowly actions as they bury and reveal the Cross. Whereas in the Christian Discovery of the Cross, Piero took the inclusion of humble people as a way to detect the nobility pervading all of God’s creation, here lowly Jews are an invitation to derision. And therefore to humour. Now humour was one of the orator’s weapons as described by Cicero and Quintillian, used to elicit sympathy for a discourse and attention to the culture of the orator.15 It is Piero, the self-conscious artist, who like a rhetorician addresses his public. Given the dominating central

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placement of the comic scenes on the east wall, their audience included all entering the church and making their way to the chapel. His comic, close-to-life scenes in the most directly visible position of his programme roped them into the story. It is Piero the rhetorician of classical stamp who juxtaposes two scenes in the genre of comedy to the solemn epic of the rest of his cycle. It seems Piero knew not only Horace’s Ars poetica, requiring elements such as gravitas, dignity, decorum, unity, variety and harmony for the epic mode, but the first part of Aristotle’s De poetica, which discusses tragedy in a like manner, and alludes to the book’s lost second part, which was on comedy. Piero contrasts the salvific epic of Christ’s Cross with the satire of those who did not believe in His power. He is contemporary in his recourse to the antique literary device and in adapting it to actuality. The literary contrast also was a forceful reminder of Bernardino’s exhortation of the Aretines to triumph over pagan belief in the sign of the Cross. Piero held up a mirror to the Aretine citizens, using humour as critique. They might well feel superior to the ridi­culed Jews suppressing the power of the Cross in his frescos, but their sense of superiority faded the moment they realized they had done the same and needed to mend their heretical ways. Piero’s satire was meant to change the situation. The literary dimension of the task in Arezzo had therefore not been lost on Piero. In this he is at the forefront of artists wanting to emancipate painting by comparison to rhetoric, a liberal art. In 1452 the humanist Enea Silvio Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius ii, and the scribe and painter Niklas von Wyle from Esslingen also agreed in an exchange of letters that rhetoric or eloquence was the common source of literary and pictorial genius.16

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Carefully composed, Piero’s murals were meant for close looking so that the viewer may wonder at their story and art. An invitation to appreciate his capacity to create by comparing it to the creative force of nature is presented in the painted dado, composed of fictive panels of different colours of marble (several destroyed when the doors in the sidewalls were opened in the seventeenth century; see illus. 25). Some veins of the marble are shaped like animals, as though Piero wanted to show that nature was the first painter. Filarete had concluded as much in his treatise on architecture (xix, fol. 156r) after observing how in the marbles in San Marco, Venice, animals and figures seem to delineate themselves. The painted dado shows that the chapel was not meant for the prayers of the friars, as is also clear from the church’s ground plan of about 1320 by the architect Fra Giovanni da Pistoia and from the historical record, which indicates that until 1617 the choir-stalls were in the nave in front of the high altar. The chapel was empty along the walls, with the focus on the high altar – probably with the tomb of Sinigardi – and on the frescos. It was a place to inspire wonder at faith and art. In images that followed a rhetorician’s rationale and sense for key moments, Piero argued the story of the true power of the Cross. The patron Francesco Bacci died in March 1459 and there is no indication in his portrait in the Beheading of Chosroes, one of the last parts of the cycle to be executed, that he wasn’t alive at the moment of painting. Moreover, also in 1459, new glazing for the window was delivered from Borgo, suggesting not only that Piero had a hand in its design, but that the murals were complete.17 Already in 1457 Andrea Bacci had

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declared that he still had to pay Piero for painting at San Francesco, probably indicating that work was finished. Until 1473 the Bacci continued to quarrel over the 500 or 600 florins that they owed Piero. Even so, the beauty and intelligence of Piero’s Legend of the True Cross stirred them and patrons to come. Little wonder that it is at the court of the literary pope Pius ii that in 1458 we next find Piero. In Arezzo, Piero had proven himself a storyteller, a pictorial director of time.

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he frescos in Arezzo are Piero’s large-scale masterpiece, but the small-scale summa of his art is the Flagellation of Christ (illus. 37), now in the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche in Urbino. Undocumented until it surfaces in 1717 in the sacristy of Urbino Cathedral, the painting has fomented a stream of interpretations to do with the rationale of the three figures in the foreground. Some maintain that they represent members or friends of Urbino’s ruling Montefeltro family following an early or violent death of one of them, a harrowing experience paralleled in Christ’s ordeal. Others have related the blows dealt to Christ to historical events and in particular to the Fall of Constantinople at the hands of Sultan Mehmed ii in 1453. Yet others interpret the painting in a uniquely biblical sense. The Flagellation has come to acquire the epithet ‘enigmatic’.1 That, however, is a mode extraneous to Piero’s lucid narration, magisterially exemplified by the frescos in Arezzo, to which the Flagellation is close in date. It was small and, even though probably meant for Urbino, Piero could have painted it at home, maybe when weather conditions prevented him from working on the temperature-sensitive fresco-work during the final years in Arezzo.

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the flagellation As in Arezzo, Piero paints space-scanning clouds, conceives of his viewer as outside his painted buildings, uses Byzantine dress to evoke Christian Antiquity, and applies his paint in a meticulous way in vibrant tempera colouring. Later he would favour atmospherically graded skies, include the viewer within the represented buildings, abandon Byzantine dress, and experiment with the oil medium’s broader brushwork, smoother transitions and darker tonality. As in Piero’s Arrival of the Queen of Sheba and Meeting of the Queen of Sheba with King Solomon in Arezzo (see illus. 28), with its twin episodes, the composition of the Flagellation is in two. At Arezzo it is a colonnade perpendicular to the picture plane, the difference between outdoors and indoors, and the queen’s change of dress that set the consecutive episodes apart. In the Flagellation, in addition to these devices, Piero employs variation in distance of the figures and differentiation of the lighting scheme to set the two segments of his painting apart. As in the Arezzo fresco, in the Flagellation consecutive episodes from a narrative take place. At the left, in the open ground-floor loggia of his palace, Pilate sits in judgement as Christ, in whom he found no cause, is nonetheless flagellated at his orders (Matthew 27:26; Mark 15:15; John 19:1). Sceptre in hand, on an imperial sella curu­ lis, Pilate is dressed in the hat and red shoes of a Byzantine emperor that Piero and his contemporaries identified as those of an early Christian ruler. In front of Pilate, Christ is tied against a column, which is surmounted by a gold idol prob­ ably of the pagan sun god Apollo.2 Two barefoot executioners wrapped in simple tunics have raised their leather flails for

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the first blow. Seen from behind, an overseer in white turban and tunic is dressed like the workman standing in the pit in the Discovery of the Crosses (see illus. 34) in Arezzo. He observes, recoiling, raising his left hand. As in, for example, the frightened, overawed Virgin Annunciate in Filippo Lippi’s Martelli Altarpiece in San Lorenzo in Florence, it is a gesture of fear or wonder, as though the overseer recognizes Christ and doubts justice is being done. Pilate seems present also in the second episode with three figures in the foreground of a square. His profile in the Flagellation episode is damaged, hampering the comparison, but the left foreground figure in the right episode has the same olive countenance, green eyes, brown neck-length hair and beard trimmed in two points. Piero rotated his head in space and scaled it up. As in the two-episode scene in Arezzo the Queen of Sheba appears first in travel dress and next in regal attire; in the Flagellation’s second episode Pilate has changed his judge’s garb for the furry mushroom-shaped hat that Piero used also for Roman officials in Heraclius Returns the Cross to Jerusalem (see illus. 36), a crimson mantle over a green tunic with pink collar (the colour scheme had been reversed in the Flagellation scene), and yellow boots. In the episode at the right, Pilate addresses a person of means and dignity, who is wearing an open-sleeved, fifteenthcentury Italian formal gown in fur-lined blue gold brocade. He has hooked his thumbs behind his belt, much like the listening Solomon in Arezzo. Over his right shoulder he wears a scarlet strip of cloth that served as a rolled hood, which he must have taken off because he is of lower rank than Pilate. He has the short trimmed hair of fifteenth-century wealthy

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merchants, such as the cloth-dealing Bacci in the Beheading of Chosroes (see illus. 35). He wears a mantle of blue voided silk velvet embroidered with gold thread in a thistle pattern and with protruding loops of gold thread in the allucciolato technique. Such sumptuous fabric is used for Joseph of Arimathea in the Netherland­­ish painting that was much admired at the Italian courts. When in the 1440s Piero worked for the Este of Ferrara, he could have seen Rogier van der Weyden’s now-lost triptych of the Deposition, which may have included a brocade-clad Joseph of Arimathea as in Rogier’s surviv­­ ing versions of the theme now in the Prado and the Uffizi. It seems that Piero’s second episode represents Pilate addressing Joseph of Arimathea, described in the Bible as rich, a secret disciple of Christ and a righteous man, and the one who 37 Piero della Francesca, The Flagellation of Christ, and Joseph of Arimathea Asking Pilate for the Body of Christ, c. 1456–7, egg tempera and oil on poplar.

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buried Christ (Matthew 27:57; Mark 15:43; Luke 23:50; John 19:38).3 According to the Gospels, Joseph of Arimathea came to Pilate after the Crucifixion and ‘begged the body of Jesus’ so that he might give it proper burial. Pilate, who had not come to Golgotha for the Crucifixion, ‘wondered that he should be already dead’ (Mark 15:42–5; also Luke 23:50–52; John 19:38). This is why Piero here depicts Joseph in grave awareness and Pilate with hand raised in fear or wonder. Between Pilate and Joseph of Arimathea, a young blond man looks out of the picture, left hand on his hip, defiantly, impressed. He is barefoot and in an ankle-long tunic like the overseer of the previous episode, only in red and with a different fabric to tie it around his waist, and a white camicia underneath. The solemn digging helpers of St Helena in the Discovery of the Crosses in Arezzo also wear a camicia with similar tunic and belt. Within the logic of Piero’s use of dress, the blond man is a workman, Joseph’s helper. Also in Francesco di Giorgio’s bronze Deposition (Carmini, Venice) of about 1475 for Federico di Montefeltro, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus are accompanied by such a young assistant. By looking straight out of the picture, he locks gazes with the viewer for greater empathy, as recommended by Alberti (On Painting, ii.43). The scene of Joseph of Arimathea asking Pilate for Christ’s Body is rare, but occurs in the Netherlandish tradition that was treasured in Urbino. It was represented twice by Simon Bening (c. 1483/4–1561), an illuminator trained in Ghent by his father, whose repertories of motives he inherited. In a prayer book of about 1509–10 (illus. 38), he depicted a standing Nicodemus, and Joseph, without hat, kneeling before Pilate flanked by a Roman official.4

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Following the Flagellation, in his second episode Piero has skipped the Crucifixion, and propelled us to the consecutive point in the Passion narrative when Christ has just died. He employs his lighting scheme to make the timing of his episodes clear. Begging attention for it is the sun idol on Christ’s 38 Simon Bening, detached leaf from the prayer book of the Enriquez de Ribera family: Joseph of Arimathea Asking Pilate for the Body of Christ, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, Deposition and Lamentation, c. 1508–9, egg tempera, gold paint and gold leaf on parchment.

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column. Sunlight from the top left illuminates the outdoors in the painting, picking out the vibrant white of the architecture and the colourful garments of the figures on the square, as well as the open staircase behind the judgement hall. It casts shadows of the figures and palaces on the square, and of the pink palace’s roof on its own facade. Inside Pilate’s judgement hall, however, the light comes from the opposite direction, from a window between what must be partially walled intercolumniations in the side colonnade.5 The window is in the central bay and illuminates the architrave above it and the top, but not the bottom, of the column next to it. Its rectangular shape can be deduced from the patch of light on the entablature above the door behind Christ. The window starkly lights the central ceiling quadrant adjacent to it, Christ, Pilate and the executioner in blue, and places the overseer, a symphony in whites, against the light. The inward direction of all shadows indicates that the sun is in front of the picture surface, so that the viewer’s position must be south. Therefore, in the Flagellation episode, in accordance with the time of day when it occurred, the light coming from the right implies a morning sun in the East. When Joseph of Arimathea comes to Pilate, after Christ has died at three in the afternoon, the sun is in the West, and the light in this episode accordingly comes from the left. Piero designed his lighting scheme to reflect the narrative according to an Aristotelian unity of time, without compromising unity of space and action. The dead body of Christ is implied between the painting’s two scenes. It may have been present in the shape of a crucifix, or as the Eucharist in a tabernacle. Piero’s painting

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may have been part of a larger whole. Unlike the independent devotional panel of St Jerome in the Wilderness (see illus. 20), the Flagellation has no painted side edges. It has rough exposed wood side edges, indicating they were originally hidden, perhaps because the panel was slotted in a surround. This could have been a tabernacle in Urbino Cathedral, where in 1717 the panel was first documented. The date of the Flagellation would seem to fall within the period 1455–64, when Federico di Montefeltro, count and later duke of Urbino, invested new energy in the construction of the cathedral that his father Guidantonio (1378–1443) had begun.6 Federico was devoted to the Eucharistic body of Christ and at Urbino features in Justus of Ghent’s Communion of the Apostles (Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino) of 1473–4 for the Confraternity of Corpus Domini and in Francesco di Giorgio’s Deposition for the Confraternity of Santa Croce. The original location of the Flagellation might be related to Montefeltro patronage of the cathedral’s chapel of the Holy Sacrament.7 Placed in the left apsidal chapel, by the 1470s it was connected by grate and passage to the Montefeltro palace. It was therefore close to their hearth and heart. It was also the most honorific place of patronage in the cathedral, especially since the high altar had to remain free. The occidentation of the church, necessitated by its position at the edge of the precipitous slopes of Urbino’s hilltop, meant that in order for the priest to say Mass towards the east, he had to stand behind the high altar to face the congregation. In 1499 a special confraternity of the Holy Sacrament is aggregated to the Montefeltro chapel and in 1512 it commissions a wood structure to protect a pre-existent wall tabernacle.

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In an apostolic visit of 1574, Girolamo Ragazzoni, Bishop of Famagosta, notes that the tabernacle was in wood.8 Other Italian rulers commissioned wall tabernacles in prominent places. Before 1461 the Medici, for the chapel of Sts Cosmas and Damian in San Lorenzo in Florence, had Desiderio da Settignano carve a marble tabernacle over a relief of the pietà that has the same dimensions as Piero’s Flagellation.9 A similar format is also the Deposition in the attic of Donatello’s marble tabernacle (Museo del Tesoro, Basilica di San Pietro, Vatican City) of 1432–3, commissioned by Pope Eugenius iv for the Cappella Parva in the Vatican.10 At Urbino, nothing of the earlier tabernacle and its surrounds remains in the present chapel erected in 1584–95, the time when Piero’s panel may have been moved to the sacristy, and the clarity of its original context, by which the artist had geared his mastery of light, space and time to the unfolding of a Passion narrative, was lost. That mastery turns the painting into a visiting card for Federico di Montefeltro, whom at the end of his life Piero could consider his most eminent patron. The Flagellation is the first surviving work that Piero did for Federico. He executed it in tempera and oil on a gesso layer that is usual for its composition of gypsum and rabbit glue, but experimental for the wool fibres maybe added to obtain as smooth as possible a surface for his miniature-like painting.11 He transferred his design by means of a cartoon, using spolvero and incisions for the architecture. He even transferred the 3.5-centimetre-wide turban of the overseer with spolvero, planning it with such care that one might unravel it. At the pictorial stage he made minor changes related to the position of the figures for better readability. He decreased the size of the head of Joseph of

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Arimathea, so as to be able to lower the already incised window behind him. He adapted the hair of both Pilates, perhaps to make them look more alike. Piero imagined a setting for his story as though he were an architect or scenographer. He conceived of a judgement loggia, sanctified by Christ’s presence, as constructed in white and coloured marbles in an antique style, such as he was wont to use for sacred structures (see for example illus. 23, 28, 60, 95).12 It is a modular architecture, with cubical bays. The back wall and floor quadrants have marble intarsia, as in the Pan­ theon. It has a marble cassette ceiling and fluted columns with fantastic capitals with eight instead of the canonical four volutes. Its back wall is pierced by tabernacle doorframes each with a different palmette frieze, such as painter Fra Carnevale and sculptor Maso di Bartolomeo had designed in 1449–51 for the portal of San Domenico in Urbino, opposite the cathedral and the Montefeltro palace.13 Nonetheless, the architectural invention is Piero’s, based on observations of bare marble Roman ruins, and not directly on the once brightly coloured Dominican portal. The staircase behind Pilate is the only hint at an upper floor, as the front architrave of the loggia coincides with the picture edge. Likewise, a sliver of the composition continues to the left of the loggia’s left column, indicating that the building, but not the platform of Pilate’s throne that the column overlaps, continues. The modular system of the loggia’s floor quadrants extends on the square where they are delineated by white stone strips and filled with terracotta tiles. Pilate’s palace, as is indicated by the light behind it, is at a remove of seven quadrants from another antique building in the distance. It is in white marble with

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details in porphyry and verde antico, including, as in the Pantheon, in the friezes. It has superimposed Ionic and Corinthian pilasters and arched windows that are reminiscent of Alberti’s Palazzo Rucellai in Florence. Catching the light streaming in from behind Pilate’s palace, at the other side of the square is a fifteenth-century citizen’s palace with cantilevered roof with terracotta roof tiles, arched windows with wood shutters, tapestry bar held on irons, and pink plastering. Piero took care to include two cantilevered roof supports at the front, so that the depth of the foreshortened side with six such supports can be calculated. Behind the pink palace is a fifteenth-century white tower with a loggia towards the top. A wall with fifteenth-century decoration separates the piazza from a garden with verdant tree behind it. There is a carefully composed mix of the (invented) antique and contemporary, aimed, as in the Arezzo cycle, to renew the faith and art of the antique Christian past in the present. Like the architecture, Piero’s perspective contributes to the proximity of the sacred events.14 The figures at the right feel notably close to the viewer and the empathy with their realization of Christ’s death is great, if only because of the contrast with the expanse of the empty square behind them and because of the difference in scale with the figures of the Flagellation. That juxtaposition invites the viewer to probe relative distance. Visual tricks such as the far wall with its ornament of foreshortened blocks, a common fifteenthcentury pictorial decoration (illus. 39), which Piero also used to disquieting effect in the Arezzo Annunciation (see illus. 30), introduce an unsettling perspective of their own and challenge the viewer to analyse Piero’s space. This is the artist

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Piero at work, who would write in his perspective treatise (iii, prologue) that ‘painting is nothing else but the demonstration of surfaces and bodies that become smaller or bigger on the picture surface according to their angle and distance from the eye.’ The perspective is so carefully constructed that it can be reconstructed. As we have seen, it reveals the architectural ground plans, elevations and relative distances between the buildings that Piero had in mind. The lines perpendicular to the picture surface, evident in floor and trabeations, converge according to the rules of perspective in a ‘vanishing’ point. It sits on the horizon, slightly to the right of the green flagellant’s knee. Its position is at a distance equivalent to the height of the picture transported along the diagonal that from the top left bisects the square contained between the picture’s top, left and bottom edges and the edge of the antique building behind Pilate’s palace. It determines the foreshortening of the colonnade that sets the episodes apart. 39 Taddeo di Bartolo, painted dado: Blocks, 1406–7, fresco, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena.

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Its off-centre placement allows Piero to allot more space to the Flagellation, compensating for its smaller scale with respect to the Asking for Christ’s Body. Placed at the knee level of the painted figures, the horizon is low. It forces the beholder into a kneeling position at a remove of about two and a half times the picture’s width, maybe consonant to the panel’s original placement. In the dedication of his Book of the Courtier, set at the Urbino court of Federico’s son Guidubaldo and circulating in manuscript as of 1508, although published in 1528, Baldas­sare Castiglione writes how a painter can make, ‘by perspective art, that which is not seem to be’.15 In the Flagellation Piero had created his own narrative and architectural world. The artist’s proud signature, ‘opvs petri de bvrgo sci sepvlcri.’, is customarily placed on the step of a throne, which is, however, unusually not the just Virgin’s, but the doubting judge’s Pilate’s. Did Piero identify with Pilate’s doubts about truth? Or did he, like Christ, subordinate himself to his judgement? And did he ask his viewer to do the same, through faith and art? In both scenes the viewer is presented with a portentous sense of doubt of whether justice is being done, by the overawed overseer first and then by the wonder of Pilate. There are clues to guide his judgement. Where Christ is in the light, the marble wall slab behind Pilate is a diabolically patterned diaspro siciliano, against which the Florentine painter Andrea del Castagno similarly placed the evil Judas in his Last Supper in Sant’Apollonia in Florence. The judgement hall has a pavement of green roundels alternating with squares with inscribed purple polygonal stars. That Christ is placed on a verde antico roundel and not on a porphyry star might be

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related to the mathematical-theological idea that a circle is like the truth and a polygon with an ever-increasing number of sides, approximating a circle, is like the human mind trying to fathom truth, as Nicholas of Cusa wrote in On Learned Ignorance (i.1.10).16 Pilate’s throne fully covers a quadrant of the pavement, but given the alternation of roundels and polygonal stars, it must be on a polygonal star, in the realm of the approximation of truth. rome The narrative acumen and magisterial artistry of the Arezzo cycle and the Flagellation made Piero a welcome guest at the Vatican. When he prepared for his departure on 22 September 1458, delegating some affairs with the Observant Franciscans in Borgo to his brother Marco, it was only 34 days since the election of humanist Pius ii to the papal throne. The pope employed Francesco dal Borgo (c. 1415–1468), Piero’s cousin once removed, not only for his administration, but to build the benediction loggia at Old St Peter’s with a superimposition of architectural orders as in the Colosseum. He also employed Piero to help put his stamp on the Vatican’s private papal apartments.17 These had been constructed by Pope Nicholas v Parentucelli (r. 1447–55) around the cortile del Papagallo and are now famous for the frescos by Raphael. In the second half of October 1458 one room was filled with scaffolding. In April 1459 the papal treasury paid Piero the large amount of 150 florins for ‘part of his work on certain paintings that he does in the room of his Holiness Our Lord the Pope’. A month later it disbursed 80 florins for gold leaf

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for ornaments and paintings in an unspecified ‘room of Our Lord in the palace’. If the gold was meant for Piero, it may have been for his finishing touches. Piero’s Vatican work is lost and it is unclear what he painted. Vasari in his Life of Raphael claims that the sixteenth-century painter obliterated a finished scene by Piero and replaced it with the Liberation of St Peter and the Mass of Bolsena. This would suggest that Piero’s work was in the private audience hall of the pope, now known as the Stanza di Eliodoro.18 When Raphael set to work, the rooms had in addition to the scenes by Piero murals in different states of finish dating from a range of papacies, as Vasari also mentions work by Bartolomeo della Gatta (1448–1502), Luca Signorelli (1450–1523), Donato Bramante (1440–1514) and Bramantino (c. 1460–1536). In his Life of Piero, Vasari says that Piero’s work consisted of ‘two stories in the rooms upstairs’ and that in the same room there were scenes that included many portraits of historical figures relevant to the Parentucelli pope that Raphael copied for Paolo Giovio’s museum of famous men in Como. Vasari clearly noticed a different hand in the other scenes, but seems to have erred when attributing these to the later Bramante or Bramantino and also when he claimed they were done at the same time as Piero’s. Pius ii seems to have employed Piero to carry on the decoration of the room begun by Nicholas v.19 If Piero worked in the audience hall, which was adjacent to the library, his subject-matter may well have been learned. And so was the entourage at the Vatican. Piero’s relation there, Francesco dal Borgo, had a keen interest in Greek mathematics, optics and geometry. Under Nicholas v and Pope Calixtus iii Borgia (r. 1455–8), he ordered Latin

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translations of the works of Euclid and Archimedes. These treatises would prove fundamental for Piero’s mathematics as applied to pictorial perspective and as elaborated in his books. Pius ii was a humanist and so was Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, to whom he entrusted Vatican affairs when in January 1459, while Piero was still at work, the pope attended the Council of 40 Piero della Francesca with Giovanni da Piamonte, St Luke, c. 1459, mural painting, Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome.

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Mantua. Nicholas of Cusa applied astronomy and geometry to an understanding of God, just as Piero applied it to painting. Piero thrived in such an environment. It also brought his workshop other commissions in Rome. Cardinal Guillaume d’Estouteville (c. 1412–1483) prevailed on his services.20 Archpriest of the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore from 1443 to 1483, he greatly enhanced the church and added two chapels for himself, including that of Santi Michele Arcangelo e Pietro in Vincoli (now a passage). The style of the much-damaged murals suggests Piero was extensively aided, if not replaced, in their execution by his assistant Giovanni da Piamonte (illus. 40). He covered the vaults of the chapel in fine plaster mixed with marble dust and blue for a smooth surface. He painted its rib vaults with laurel leaves bound with flowery ribbons and lined them with a palmette frieze that is treated as though it were a little fence, similar to the crowning motif of Alberti’s Tempietto of the Holy Sepulchre in Florence. It overlaps the stars and the clouds in the sky where the evangelists are seated, one in each section of the vault. St Luke with his symbol of the winged ox is best preserved. The evangelist has folded his mantle over his shoulder, like Elias (see illus. 26) in Arezzo, so that his right hand is free to write on a scroll on his knee. In his other hand he holds a shell with ink, into which he has dipped his pen. The pale lilac, green and blue shades of the evangelists’ vestments attest to the colouristic feast that Piero here conceived. The Florentine painter Benozzo Gozzoli finished the chapel, as sad tidings made Piero return to Borgo. On 6 November 1459 his mother was buried in the Badia.

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iero’s renewed presence in Borgo drew a sigh of relief from the confraternity of Santa Maria della Misericordia. He finally set to work on the altarpiece, which they had commissioned in distant 1445 and vainly solicited in 1454. Instalments paid on 10 January 1446 and 29 April 1450, totalling a fifth of the promised fee, probably had to do with the carpentry. Payment of the remainder of Piero’s honorarium in 1460–62 suggests that this is when he took to the brush.1

the misericordia altarpiece Long-standing family ties bound Piero to the confraternity of the Misericordia. It was a brotherhood of flagellants, who scourged themselves for penance and had an active civic life in Borgo. With an oratory church and hospital ward, it was dedicated to the care of its members, the poor, the sick and the dead. It was also devoted to the propagation of the cult of the Virgin. In the early summer of 1460, while Piero painted the altarpiece, an indulgence of three years for all those visiting the confraternity’s church during Marian feasts was obtained through the mediation of Piero’s childhood friend

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Malatesta Cattani, who had become the bishop of Camerino. The original, late medieval church was demolished in the seventeenth century, on account of its critical vicinity to the city walls in the northeastern corner of the city, and rebuilt several metres closer to the city centre. Excavations have revealed the foundations of the first shallow apse with an altar at its cord where Piero’s polyptych was once installed. At a width of 3.5 metres the apse was a snug fit.2 When the confraternity officials signed the contract with Piero they claimed the right to dictate which saints and stories would be depicted. As was also the case with Sassetta’s Fran­ cis­can Altarpiece in Borgo (see illus. 7), the programme was 41 Piero della Francesca, Misericordia Altarpiece, 1460–62, gold, egg tempera and oil on poplar. Main tier, left to right: Sts Sebastian and John the Baptist, Virgin of Mercy, Sts John the Evangelist and Bernardino of Siena. Top tier, left to right: St Benedict, Annunciating Angel, Crucifixion, Virgin Annunciate, St Francis.

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probably refined once the carpentry was ready, so that the patrons could physically indicate their wish, and the painter could make precise designs.3 Piero would have met with the officials around 1460 in front of a polyptych that consisted of predella, main tier, pinnacles and piers. We can infer that they wanted the confraternity’s protectress, the Madonna della Misericordia, or Virgin of Mercy. She was to go at the centre, with the Annunciation in the pinnacle tier. Practising selfflagellation in imitation of Christ’s suffering, the confrat­ern­­ity members also wanted the story of the Passion with, in reference to the town’s name, particular attention to Christ’s tomb.4 This narrative was to be unfolded in the predella and the central pinnacle. The Baptist, as patron saint of Florence, the dominating city, was owed the most honorific place to the Virgin’s right. John the Evangelist, as patron saint of Borgo, was to be at her left. The far ends of the main tier were for Sebastian – who had not died when riddled with arrows, and therefore was a saint of solace to those in the confraternity’s care who suffered from pain and disease – and Bernardino of Siena, canonized in 1450 and associated with the local cult of the Virgin of Mercy. Also to be included were Arcano and Egidio, the city’s founding fathers who had brought the relics of the Holy Sepulchre. They were to be on the piers with above them and in the outer pinnacles a scattering of monastic and mendi­ cant saints. All saints were to be male, as was the confraternity’s membership. The monogram of the confraternity was to appear as a sign that it had commissioned the work. It was to take pride of place on the piers in correspondence to the predella. The original framing elements of the polyptych are lost, but the figurative parts survive and are now in the Museo Civico Predella, left to right: Noli me Tangere, The Three Maries at the Tomb, The Deposition, The Flagellation, The Agony in the Garden. Left pier, top to bottom: St Jerome, St Anthony of Padua, St Arcano, monogram of the Misericordia. Right pier, top to bottom, St Augustine, St Dominic, St Egidio, monogram of the Misericordia.

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in Sansepolcro (illus. 41). The conventional polyptych has innovative features such as round, instead of Gothic, arches and a continuous, instead of compartmentalized, main tier.5 The gold ground follows tradition, but Piero decided to omit any decoration such as punch marks, so that it becomes elusive, pure light. The figures bathe in it, illuminated not only by a natural illumination from the right that creates the lights and shades of their modelling, but, divinely, from the back. The edge of the fur lining of the Virgin’s mantle even catches the iridescent backlight where it overlaps the gold (illus. 42, 43). The golden light and lack of depth make the saints on their shallow marble ledge unfathomably large. Their halos, glazed over the gold and catching the reflections of the tops of their heads, almost touch the frame’s arches. Disposed in a columnar rhythm, their rows open up to the Queen of Heaven in their midst. She in turn opens her merciful mantle around the protégées at her feet. The Virgin of Mercy is the pivot of the polyptych. Her head, body and right foot are aligned with its vertical axis. Her contrapposto and asymmetrically tied rope give such centrality its off-centre corollary. This Queen of Heaven has the face of a young maiden earnest with early sorrow and compassion. Her crown fastens the transparent fringed veil around her modishly shorn forehead and tied hair, while her halo seems caught between its points. Her body almost cylindrical, her mantle a parabolic cone, she is the living equivalent of the tent of Constantine (see illus. 31). The male protégés to her right are of different ages and include a hooded flagellant. The female devotees to her left likewise represent the stages of life with one unmarried with loose hair, two married

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with tied hair, and one widowed with white veil and black mantle. Disposed in semicircles under the conical mantle, the groups of devotees have a concise spatiality that erupts in the stark expression of the foremost protégées seen in threequarter profile, the man opening his arms in rapture and the woman, with flowing hair and dress, folding her hands and fixing her gaze in boundless devotion. The figure group with its rectangular base is reminiscent of Umbrian and Marchigian polychrome wood statues of the Virgin of Mercy (for example Bargello, Florence, and Museo Diocesano, Urbino), which might explain why, even though pictorial space against the gold background is continuous, there is an incongruence in scale between the figures of the central panel, as well as between them and those on the lateral panels. Above the Virgin of Mercy, in the central pinnacle, is the Crucifixion. Like the Virgin, Christ is almost frontal with a slight asymmetry, here in the legs. Piero painted the body in its entirety, before applying the loincloth. The mourning Virgin and John the Evangelist pivot around the immobile body of their son and master on the cross. She is in widow’s black and has stretched out her powerless hands towards him. He stands with legs and arms parted wide, and screams. The predella has scenes from Christ’s Passion and com­ ple­ments the Crucifixion in the central pinnacle. The Passion narrative starts at the right with the Agony in the Garden and the Flagellation. Viewers then have to raise their gaze, via the pivotal Virgin, to the Crucifixion above, before lower­ing it, again grazing devotedly over the Virgin, to the pre­­della’s central Deposition with the Tomb placed in the middle. The narrative then continues at the far left, with the Noli

42 Piero della Francesca, central panel of the Misericordia Altarpiece: Virgin of Mercy, 1460–62, gold, egg tempera and oil on poplar.

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me Tangere and moves inward again with the Three Marys at the Tomb. Piero geared his composition and his narrative towards a centripetal reading that circles around the Virgin like a planet around the Sun.6 The two Sts John at the side of the Virgin of Mercy have heavily folded mantles that make one believe Vasari when he writes that Piero experimented with drawing wet textiles draped over clay manikins. St Sebastian in underpants has an anatomy so lovingly described that one can imagine Piero studying both workshop models (as had been introduced in Florence and Ferrara), contemporary Marchigian wood statues of the troubled saint in underpants (for example Palazzo dei Priori, Fermo, and Pinacoteca Civica, San Severino Marche), and, somewhat timidly, Roman sculpture. The volume and smoothness of the modelling of the flesh parts and draperies have everything to do with Piero’s use of oil in addition to egg as a binder for his colours. It allowed him to blend 43 Piero della Francesca, fur lining of the mantle of the Virgin overlapping the gold, detail of illus. 42.

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and juxtapose hues of a colour to suggest light and shades. That his technique is at an experimental stage is clear from the condition of the paint, which, especially in the ultra­marine blues that needed a lot of oily binder, has developed a marked crackle like crocodile skin. The unwanted effect is partly due to the slow drying times of the walnut oil that Piero used. The oil-rich preparation layer that he applied only on the gesso ground of the panel at the right may explain why the condition of the paint here is worse than in the other panels. Piero prepared his figures in drawing and transferred them by way of pounced cartoons. The absence of incisions against the gold, usually made to show the gilder the point up to where he had to apply his leaves, is remarkable and typical of Piero’s highly planned preparation and autograph execution. Piero enhanced the valued purple glow of the expensive ultramarine of his blues with a layer of red lake underneath. In the altarpiece he made two adjustments. The first concerns the viewpoint of the platform of the Virgin, which he lowered, so that perspective dictates that it is shared by the spectator and the painted supplicants and that the Virgin towers over all in the same way. The second adjustment is the exten­­sion of the feet and dress of the outermost supplicants over the side panels, done probably once he had assembled the main tier panels. By contrast to Piero’s mastery, innovation and material richness, the painting in the piers and predella uses incisions against the gold, favours less expensive azurite over ultramarine, and egg over oil as a binder. The predella has long been attributed to Giuliano Amidei (first doc. 1446 – d. 1496), a painter and Camaldolese monk who lived in Borgo’s Badia at the time. The piers may

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have been designed by Piero but executed by an assistant, possibly Lorentino d’Andrea.

st louis of toulouse On a civic level, Piero was engaged not only by a confraternity, but directly by the government. By 30 October 1460 Piero was serving a two-monthly duty on Borgo’s advisory Council of Twelve. This coincided with the tenure of Ludovico di Odoardo Acciaioli, scion of a Florentine family, as the administrative and juridical governor sent from Florence for the second half of 1460. Acciaioli was capitano, but also, in imitation of Florence’s most honorific function, gonfaloniere di giustizia, or standard-bearer of justice, an office that many of his ancestors had fulfilled in Florence. After his term, Florence revoked what was either its own premature intention or Borgo’s wishful move, and officially sanctioned an executive structure similar to its own only as of 1467. In 1460, though, the citizens rejoiced in the grandeur of the honorary office. They celebrated Ludovico Acciaioli with an image of his name saint by Piero’s workshop (illus. 44) in the Palazzo del Capitano (see illus. 45), once bearing an inscription identifying Acciaioli as capitano and gonfaloniere and now in the Museo Civico in Sansepolcro.7 The St Louis of Toulouse carried both civic and religious meaning, as it was on a wall in the chapel in the Palazzo del Capitano.8 The wall divided the hall of justice, occupying the full width of the west end of the first floor, from the chapel to its east. Criminal causes were heard in the hall and the chapel may have served for the accused and the condemned

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to get spiritually prepared for their verdict. Piero planned the St Louis for a shallow niche in the west wall of the chapel, presumably facing the altar at the east, and almost certainly lit by a window from the south, as the figure and the architecture behind it are strongly lit from the left. In 1846, when an internal staircase replaced the palazzo’s external steps (see illus. 45), the wall was destroyed. The fresco was detached, but the lower half of the figure, much of the architecture and the inscription were lost. Whereas Piero often painted single figures against a marble slab, the St Louis is positioned in a niche clad in alternating green and red stone. It might be an artistic and political reference to an eminently Florentine ensemble, the niche of the Parte Guelfa at Orsanmichele by Lorenzo Ghiberti, in which Donatello placed his bronze St Louis of Toulouse.9 Louis of Toulouse (1274–1297; canon. 1317), firstborn of Charles ii of Anjou, King of Naples, was traditionally depicted in a cope scattered with the heraldic fleur-de-lys of Anjou. Piero’s young Franciscan looks daunted by the mitre, cope, crosier and breviary of the bishopric of Toulouse that he was forced to accept when he declined his right to become king of Naples. The long, youthfully unbent neck rises from the wide, engulfing cope. As a small gloved and ringed hand emerges from that cope to hold the crosier, it reveals a slender waist girded by the Franciscan cord. The St Louis is in buon fresco. Only the azurite of the mantle, a pigment that cannot be applied in fresco, and the shell-gold rays of the halo were done a secco. Once Piero had made the drawings, his workshop could have executed the fresco in a couple of days. Three giornate, applied soon after each other,

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remain in the fragmentary fresco once probably measuring about 3 by 1.5 metres. To transfer the design, incisions were used for the architecture and crosier, and spolvero for the figure. In the hands, the dots of the pricked cartoon appear as depressions, possibly because the cartoon was transferred by pricking holes in it directly on the wall, instead of pouncing 44 Piero della Francesca with Lorentino d’Andrea, St Louis of Toulouse, 1460, fresco and egg tempera on plaster (detached from the Palazzo del Capitano in Borgo).

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charcoal through pre-pricked holes. The technique seems to indicate velocity of execution, in accordance maybe with the brevity of Acciaioli’s office and the delegation of the frescoing to an assistant, possibly again Lorentino d’Andrea.10 Even so, there is a delicate rendering of the shimmer of winding gold threads in the cords lining the orphrey of the cope, as well as a soft glow of the pearls with which the mitre is studded, worthy of Piero’s powers of observation. the r esur r ection More central to city life, and therefore done with the master’s full attention, is the Resurrection (see illus. 46) in the Council Hall. In the late 1450s, along with the reconfiguration of the Palazzo del Capitano, the Palazzo della Residenza, or communal palace, of Borgo had been enlarged. After almost two decades of submission to Florence, the local politicians re­ claimed visual autonomy. The city fathers built a new Council Chamber opening onto a raised loggia where they could address the citizens (illus. 45).11 Over the door was Borgo San Sepolcro’s emblem: Christ Rising from the Sepulchre. In 1418 the story of the founding fathers who brought pilgrimage relics of Christ’s tomb had even been written in the communal account book.12 At the other side of the square was the town’s most important church, the Badia, or Camaldolese Abbey, with its altarpiece of 1348 showing Christ’s Resurrection from the Sepulchre by the Sienese painter Niccolò di Segna (see illus. 6). Communal halls usually had an image of the holy figure to whom the town was dedi­cated. Siena, the self-styled City of the Virgin, for instance, has a Virgin Enthroned by Simone

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Martini. There was no better artist to paint the Resurrection for Borgo’s Council hall than its own Piero della Francesca. Probably by about 1462, during or just following the com­­pletion of the Misericordia Altarpiece, he painted the Resurrection (illus. 46). It is a mural that has been detached with its wall, a so-called trasporto a massello.13 Its wall is a single layer of bricks, suggesting that also in origin it was an internal partition and not part of the stone exterior of the building. Like the wall in which it is now inserted, it may have been part of a divide between the anteroom and the Council hall behind it. In the mural, the light comes from the left, consonant with a position in the anteroom facing the loggia, because the room is lit from the south, or left when entering the loggia door. The painting (‘el sepolcro’) is mentioned when in 1474, while Piero was ‘supervisor of the walls of the residence’, its supporting wall in the upstairs hall is set as an example for a 45 Remigio Cantagallina (1575–1656; attr.), View of the Square in front of the Badia in Borgo, technique unknown.

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single-brick wall (‘una stola de mattoni’) to be erected in the space downstairs.14 It seems that when the wall upstairs was modified or pulled down, maybe when in the early sixteenth century vaulting was created that needed sturdier support, care was taken to save the Resurrection with its part of the wall. It was encased in a new partition that is still there. At the occasion, part of the tabernacle frame with which Piero surrounded his composition was lost, including most of the two-line inscription in the base. In the first line, at about a quarter from the left the letters ‘hvman’ and midway ‘orte’ are all that can still be deciphered. In a city hall, as was also the case in Siena, inscriptions on imagery addressed the governors from the mercantile class and were therefore often in Italian. Preserving the Latin initial ‘h’ in human[a/ e/i/o] was something that Piero often did in his writings.15 His inscription of the Resurrection may have been a reference to the Salvation of the ‘genere humano’, or mankind, through the death, or ‘morte’, of Christ. The inscription could have been grafted on the Bible’s central reflection on the Resur­ rection (1 Corinthians 15:21): ‘For by a man came death, and by a man the resurrection of the dead,’ or in the first complete Italian Bible translation, the Malermi Bible of 1471, ‘i[m] perho che certe per lhomo ven[uta] e la morte; & per lhomo e venuta la resurectione di morti.’ It would have alluded to the sepulchre of Borgo’s foundation. It would have stated mankind’s Salvation at the hands of a God become human. Piero painted the Christian mystery of human triumph over death. He makes the viewer an accomplice in an event that had no waking witnesses. The viewer is level with Christ’s stare. For the oblivious sleeping soldiers the perspective

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shifts and, probably in accordance with the mural’s original position, they are seen from below. In theological-optical theory, such as Peter of Limoges’ Tractatus moralis de oculo (Moral Treatise on the Eye), direct vision as opposed to mediated or refracted vision, or seeing at an angle, was possible only after the Resurrection and was associated with a passage from Paul (1 Corinthians 13:12): ‘We see now through a glass in a dark manner; but then face to face.’ Piero’s shift in perspective helps to perceive a religious truth, it generates spiritual meaning, as well as vicinity to the risen Christ. At the same time, by shifting the perspective, he avoided awkward distortions, as Paolo Uccello did in his frescoed cenotaph for John Hawkwood in Florence Cathedral.16 Christ has the frightfulness of one who has looked death in the eye. From dark sockets he transfixes the viewer with wide-open eyes, the white showing under his brown irises. His face is asymmetrical, as any human’s. The shadows caused by the tension in the facial muscles as he inhales deeply are rendered with colours, which Piero blended with his finger to even out transitions. The blood dripping from the wound in his side is a fresh memory of his horrid death on the cross. At the same time, his muscular physique shows that he is outdoing death unscathed. His ivory-pale skin seems almost luminescent and lightens up by reflection at the inside of his right arm. That he is not just human, but divine, is explicitly clear from his halo, which Piero applied against a small white outline held in reserve in the painted sky, as a foreshortened solid object of gold leaf over tin maybe once reflecting the top of his head. As Christ is rising from the tomb, he holds in his right hand the pole of the banner placed in front of the

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sarcophagus, with the banner seen from below, tapering and wrapping around as it disappears behind his shoulder. A pink cloth, redder and smoother when the glazes of Garanza lake over the pinkish ochre were still intact, is draped over his shoulder and middle. He loosely gathers its folds in the hand resting on his raised knee as he has planted his foot firmly on the rim of the sarcophagus. Since the Resurrection occurred at the rising of the sun, the clouds and the blue of the sky at the horizon lighten up. The hills, more verdant when Piero’s shades of copper green were still present, are scattered with scrub, a castle and a town with walls and towers. At the left, small buds appear on other­wise bare branches, as though referring to ‘But now Christ is risen from the dead, the firstfruits of them that sleep’ (1 Corinthians 15:20). At the right are eternal evergreens. The trees are aligned along diagonals that lead the eye to Christ. Even the choice of the Corinthian order in the tabernacle frame signifies triumph over death. The soldiers sit, fast asleep, arranged in front of the sarcophagus in a maximum variety of poses, falling back to the sides, as though a seed has burst open and Christ above them buds from it. Their body armour is of the Byzantine type, with gilt cuir bouilli torso plates with shoulder, groin and knee protection. A soldier with a red sallet bends forward over his raised knees to bury his face in his hand, his nose projecting between his thumb and index finger. He is wrapped in a green and red shot silk cloth. He partially overlaps another soldier, whose head has sunk back in audacious foreshortening that needed a single giornata’s work, almost touching the pole of Christ’s banner. He has supported himself by

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placing his shield, showing the inside with its handle, under his right armpit. Next to him, higher than the others, because he has pulled his legs underneath him, a soldier with a blue chapel-de-fer rests his head against the shaft of his spear, which he clutches with both hands. His red shield with the monogram of the Senate and People of Rome covers the lower part of his body. Only the inside of the rim of his helmet is visible. 46 Piero della Francesca, The Resurrection of Christ, c. 1462, fresco, egg tempera and oil on brick wall (detached and inserted in a new wall), Palazzo della Residenza (Museo Civico), Sansepolcro.

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It is painted a secco in now mainly abraded azurite, which once would have neatly covered the now disturbingly exposed seam between giornate in the rim. In front of him is a soldier who leans back with one elbow resting against a stone. Even though a lowly soldier and not an elevated Madonna, his purple tunic is done by glazing red lake over expensive ultramarine. Piero studied the backward slant of his head carefully and made an adjustment in the position of his chin for which spolvero marks indicate that initially he had in mind a more raised position. The tilt is given force by the cascade of feathers on the rim of his sallet. The sarcophagus, with three coloured marble panels, is of the type that Alberti used for his rendition of the Holy Sepulchre in San Pancrazio in Florence. Because of the low viewpoint, the top is not visible, but it is clear that Christ stands inside it and that the covering stone was miraculously displaced when he arose from death. Also Albertian is the device whereby Piero’s mural seems to have opened a window in the wall, maybe using the architecture of the communal palace’s loggia as inspiration for the surrounding tabernacle, through which the event, unseen by human eyes, becomes nonetheless visible. After transferring his design with pricked cartoons and snapped cords, Piero in principle needed nineteen days of work, or giornate, to apply his patches of extraordinarily thick plaster. As very little of the mural is in fresco and the rest in subtly overlapping layers of pigments in egg, oil, or a mix of these binders on either dry or semi-dry intonaco, it would have consumed much more intermediary and successive time. Whereas the larger cycles in Arezzo and Rome had required

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assistants, this smaller mural, which would have come under the close scrutiny of his fellow-citizens, incited full autography, meticulous care and expensive materials. Because of the painting’s sheer beauty, it and Borgo as a whole triumphed over death and destruction. During the Second World War, Anthony Clarke, captain of the British artillery who liberated the town, ordered a daring ceasefire, because he had read Aldous Huxley’s enraptured description of the Resurrection in ‘The Best Picture’ (1925).

st jerome and a supplicant With a landscape resembling that in the Resurrection and reflecting halos as in the Misericordia Polyptych, Piero’s St Jerome and a Supplicant (illus. 47) might date to about the same period.17 The small devotional panel is now in the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice and may have been meant for a patron in the lagoon city from the outset. Unlike Piero’s earlier version of the Penitent Jerome (see illus. 20), it includes the image of the patron. An old although not original inscription, perhaps added by someone who remembered the genesis of the work (as also happened in early sixteenth-century Venice for Giorgione’s Laura, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and Giovanni Bellini’s St Francis in the Desert, now in the Frick Collection in New York), identifies the sitter as ‘hier[onymvs] amadi avg[vstinvs] f[ilivs]’, possibly Girolamo di Agostino Amadi (1431–1507), a silk merchant active in Venice, whose family was from Lucca.18 If his attire and portly stature are those of a prematurely old magistrate, the identity would work with a date in the early 1460s.

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After that Piero favours atmospheric landscapes over this panel’s crystalline Tuscan views and saturated flesh parts over this panel’s blonder tempera tonality. The donor wears the Venetian adult male’s fur-lined toga or lucco, also known as a dogalina a comeo, with sleeves bulging at the elbows so that they could be used as a purse. Over his shoulder is the scarlet strip of cloth of his rolled hood, which he has taken off out of reverence for Jerome. Amadi may have heard about Piero through the painter’s brother Antonio, who in the second half of the 1450s traded in woad in Venice.19 Piero’s signature, ‘petri de bv/ go sci sep/ vlcri opvs’, points to the artist’s home town, as he always did in his known signatures, all on pictures done for destinations away from home. He proudly underlined both his authorship and his citizenship, like the hard-working artists whose toil Alberti compared in his treatise on the family to the efforts of fathers raising their children so as ‘to win praise, and to gain as much immortality as they can’.20 St Jerome, in a short light-grey, open-breasted tunic bound by a twig, is reading next to his cave. He sits on a simple bench, which is rigorously parallel to the picture plane and made of a big rectangular stone resting on two stone blocks. To the left in the immediate foreground is a simple wood crucifix with a polychrome statuette of the crucified Christ placed obliq­ uely to face the meditative saint. It is mounted on a tree trunk, in the bark of which, already whitening with mould, is carved Piero’s name. Jerome is about to turn a page in the open book on his lap, but is looking up, perturbed by the prayers of the donor. The light in the painting parallels the orientation of the crucifix. It bounces on Christ’s back and on Jerome’s head so that it reflects in the saint’s halo. It

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is intercepted by his legs and tunic, which cast shadows lapping the ground and creeping up the bench. Just like Sigismondo Malatesta in the votive fresco in Rimini (see illus. 23), the donor is not diminutive, but at the same, credible scale as the saint whose intercession he seeks. Kneeling in the foreground, he even rises slightly above him. 47 Piero della Francesca, St Jerome and a Supplicant, c. 1462–4, egg tempera and oil on poplar.

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Whereas Jerome turns his head, the donor is in rigorous profile, as in Italian portraits of the time, hands joined in prayer before his chest. Behind him, against the sky, is the silhouette of a leafy oak tree, which once probably showed its entire crown before the panel was cropped by some 8 or 9 centimetres, encroaching upon the saint’s space much as the donor’s prayers do. The donor’s eye is fixed on the saint’s. It also gathers the flight lines of the perspective of the bench and therefore, according to the rules of linear perspective, mirrors the eye of the viewer. The saint and his devotee sit on a hill, which drops behind them, revealing a view of a turreted walled city and its fortress, allusive of Jerome’s Bethlehem and possibly Girolamo’s native Lucca. The valley is embraced by cultivated hills. The broom scrub is blossoming and Jerome fashioned his belt from it, like John in the Baptism (see illus. 2). The blue of the sky grows paler towards the horizon, as in Piero’s earlier work, but only streaks of high cirrus fibratus clouds have now remained to sketch depth. That the stare of the donor corresponds to ours makes us complicit and equal in their intense communication, not unlike the dialogue between Christ and the viewer in the Resurrection (see illus. 46). The viewpoint makes us hover over the landscape as well. Filarete was of the opinion that contemporary artists equalled the antique, which in turn equalled nature. When planning his ideal city, he fantasized about visiting a holy hermit and having lunch with him in the woods above its valley (ii, fol. 12v), which he compared to a painting (iii, fol. 20v). Likewise, Piero’s hermit knows the toil and joy of the (painted) countryside as a foil to the city. In Piero’s radically new landscape, mankind and

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its cities are the measure of the world. Piero is a self-styled proud citizen of Borgo in signing his works abroad and, in local works such as the Misericordia Altarpiece and the Resurrection, in giving the town not only the identity of its legends, but the imprint of its by now famous artist.

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n the 1460s, and particularly following the death of his father on 20 February 1464, which left him the eldest male in charge of the Della Francesca family, Piero resided more than before in his native house and town. He painted for the churches of convents and confraternities and for the chapels of citizens of Borgo and Arezzo. As at San Giovanni d’Afra and the church of the Misericordia (see illus. 3, 41), Piero continued to face structures of Gothic high altarpieces that had been prepared years if not decades before, with a different painter in mind. When he painted simpler murals for devotees and their side altars, his mandate was circumscribed by the liturgical and formal conventions of the genre. It certainly did not limit his invention.

st julian Piero’s first surviving votive fresco, from the church of Sant’Agostino (now Santa Chiara) in Borgo, may have been done during a trip home while he was working on the Cycle of the True Cross in Arezzo (see illus. 24). Piero painted St Julian (illus. 48) almost immediately to the right of the main altar of the Augustinians, in the chapel of San Giovanni

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Battista, constructed in 1451 at the behest of Giglio di Bartolo di Cristoforo Cresci.1 Only in 1954 was the fresco discovered under whitewash, detached and transferred to the local museum. The head of the originally full-length figure was at a height of almost 4 metres from the floor. The saint would have been turning his gaze at the high altar and the lancet window behind it from which he was lit. His identity is known from a 1503 reference to a new chapel being dedicated to 48 Piero della Francesca, St Julian, early 1450s, fresco, egg tempera and oil on plaster (detached from Sant’Agostino in Borgo).

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Corpus Christi for Bartolomeo Martelli on the spot of the ‘figure of St Julian’ at the Cresci altar.2 Even without that knowledge, the fragmentary figure, nobly dressed and with an anguished expression on his face, is identifiable as Julian. Through arduous pilgrimages, the noble­­man tried to flee from his destiny, foretold by a prey during a hunt, that he would murder his parents. Eventually he settled in a faraway country and married a widow. A hospitable person, one day she offered a travelling elderly couple the conjugal bed. When Julian returned he assumed it was his wife with a lover and, blind with fear of adultery, he killed them with his sword. They were his parents. After a life of repentance and hospitality, he was forgiven the gruesome murder and became a saint. Piero placed his Julian in a niche, against a large slab of verde antico framed by light green marble. Noble Julian dons garments similar to Sigismondo Malatesta’s (see illus. 22, 23). Over a white camicia, he is wearing a green damask dress, or farsetto, and a sleeveless padded and plaited day-coat or giornea in a white and red patterned silk. Direct and reflected light help sculpt the magnificent mass of the figure. The brocaded pattern emerges and submerges in the padded pleats of the day-coat. The folds of the plum-coloured red mantle have deep pockets that would seem to be studied after the model of textiles soaked in glue over a workshop manikin. Thrown back over the right shoulder, the mantle opens to show the sideward motion of the arm that would have held a sword. The huge eyes, the movement of the mantle and the sculpting force of the light are distinctive also of the figure of Elias (see illus. 26) in Arezzo, which Piero painted probably already

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around 1452–3, making it likely that Piero painted St Julian not long after Cresci constructed his chapel.

madonna del parto It was probably through relatives that Piero obtained an un­­ documented commission at Monterchi. The small hilltop town between Arezzo and Borgo was the birthplace of Romana, Piero’s mother. In the church of Santa Maria in Momen­­tana in the valley below, he frescoed the Madonna del Parto, or Virgin of Childbirth (illus. 49), above a side altar. Upon entering, the devotee found her at the left, an immediate and visionary fulfilment of prayers yet to be muttered. It is the shock of looking. The Virgin turns towards the light from the opening church door, as two angels in turn open her pavilion. We find her in intimacy. She does not wear the mantle and opaque head covering expected from women appearing in public, but only a blue gamurra da parto, or pregnancy gown, over a long white camicia.3 Her hair, bound around her head in a corona with white ribbon, is visible below a transparent veil. At the front and sides of her dress the laces along the seams are loosened to accommodate the swelling of her body. She is expecting Christ. Although her eyes are modestly downcast, she is slightly turned towards the approaching devotee, one hand on her left hip as her left leg carries the precious burden of her body, the contrapposto reverberating in the line of her shoulder and hem of her dress. While she turns, she gently rests her other hand on her womb. Her pose already has some of the proud defiance of a mother, but her expression is soft as a young girl’s. Piero, who used seven giornate for the mural,

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modelled her pale face in fresco, probably adding milk to mute the colours. He applied the soft sky-blue of her mantle a secco, mixing the blue pigment azurite with white lead. He used leaves of gilt tinfoil for the halos, the overlap of the leaves now showing as black lines. Working a secco he also gave the Virgin a transparent veil hanging to either side of her face, which has mostly abraded.4 Modest as the Virgin might be, she stands in a pavilion against a coloured marble wall. The pavilion is of regal pink and purple voided velvet brocade embroidered with gold, and lined with light grey squirrel-back fur providing the softest of foils for her delicate face. The rulers of Italy exhibited themselves in such pavilions and the rich lined the walls of their houses with such fur, either real or painted, as is still visible in, for example, the Palazzo Davanzati in Florence. The pavilion is symmetrical, frontal, constructed as though it were a mathematical cone. The angels are perfectly symmetrical mirror images of each other in colour and above all pose, which Piero achieved by reversing a single cartoon. The slight turn of the Virgin, vulnerable among this idealized rigour, is graceful and touching. The angels and the pavilion might refer to the description in Exodus of the Ark of the Covenant, where the Word sacred to the Jewish tradition was treasured under curtains and guarded by angels, much as Christ as the Word become flesh was held in the body of the Virgin.5 By her gentle expec­­ tant motherhood, Piero’s Virgin embodies the human nature of Christ. There are few precedents for Piero’s image, such as the more explicit Byzantine type of the Madonna Platythera shown with a disc with a baby Christ in front of her womb,

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and even fewer successors, as the Church was uneasy with a cult of the pregnancy of the Virgin. The Madonna del Parto obliterated a rustic fourteenth-century image of the Virgin and Child. That Piero and his patrons altered the icon­ography may have been dictated by the cult for a miracle-working wood statue in the church. It is unknown when this happened, but the faces of the Madonna del Parto and the Madonna della Misericordia (see illus. 42) would seem to point to twin sis­ ter­hood and therefore to a date in the early 1460s also for the former. 49 Piero della Francesca, Madonna del Parto, early 1460s, fresco, egg tempera and oil on plaster (detached from Santa Maria in Momentana in Monterchi).

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In 1786 Santa Maria in Momentana was reconfigured into a smaller cemetery chapel and the liturgical axis was turned 90 degrees so that the Madonna del Parto, after having been moved slightly with part of its wall, became its high altarpiece.6 The operation turned the image into a moveable object and after another transfer in 1991 it is now exhibited in a former school building in Monterchi. At the occasion of the first transfer, some of the Virgin’s pavilion and most of its background of white, red and green marble panelling were lost. Perhaps there also was an illusionistic architectural frame as in most of Piero’s single frescos (see illus. 23, 46, 48, 50), which would have added an extra layer of revelation to the sacred, marble-clad room housing the pavilion opening to a vision of the Virgin subtly indicating Christ in her womb. lost mur als in borgo Piero continued painting frescos for side chapels and altars in his homeland. Much of this production has been lost. An example is a figure on a wall between the church and hospital ward of the Misericordia, for which Piero was paid on 13 May 1477. Facing the Palazzo della Residenza, the town’s central Camaldolese Abbey (see illus. 45) was once home to not only Piero’s brother Francesco, who had become a monk in 1427, and to the family tomb, but to at least two works by Piero.7 He frescoed the Chapel of the Madonna della Badia, named after its venerated Sedes Sapientiae, a wood statue of the Virgin and Child Enthroned carved and signed by priest Martino in 1199 (Staatliche Museen, Berlin). The chapel was at the

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Gospel side of the high altar, separated from it by an iron openwork screen of 1442 forged by Matteo di Jacopo, which also closed it at the front. The patronage belonged to the Carsidoni family, who had conceded it in use to the mixed Confraternity of the Madonna, to which Piero would leave a bequest in his testament of 5 July 1487. In April and July 1474 Piero is paid about 50 florins ‘per depegniere dicta capella’, so apparently for murals. The money came from the town’s major charitable institution, the Fraternita di San Bartolomeo, as heir of Contessina d’Urbano di Bartolo (d. 1468), widow of Ludovico di Giubileo Carsidoni, acting to fulfil the wish of her pre­deceased son Piersaccone. When the chapel was transformed towards the end of the sixteenth century, Piero’s work was lost. The same fate befell a votive mural that somebody about to leave the Abbey found against the counterfacade immediately to the left of the Abbey’s main door. It was described prior to its demolition as depicting the medical patron saints, Cosmas and Damian. It may have been done for somebody who sought a cure, or for a doctor. smaller commissions in sargiano and ar ezzo Piero’s standing in his native Borgo generated many commiss­ ions, but then so did the success of the cycle at San Francesco in Arezzo. Its patrons, the Bacci, seem to have kept favouring the artist. According to Vasari, Piero painted a nocturnal rendering of the Agony in the Garden in a chapel at the Observant Franciscan hermitage of the Assumption at Sargiano, a couple of kilometres south of Arezzo.8 In 1405 the painter Parri

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Spinelli had built the church for Bernardino of Siena. Bishop Angelo Peruzzi, who paid an apostolic visit to the old church in 1583, noted a side chapel dedicated to St Anthony of Padua that had been founded by Antonio Bacci, who was buried there with his wife Anna da Montedoglio.9 It was covered with mural paintings (‘tota depicta’), which were crumbling at the left-hand side, where Peruzzi ordered them to be repainted. Sargiano had three other side altars and a high altar with a painted terracotta relief of the Stigmatization (now at La Verna) by Michele da Firenze, whom Piero knew from his early Ferrara days, but it is tempting to identify Piero’s commission with the decoration of the chapel of the Bacci. His patron may have been Antonio di Giovanni di Donato di Giuliano di Angnolo di Magio Bacci, documented in 1485. He was a distant cousin of Baccio Bacci who left the bequest for the Legend of the True Cross, their great-great-grandfathers being brothers.10 When the church at Sargiano was enlarged in the eighteenth century, part of Parri’s structure was turned into a sacristy. A residue of Piero’s work was last recorded there around 1800. It is unknown when Piero worked at Sargiano.11 In painting an Agony in the Garden, he would have been aware of Sassetta’s nocturnal version in the predella of the Franciscan Altarpiece in Borgo (see illus. 7). Piero would have painted sleeping apostles, just as he painted sleeping soldiers in the Resurrection. According to Vasari he depicted the night, maybe similar to the dark haze in the Vision of Constantine (see illus. 31) and later in his Stigmatization of St Francis (see illus. 52). It may have been an interest he took from Alberti, as we have seen, or earlier still from Gentile da Fabriano, who for the Nativity of Christ in the predella of the Strozzi Altarpiece of

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1423 (Uffizi, Florence) also chose a nocturnal setting. It may indicate that Piero painted at Sargiano in the late 1450s or the ’60s, when his interest in depicting the time of day seems to have been most pronounced. One of Piero’s other Aretine commissions also saw the involvement of a Bacci. When in 1464 the confraternity of the Santissima Trinità asked Piero to make a processional banner, Agnolo di Girolamo Bacci, one of his three patrons at San Francesco, acted as his guarantor. The banner was to represent the Trinity, as on the confraternity’s now lost high altarpiece, and was to cost 24 florins. Piero received one of his payments in Capolona, to the north of Arezzo, where the Bacci had their country estate. It may have been the success of this banner that on 20 December 1466 induced another Aretine confraternity, the Compagnia della Nunziata, to look no further for a Florentine painter, but ask Piero, whose work, as they explicitly wrote in their deliberation, they knew from San Francesco.12 He was to paint their processional banner with the Annun­ ciation on both sides and could spend as much as necessary of his effort and materials and their money on it to make it as beautiful as he could. The faces of the archangel and Virgin were to be as angelic and gentle as possible. He was asked to do it in oil, perhaps an indication of his mastery of the relatively new medium. Two years later the confraternity men collected the more than 2-metre-high textile banner in Piero’s country home at Bastia, near Borgo, where he had retreated because of an outbreak of the plague and where he must have had a workshop for such portable paintings. Unfor­tunately, both Aretine banners are lost. Since their contracts are highly articulate about subject-matter, dimensions, materials and

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execution, they would have provided a good occasion to see how Piero coped with such stringent demands. And with result: on 20 November 1468, two weeks after the arrival of Piero’s banner of the Annunciation in Arezzo, several women left money on the confraternal altar out of love for it (‘per amore del detto gonfalone’). Piero’s renewed activity in Arezzo in the mid-1460s seems to have comprised the fresco of St Mary Magdalene (illus. 50) in Arezzo Cathedral. An undocumented votive image of the saint, it is placed on the left nave wall next to the pre-existent sacristy door and is partially overlapped by the tomb of Guido Tarlati, which was relocated here from the apse in 1783. Piero placed his fresco asymmetrically on the bay’s wall, but in axis with a now bricked-up window above.13 He conceived of it as a second window in a lower storey. Beyond an arched stone opening, almost as thick as the cathedral wall, and beyond the saint, there is no marble wall panelling to indicate sacredness, but sky. Now abraded, Piero applied it a secco, in azurite.14 The saint stands on a pink pavement in front of a parapet. The viewpoint is low, more or less where the saint’s right hand gathers the folds of her long heavy mantle. The Magdalene receives light as though coming from the main door and oculus of the cathedral. A repentant prostitute who had anointed Christ’s body and then retreated for a life of solitary penitence in the desert, the Magdalene is depicted in celestial state, though with clear references to her earthly life.15 Her beauty is both majestic and seductive, as the light caresses the soft yet firm flesh of her face. Her heavy vestments turn her figure into that of a cylinder surmounted by a cone. It is a shape that is demonstratively repeated in miniature in the jar of ointment she proffers in

50 Piero della Francesca, St Mary Magdalene, mid-1460s, fresco, egg tempera and oil on wall, Arezzo Cathedral.

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her left hand. Piero imagined a jar of rock crystal and depicted it in virtuoso lustre as in Netherlandish painting, defying the inherent dullness of the mural medium. Unlike the refined hairdos of Piero’s Virgins and courtiers, the brown hair of the Magdalene has seen no hairdresser and flows over her shoulders in ever-thinner points, presumably like that of the Bathing Women in a painting by van Eyck (now lost) that Piero could have seen in Urbino.16 It might be a reminiscence of her libidinous past, but also of her desert life when, according to legend, her hair miraculously grew to cover her nudity once her clothes had fallen apart. The usual colour of the passionate Magdalene is red, but Piero dresses her in white and green in addition to red, together representing the colours of the theological virtues she adopted later in life, respectively faith, hope and love. The softness of the modelling places the Magdalene in the early to mid-1460s, close to the figures of the Virgin in Monterchi and at the Misericordia in Borgo (see illus. 49, 42). The parapet and its frieze occur also in the Augustinian Altar­piece of those years (see illus. 53). Of Piero’s other figures of saints in Arezzo little else remains beyond Vasari’s testimony. Such is the case of an image of St Vincent in a high niche in the Olivetan convent church of San Bernardo, which still elicited much artistic admiration in the sixteenth century. At Santa Maria delle Grazie, which St Bernar­­ dino had founded upon the pagan Fonte Tecta, Vasari saw a fresco by Piero at the head of the cloister arcade showing the first bishop of Arezzo, St Donatus, in a cope and surrounded by ‘putti’ seated on a beautifully foreshortened throne. At the head of the northeastern cloister arcade, constructed in 1471–4, a fragment of Piero’s work remains in situ (illus. 51).17 It is

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illuminated from the right, in correspondence to light coming from the arcade. Visible against what seems to be a background composed of a red marble slab is an entablature with Piero’s distinctive coloured frieze between dentilated cornice and tripartite architrave, and, transferred with spolvero, two Corinth­ ian capitals, similar to others in Piero’s oeuvre (see illus. 53–5, 60). The architecture may be part of the throne of St Donatus that Vasari admired. At the top a swag of greenery is still visible, similar to the decoration of the hall of St Sigismund in Piero’s fresco in Rimini (see illus. 23). the perugia altarpiece A mix of fame and high-placed personal acquaintances led in the late 1460s to Piero’s invitation to work in Perugia for the monastery of Sant’Antonio da Padova. It belonged to a 51 Piero della Francesca (?), fragment of St Donatus Enthroned (?): entablature and Corinthian capitals, early 1470s, mural, northern portico of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Arezzo.

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group of female Observant Franciscan tertiaries founded in 1388 by Paoluccio Trinci in Foligno and subsequently guided by an aristocratic widow, the Blessed Angelina da Montegiove (c. 1357/60–1435). These so-called contesse di Foligno were a nonsecluded community of mostly noblewomen who were either widowed or preferred virginity over the period’s arranged marriages. They pleaded poverty, penitence and care for their fellow citizens. They had an external church in Perugia by 1455 and, behind it, back to back, an internal church by 1478. The entrance of the external church gave on the main road of the Borgo Sant’Angelo, the present corso Garibaldi. The two churches have now been converted into connecting conference rooms. The sisters commissioned their first altarpiece, for the external church, from a painter they personally knew. Between 1467 and 1469 the community in Perugia was led by Ilaria Baglioni (doc. 1460–1503), daughter of the city’s virtual ruler Braccio Baglioni. Since at least 1463, the Baglioni shared ownership of a villa at Bastia, near Borgo, with Piero’s family, in whom they sometimes confided for affairs such as safekeeping their possessions.18 This illuminates the status that Piero’s family enjoyed and which probably resulted in Piero’s call to Perugia. The contract is unknown, but he had completed his work by 21 June 1468, when the governors of Perugia granted the tertiaries a contribution of 15 florins towards the expenses that had gone into the construction and painting of their finished altarpiece (illus. 52), which is now in the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria in Perugia.19 It was installed on the high altar in the polygonal apse at the end of the church’s single nave.20 Above the altar the wall probably had an opening for visual communication with the

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(planned) inner church. Through it, the priest could pass the Eucharist to the sisters, who vice versa could maybe pass their glances during Mass. Piero and his carpenter made the altarpiece support to measure.21 It was brilliantly conceived to be flush with the back wall and have a shutter in correspondence to an opening. It has a stepped lunette, on which Piero painted the Annunciation, which could be slotted under the central section of the segmented vault of the apse. The lunette rests on a large panel made of vertically grained planks, on which Piero painted a polyptych and a predella with figures of female saints flanking the shuttered gazes of the nuns. The entire structure was supported by a wood box, a second predella, which Piero decorated with scenes. The usual cross beams for aligning and securing the panels were avoided. Z-­shaped pieces of iron inserted in the panels’ thickness were used instead, so that the painting could really be flush with the back wall and its opening. Piero conceived of the entire structure as the illusion of a wall on which is frescoed an Annun­­ciation with a wood polyptych below. Accordingly, the Annunciation has a more matte tonality, whereas the polyptych is golden and shiny. It is an altarpiece that is its own chapel. The polyptych is divided by colonnettes into three compartments. The slightly wider inner one has a single Gothic arch, whereas the outer ones have two. Piero’s disposition of the figures reflects this traditional framing architecture, but also sets it loose. Behind the arches, space is everything but compartmentalized as there is one white marble floor for all the figures and the corners of the platform of the throne of the Virgin peep out to the sides of the colonnettes. The burnished gold of the background traditionally indicates that the

52 Piero della Francesca, Altarpiece for Sant’Antonio da Padova in Perugia, finished 1468, egg tempera, oil and gold on poplar. Main tier: Virgin and Child Enthroned with Sts Anthony of Padua, John the Baptist, Francis of Assisi and Elizabeth of

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figures are in heaven, but Piero did away with its unrealistic intrusion in a naturalistically painted world, by giving it a con­­ tinuous thistle pattern as though it were a hanging of damask. The saints at the sides are not centred under the arches, but grouped together. The low viewpoint notwithstanding, the two in the background are not lower, but taller with respect to the saints in the foreground, as though they are taller also in real life. In this way, they provide an imaginary semicircular crescendo towards the niche of the throne of the Virgin. With a rigorously central viewpoint, the throne appears at first frontal and flat, responding with a rounded arch to the frame’s Gothic one. That the throne is instead a massive structure is indicated by the foreshortening of its platform, the depth of its panelled and cassetted niche, along with the sheer bulk of the drapery of the Virgin and the fleshy full nude of the Christ child on her lap. The halos are traditional gold discs, but, as in the Misericordia Altarpiece, Piero presents them as shiny plates set at an angle corresponding to the tilt of the head, which they reflect. Everything that can be vertical is vertical, from the bamboo stick of the Baptist to the folds of the habits, and the plumb fall of the Franciscan cords. Piero’s line-up of saints is an antique peristyle that revolutionizes the Gothic polyptych with which he set out. The Virgin’s fur-lined ultramarine mantle over a dress of expensive red gold brocade may have reminded the women at Sant’Antonio of the luxury of their former lives.22 The Christ child is fully nude to show that God has really assumed human flesh. He raises his hand to bless the sisters and proffers them a bunch of cherries promising of Paradise. In the place of honour in the left foreground, as is his due, is the Hungary. Lunette: Annunciation. Upper predella: Sts Clare and Agatha. Lower predella, left to right: A Miracle of St Anthony of Padua, The Stigmatization of St Francis and A Miracle of St Elizabeth.

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titular saint of the church, Anthony of Padua, a fiery preacher who in 1232 was the second Franciscan to be canonized. He holds a book bound in red, stamped and gilt leather, possibly his collected sermons. He wears the un-dyed rough woollen habit of the short, Observant cut, tied with a rope with the three knots representative of the monastic vows. In the corresponding position at the right is the charitable Hungarian princess, Elizabeth of Hungary (1207–1231), dressed in the Franciscan habit with additional white veil and mantle of the Franciscan tertiaries, which she joined as a widow. The roses in the fold of her mantle are the loaves of bread that she was distributing to the poor and that miraculously transformed into flowers beyond reproach when she chanced upon her parsimonious husband. Hers was the example that the tertiaries in Perugia wanted to follow. On the left, at the back, is John the Baptist in a camel-hair shirt under a red mantle, who points to Christ as the sacrificial lamb of the Redemption of mankind. On the right at the back is the founder of the Franciscans, Francis of Assisi, who so passionately followed the example of Christ that the wounds of Christ on the cross were impressed upon him. He reveals his side wound through a slit in his habit and magnifies his Christlikeness by holding a small gold and rock crystal cross close to it. Flanking the shutter and therefore the communication with the sisters’ inner church are examples of female holiness. Clare is in the habit with black veil of the Franciscan second order and with the lily of virginity and the book that held the rule also followed by the tertiaries in Perugia. Close to the sisters’ abhorrence of arranged marriages is Agatha, who presents her breasts on a platter, the result of the martyrdom

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that she suffered when as a fifteen-year-old Christian she refused to give up her virginity for marriage with a Roman. The shutter between them is now missing. In its opened state it showed the Perugia sisters and in closed state, given the direction of the gazes of Clare and Agatha, probably a Chris­to­­logical image, such as a Man of Sorrows. The miraculous merits of the three Franciscan saints of the main tier are highlighted in the predella. Anthony accom­­ panied by another brother is shown praying for the resurrection of a baby that had died in its crib while its mother left it alone to listen to the Franciscan’s sermon. Elizabeth, in answer to the prayers of the man who has found a four-year-old boy dead in a well, appears in a vision to resurrect the child. Two despairing mothers with dishevelled hair, donning a homely gamurra without overgarment, along with the setting in a street or home, show the distress of everyday people and therefore the recognizable working ground of the tertiaries. At the centre of the narrative predella is the Stigmatization. Christ appears in the form of a seraph to impress his stigmata on Francis, who was deeply meditating on the Passion in the company of brother Leo. A variation in greys, it is a nocturnal scene with divine light coming from the opposite direction to the illumination of the rest of the polyptych, which was dictated by windows on the long side of the street-corner church. The Stigmatization is best read along the vertical, Christological axis of the polyptych. It resonates above it with the shutter for passing the symbolic body of Christ, then the Virgin with her nude child with the red fruit allusive of his Passion, which made Paradise accessible again, and finally the Annunciation in the lunette.

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The Annunciation represents the moment in which the Virgin Mary consents to be the mother and wife of God, who becomes incarnate and therefore visible. This is why for its representation artists relished using ‘perspective art’, which can make ‘that which is not seem to be’. Here Piero uses more luminous and matte colours and little gold, as though it is not a panel painting, but a fresco. Whereas the lower tiers had sym­phonies of brown and grey, here it is a hymn of light to the tune of celestial blues, azurite for the angel, the sky and the fantastic blue marble at the back of the arcade, but darker and more expensive ultramarine for the mantle of the Virgin. She had been reading from her prayer book, presumably walking in the cloister around the inner garden, as she was perturbed by the arrival and the message of the angel. While the angel kneels and the dove of the Holy Spirit descends in a sunburst and sends out its rays, she has folded her hands over her chest, lowered her eyes, and is bending her knee in submission. The Virgin stands in a two-bay loggia in front and to the side of the cloister. As is indicated by the placement of both figures on the continuous white band on the pavement, she is as close to us as the angel is. The two of them can only just see each other around a cluster of columns supporting the loggia arches, or maybe not at all. This is modesty incarnate, an Annunciation for nuns. Piero’s mode of repre­sen­tation becomes part of the theological argumentation. The central arcade of the courtyard walk is perpendicular to the picture surface, but slightly to the left of the central vanishing point, so that the light, parallel to the picture surface, plays between the columns at the left side, the side of the angel and the hortus conclusus, casting countable shadows on

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the cloister walk floor, but becomes serrated at the more foreshortened right side, the Virgin’s side, as though to under­ ine her virginity and reticence. The off-centre composition counterbalances the complex play of horizontals on the left and verticals on the right generated by the kneeling and standing figure. It outdoes the complexity of the lunette’s gabled outline. And it allows Piero to make the construction of space comprehensible and show that, to the right, the loggia of the Virgin’s house continues for at least another bay. With foresight and controlled execution, Piero transferred his design, choosing the most appropriate method to serve his purpose. Whereas the figures are transferred from a pounced cartoon, their contours reinforced with brush and ink, the perspectival lines in the Annunciation were incised directly on the gesso with straightedges. The relatively dark tonality of the work is not only due to his predominant use of oil, which tends to darken with time, but because on top of the gesso and under the paint layers he applied an amber-coloured ground layer. He used the amber as a warm shine beneath subsequent colours applied in a thin layer. He also left it visible to give a figure a glowing profile or to differentiate a hemline or a hand where he made contours almost abut. In the foliate ornament of the Annunciation’s capitals, which he incised in the wet white paint with the back of his brush, he left the coloured underlayer bare to help construct his volumes. Contrary to his work of the 1440s and ’50s, his brushstrokes are now visible and used to create the effect of, for example, the rough Franciscan habits. As in the Misericordia Altarpiece, in some areas his lack of knowledge of the properties of oil as a medium resulted in a wide crackle. At the same time there are miniature-like

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effects in, for example, the eyelashes of the main figures, the wood pin securing Elizabeth’s cloak, the figures in gold relief on Francis’s cross, or in a still-life such as the maiolica decanter and glass flask in the niche in Anthony’s Miracle in the predella. The gold damask background is rendered by two lush layers of gold leaf applied in different ways. On top of the first burnished gilt layer, which serves as the darker, glowing tone of the brocade, unburnished mordant gilding is applied for the lighter pattern. In design and technique Piero pushed the formula of the Gothic polyptych to the limits of its viability. the augustinian altarpiece Piero faced the genre of the polyptych one more time. On 4 October 1454, while he still had the Arezzo cycle and the Misericordia polyptych on his hands, he had agreed to paint a high altarpiece for the Augustinian hermits in Borgo.23 He probably started it in 1468 only after finishing the Perugia Altarpiece, much surpassing the already generous term of eight years the friars had set him. He was given a now-lost iconographic programme and a wood altarpiece support that he knew all too well. It was the carpentry that back in the early 1430s he had gessoed with Antonio d’Anghiari for the Fran­ ciscans in Borgo, abandoning it when Sassetta (see illus. 7) was hired instead. On 29 March 1451 the Franciscans had sold the discarded woodwork to Angelo di Giovanni di Simone, the patron of the Augustinian Altarpiece. Therefore, when Piero set to work for the Augustinians, he was faced with a polyptych structure about forty years old. Its type was even

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older, because when the Franciscans had commissioned it in 1426 they had selected Niccolò di Segna’s Resurrection Altar­ piece (see illus. 6) of 1348 in the Badia as its model.24 Piero finished painting this late medieval polyptych in the mature Renaissance. On 14 November 1469, in relation to one of the last instalments of his considerable fee of 320 florins, his altarpiece is recorded as painted. Whereas the Franciscans had wanted a double-sided altarpiece, serving both the celebration of Mass at the front of the high altar and their litany in the choir-stalls behind, the Augustinians needed only the anterior side to be painted as both their Masses and prayers were said in front of it. The new altarpiece replaced a now-lost mid-fourteenth-century one by Niccolò di Segna. Angelo di Giovanni’s sister-in-law Giovanna and his late brother Simone, like him in the muledriving business, had financed an overhaul of the main apse’s decoration as they had paid for vaulting, a stained-glass window, choir-stalls and luxurious garments for the priest. Angelo acted in their memory, too, when commissioning the altarpiece (illus. 53). When in 1555 the Augustinians ceded their original church to the Poor Clares and moved to the Pieve, Piero’s altarpiece was reinstalled in their new church, only to be disassembled in the following century. It survives in a few dispersed parts.25 These include the lateral panels of the main tier, which have four massively monumental figures. In the outer positions were two saints from the Augustinian order. At the left, as titular of the church in Borgo, was St Augustine (illus. 54), now in the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisbon, with the cope, mitre, gloves and crosier of a bishop, holding a book,

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presumably the Rule that was inspired by the saint’s writings. At the right was, as the most recent Augustinian saint, Nicholas of Tolentino, now in the Museo Poldi Pezzoli in Milan, a corpu­ lent friar supporting another copy of the Augustinian Rule and pointing to the star of his many visions. In the inner left position was the name saint of the patron Angelo di Simone, the Archangel St Michael (illus. 55), now in the National Gallery in London. He has a laurel victory wreath on his head and is 53 Reconstruction of the Augustinian Altarpiece for Sant’Agostino in Borgo by Piero della Francesca, 1468–9, gold, egg tempera and oil on poplar. Main tier, left to right: St Augustine, St Michael Archangel, Coronation of the Virgin (?),

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clad in an opulent, bejewelled gauze camicia under a ceremonial Byzantine-style, leather musculata, or anatomical cuirass, deco­ rated with gems.26 He has elegant boots in red, like a Byzantine courtier’s. His single-edged sword, a European falchion, is stained with the blood of a dragon. He holds its screaming, dripping head by the ear and tramples its body while its tail is still moving. The inscription on his cuirass identifies this seductive young warrior as ‘angelvs potentia dei . . . ’, or angel of the force of God. At the inner right was the patron of Borgo, St John the Evangelist, now in the Frick Collection in New York, as much enveloped in his heavy red mantle as he is in his reading, probably from the Book of Revelation that he wrote in old age. All the saints are placed on a continuous marble floor in front of a parapet. Unlike Piero’s previous altarpieces the back­­ground is not gold, but an atmospheric blue growing less intense towards the horizon. In the Augustinian Altarpiece, heaven is like the sky on earth. The continuous panelling of the parapet, along with the foreshortening of two steps of a throne visible on the inner side panels, indicates that the now missing central panel was twice the width of the side panels, as was the case with those by Niccolò di Segna and Sassetta to which Piero’s altarpiece was contractually related in dimensions and type.27 Still visible at the extreme right of the St Michael panel are part of a blue garment, behind the far end of the seat of a throne, and a red-and-gold brocade garment draped over the throne’s steps. Any protruding elements extending from the central panel onto the St John the Evangelist, originally to its right, have been scraped away and only indications of the steps remain. The wide centre of the St John the Evangelist, St Nicholas of Tolentino. Predella: Crucifixion. Left pier, side (not visible in illus.): St Apollonia, front: St Monica. Right pier, front: Blessed Angelo Scarpetti (?).

54 Piero della Francesca, St Augustine, 1468–9, egg tempera and oil on poplar.

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main tier most likely had a Coronation of the Virgin, dressed in brocade, sitting on the left and receiving the crown from Christ on the right. All the elements of the altarpiece’s supporting and flanking piers are lost, except for three panels, all with gilt background, that served as its bases at either side of the predella. Judging by the lighting scheme, St Apollonia, now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, dc, was at the extreme left of the structure. St Monica, Augustine’s mother, was at the front left, paired at the front right with another Augustinian, possibly the Blessed Angelo Scarpetti (d. 1306), who was buried at Sant’ Agostino. The Crucifixion is the only surviving scene of the predella and, together with St Monica and the Blessed Angelo Scarpetti (?), is now in the Frick Collection in New York. In the seventeenth century it was recorded in a private collection along with three others representing the Flagellation, Deposi­tion and Resurrection. A Passion cycle was common in predellas in Borgo, and it may have been similar to Niccolò di Segna’s in the Badia (see illus. 6) with the Crucifixion at the centre and a fifth scene now missing.28 If it was more like Sassetta’s Franciscan polyptych, the four recorded scenes may be the original number that Piero painted, whereas the centre may have had an opening for the Eucharist. The scenes from the youth and Passion of Christ in the orphrey of the cope in the St Augustine, along with the Resurrection in his morse and Eucharistic Man of Sorrows in his mitre, almost provide a gloss of the predella. None of the top tier panels survives. Maybe the Passion iconography of the predella was con­tinued in the central pinnacle with a pietà. It would have presented another

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occasion to show the sepulchre as a tribute to Borgo San Sepolcro. A couple of years later, around 1472–5, Giovanni Bellini in his revolutionary altarpiece with unified central field for San Francesco in Pesaro also introduced a Pietà over a Coronation (illus. 56). It may have been Piero at Sant’ Agostino in Borgo who, on the broad central panel and pinnacle of a polyptych, had started that revolution. Although originally seen through the screen of Gothic framing, because of the unified space in the main tier, the naturalistic sky and the illumination from the right, as though from the high windows at the street side of the church, Piero’s heavenly court provides as much a window on a possible reality as Bellini’s. Many aspects of Piero’s controlled technique had been characteristic of him for his entire career. There is carbon black, presumably as an isolating layer, under the gesso as in many other works he did for Borgo. In the gilt panels of the piers and the predella, he needed no incisions to know where to stop applying the gold of the backgrounds and where to start painting. Like his Netherlandish colleagues, and as he himself had already introduced in the Baptism (see illus. 2), he left the gesso bare around his figures to achieve the effect of light caressing their contours. As in, for example, the Baptism and the Misericordia Altarpiece, and as advocated by Alberti in Ferrara and Florence, he fully painted features such as the parapet and the steps of the throne, even where he knew he would later cover it with garments. Likewise, for greater structural logic, the figure of Michael is fully painted beneath his falchion. Other technical features represent relatively new experiments. As in the Perugia Altarpiece, he used coloured intermediary layers to enhance the effect of the top layer, in

55 Piero della Francesca, St Michael, 1468–9, egg tempera and oil on poplar.

56 Giovanni Bellini, altarpiece for San Francesco in Pesaro, c. 1472–5, oil on panel. Main tier: The Coronation of the Virgin. Top tier: Pietà, or the Embalming of the Body of Christ.

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this case in the Nicholas, for example, using red lake to render the black of the habit on top more lively and shiny. Atmos­ phere and its gradation now scan the depth of his sky, whereas in earlier works he had needed clouds. He uses oil in addition to tempera as a binder, with greater mastery than in the Misericordia and Perugia polyptychs. It allows him hallucinating precision in the rendering of materials. In the Augustine, in particular, Piero luxuriates in the double highlight of the rock crystal crosier (as in the jar of ointment in the Arezzo Magdalene, see illus. 50), with two white lines. He renders the pearls on the mitre with highlight where there is light and without where there is none. The char­­acterization of the garments and architecture carries mean­­ing. Michael and John have jewels along the collars and hems of their shirts and tunics in a Byzantine style that recalled Christian Antiquity to Piero and his contemporaries. Likewise, Piero’s parapet of heaven has antique coloured marble panelling, Corinthian pilasters, and an anthemion and palmette frieze. On the other hand, the Augustinian hermit’s habit of Augustine and Nicholas of Tolentino was similar to that of the friars in the choir. The luxuriously brocaded and embroidered cope of Augustine may have resembled the vestment provided by the lay patrons for the officiating friar at Sant’Agostino. In Piero’s Augustinian Altarpiece, Antiquity, conflated with Modernity, is the time of heaven.

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t was at the court of Urbino, where under the aegis of a magnificent patron a new city was in the making, that Piero could shed the constraints of previously established surroundings for his work. Pacioli in his Summa de arithmetica (Summary of Arithmetic; Venice, 1494, fol. 2r) wrote that Piero was a ‘familiare’, or courtier, of Urbino’s ruling Montefeltro family, which would have given him an artistic liberty greater than in previous contract situations. His altarpiece for Federico di Montefeltro in the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan (see illus. 60) is no longer a polyptych.1 On a panel that is the shape of an elongated vertical rectangle it has a unified composition in a church interior. The type had never been seen before, but would engender much imitation, first of all by Giovanni Bellini in Venice, for example in 1478–80 for the Observant Franciscans at San Giobbe (Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice).2 the montefeltro altarpiece In its grand figural and architectural style, free brushwork and accomplished use of the oil medium, Piero’s Montefeltro Altarpiece is close to his Augustinian Altarpiece (see illus. 53)

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finished in 1469. In that very year Piero was in Urbino, to consider painting an altarpiece for the confraternity of Corpus Domini. On 8 April 1469, on behalf of the brotherhood, Giovanni Santi, the father of Raphael, paid ‘maestro Piero dal Borgo’ for his visit. Piero declined the confraternity’s offer, which in 1473–4 was taken up by the Netherlandish painter Justus of Ghent. Piero had accepted the rival commission by Federico instead. The count already had the Flagellation (see illus. 37) and by now was directly connected to the artist and his family. Piero’s family shared a country home with the family of Pantasilea Baglioni, who had probably been instrumental in getting Piero the commission for the altarpiece for the contesse di Foligno in Perugia (see illus. 52) and was close to Federico’s wife Battista Sforza (1446–1472).3 Pantasilea, a woman of ‘sensible and prudent gravitas’, would even head the court after Battista’s untimely death.4 Furthermore, Piero’s brother Marco acted as a guarantee on 12 February 1471 when Federico bailed out a man from Urbino who had been imprisoned in Borgo. Piero’s altarpiece invention for Federico has been hard to grasp in full, as it seems to have been meant for a church that was only completed when the patron of the altarpiece was long dead and its painter almost blind. Following the Napole­ onic suppressions of 1811 the altarpiece was brought to the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan from the church of San Bernar­ dino near Urbino, which was built under the dukedom of Federico’s son Guidubaldo. A sixteenth-century drawing shows Piero’s work installed on the high altar in the central apse at San Bernardino (illus. 57). Hypotheses include that

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the altarpiece pre-dates and predisposed the construction of the church of San Bernardino and was temporarily installed in another church.5 Altarpieces, however, are made when their destination, dimensions, lighting and use can be determined. And indeed, the church of San Bernardino was part and parcel of Federico’s building projects. A remote Marchigian mountain town with few natural resources, Renaissance Urbino survived on the muscle power of its men serving as mercenary soldiers in an Italian peninsula raided by war. Urbino rose to fame with condottiere Federico di Montefeltro as its ruler, especially when his second wife, Battista Sforza, months before her death, gave him a male heir, and when in 1474 he received the Order of the Ermine, the Order of the Garter, the command of the papal army, the ducal crown and, for his daughter Giovanna, the hand of Giovanni della Rovere, the nephew of Pope Sixtus iv Della Rovere (r. 1471–84). Federico was probably the firstborn son of Bernardino Ubaldini and Aura di Montefeltro.6 He was raised and wanted to be known to the world as the legitimized son and male heir of his maternal grandfather, Aura’s natural father, Guidantonio di Montefeltro, Count of Urbino. He became, however, second in line when Guidantonio had a son of his own from a second marriage, Oddantonio (1427–1444). Federico ascended to the county in 1444, following the murder of the politically inept Oddantonio, which was probably his doing. Federico was as great a military genius as a Maecenas. To prove dynastic continuity and legitimacy, in the eyes of his citizens and God, he married first Gentile Brancaleoni, who through her paternal grandmother descended from

57 Baldassare Peruzzi, drawing: Interior of San Bernardino near Urbino, c. 1513, pen and brown ink, with brown wash, over black chalk on paper.

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the Montefeltro, and then Battista Sforza, whose maternal great-grandmother was a Montefeltro, and he carried on Guidantonio’s building projects in Urbino: the residential palace and adjacent cathedral, but also the convents of the Observant Franciscans.7 In fifteenth-century Urbino, the Observant Franciscan female house of Santa Chiara was started by Guid­antonio and brought to magnificence by Federico, who often visited it for his prayers and who would see Battista buried there.8 Moreover, in 1425 Guidantonio had donated the existing church of San Donato to the Observant Franciscans and in 1429 disposed to be buried in its main chapel.9 It was on a hill overlooking the city with the convent of Santa Chiara skirting its walls, as though a celestial bridge linked the burial places of the male and female members of the dynasty. Guidantonio probably particularly favoured the order because one of its members, Bernardino of Siena, had blessed the birth of children from his second union, in 1424, with Caterina Colonna, after his first marriage to Rengarda 58 Thirteenth-century church of San Donato (left) and Luciano Laurana and Francesco di Giorgio Martini, San Bernardino (right), late 1460s–80s, near Urbino.

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Malatesta had remained barren. Guidantonio’s final resting place, under a tombstone with his effigy in the Franciscan habit and flanked by his sword, was prepared ahead of time, as he was laid at the foot of a polyptych (Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino), dating from 1439, four years before his death, in which Antonio Alberti depicted the funerary theme of the Virgin of Humility with the sleeping Christ child.10 Federico enlarged the male convent of the Observants. He also designed a second church, eventually built next to that of San Donato at a ninety-degree angle and dedicated to San Bernardino (illus. 58). Like his father, he planned his burial ahead of time. According to Vespasiano da Bisticci, Federico already during his lifetime meant to endow the new church and convent buildings with more than 3,000 florins, whereas Giovanni Santi wrote how Federico ‘commissioned a glorious temple of which his death was the cruel destiny’ and that in his palace he had ordered a design for this church more beautiful than any ever built before, bearing witness to his piety.11 That these plans were made in the late 1460s is indicated by an act drawn up at San Donato on 22 October 1470, in which Marco da Bologna (1409–1479), vicar general of the Fran­ciscan Observance, conceded to Federico and Battista all possible spiritual benefits of the order in exchange for being its ‘most devout benefactors’.12 The grandiosity of that grant suggests that the Montefeltro had invested in architecture and art for the Observant Franciscans at Urbino. Credence might therefore be given to an eighteenth-century memorial of the convent, which records that Piero’s high altarpiece was dated 1472.13 With the plans for his church in hand, Federico may have commissioned its altarpiece. Already in 1475 the

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convent was the stage for the general chapter of the Observant Franciscans, although it was not as finished a backdrop as Federico would have liked.14 At the occasion, Piero’s altarpiece may have been placed in the pre-existent church of San Donato as a sign of Federico’s legitimacy, munificence and building plans. Federico did not manage to erect the new church during his lifetime. He disposed to be buried in the old church of San Donato. It was his devoted brother Ottav­ iano Ubaldini (c. 1423–1498), regent of the duchy until Federico’s young son Guidubaldo came of age, who built San Bernardino in the 1480s, probably following the model made during Federico’s lifetime.15 This model would have set the parameters for Piero when designing his altarpiece. Architectural features of the building corroborate that the church was planned before or around 1470.16 The motive of its apsidal arch overlapping the trabeation (see illus. 57) is cited in 1481 in the Prevedari engraving by Bramante, who owed his training to the artists of Urbino of those very early 1470s. This chronology suggests that Federico’s court architect Luciano Laurana (in Urbino 1466–72 and probably again as of 1475) started to design it and that the next to fill that post, Francesco di Giorgio Martini, worked for Urbino already in the early 1470s and not only as of 1477, when he is first documented in Montefeltro service. It is as difficult as in the palace that Federico had built in Urbino to define where in San Bernardino Laurana left off and Francesco di Giorgio began.17 San Bernardino as built consists of a triconch with attached nave. Behind the central apse is a rectangular choir, which was thought to be a seventeenth-century addition, but study of the brickwork has shown that it was part of the original

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fifteenth-century building.18 Two doors in the central apse connected the church and secluded choir. That apse was demo­­li­­ shed in the seventeenth century, exposing the choir. The choir indicates the Franciscan use of the church. The tri­­­­­ conch, with four free-standing columns on pedestals in the corners, is a reference to classical mausolea and early Chris­­­tian martyria. It designates San Bernardino as Federico’s intended burial space. Laurana probably built two other centralized mausolea, both consisting of a centralized space with freestanding corner columns, and both now demolished.19 The first was in San Francesco in Mantua and was done about 1466 for Gonzaga courtier Francesco della Rama. The second was the Observant Franciscan church of San Giovanni Battista in Pesaro for Alessandro Sforza, where in 1471 Marco Zoppo’s high altarpiece (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin; Musei Civici, Pesaro; and Walters Art Museum, Baltimore) was installed and two years later the patron’s tomb. Its brick material with light stone window and door surrounds, dome and centralized cruciform layout, with protruding apses at the ends of the arms, are documented in the Stigmatization of Zoppo’s predella.20 That construction of the Pesaro mausoleum preceded Ales­ sandro Sforza’s death is a significant precedent for Federico and San Bernardino in Urbino, since Sforza was Federico’s father-in-law. They seem to have planned their mausolea in tandem. Federico’s plans for San Bernardino were the fully mature evolution of Laurana’s trio of mausolea. In details such as its use of an inscription in the trabeation, and in the orna­mentation of its capitals, it is comparable to Laurana’s work at the Palazzo Ducale. In features such as its stringcourses and pedimented, elongated windows, it is typical of

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the art of Francesco di Giorgio, who in adapting an earlier project, ended up with some irregularities, such as the crossarms’ exterior window frames, which do not align with the pediments. For the dedication Federico may have opted for the name saint of his beloved wife Battista, John the Baptist, who is in the place of honour in Piero’s altarpiece, although eventually Ottaviano sought the specific intercession of the great Observant Franciscan preacher Bernardino of Siena, who was canonized in 1450 and is in the back row in Piero’s altarpiece. An inscription running around the church’s interior frieze, taken from the office of St Bernardino written by Giovanni da Capestrano, implores the innocent, wise and truthful saint for intercession when after death Federico would face the ‘thronum fulgi­dum aeternae maiestatis’, ‘the radiant throne of eternal majesty’. Federico’s death arrived in 1482, from malaria contracted on the battlefield near Ferrara. Ottaviano arranged for a temporary resting place for Federico’s remains 59 Hypothetical reconstruction of the interior of San Bernardino near Urbino with the coffins of Federico and Guidubaldo di Montefeltro flanking Piero della Francesca’s Montefeltro Altarpiece (illus. 60) reconstructed in a Renaissance frame based on illus. 56.

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and maybe Piero’s altarpiece at San Donato. He devotedly constructed the church that Federico had planned and upon its completion in the early 1490s brought the body of his brother and the altarpiece there for their final resting places. As witnessed by Federico Veterani, writing in 1517, and Bernardino Baldi in 1603, Fede­rico di Montefeltro’s body was embalmed and dressed in red hat, doublet, stockings and mantle with his sword at his side.21 He was placed in a wood coffin, with a cover of gold brocade. The coffin was placed in an elevated position to the right of the high altar, so presumably to the honorific spectator’s left. In 1508 Federico’s son and heir Guidubaldo was placed at the other side (illus. 59).22 Only in 1620 were two marble monuments erected in the nave and the bodies placed in an underground sepulchral chamber.23 Funerary arrangements similar to Federico’s were observed in Milan for Duke Fran­cesco Sforza (1401– 1466), Federico’s first employer, who found a final resting place in a wood coffin draped with brocade and suspended from chains between two piers of the ambulatory of the cathedral, like many of his predecessors, his wife and some followers.24 Similarly, the embalmed corpses of the Neapol­ itan kings of Aragon were placed in wood coffins in the main apse of San Domenico Maggiore in Naples (they are now in the sacristy).25 Federico and Ottaviano would also have been aware of the tradition of embalming and presenting the bodies of those who had died in odour of sanctity. In shuttered wood coffins, their incorrupt bodies were venerated as tokens of their spiritual integrity. Among many such examples in Umbria and the Marches, the arca of St Ubaldo, defensor civitatis of Gubbio,

60 Piero della Francesca, Montefeltro Altarpiece: Virgin and Child with Four Angels, Federico di Montefeltro and Sts John the Baptist, Bernardino of Siena, Jerome, Francis, Peter Martyr and John the Evangelist, c. 1469–71, egg tempera and oil on poplar.

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is significant. Federico would have known about it, as tradition has it that his wife Battista Sforza went there to ask the saint for the birth of a male heir. Ottaviano, doubtlessly acting at the instruction of his brother Federico, offered the incorrupt ducal body to the veneration of its former subjects as a token of perfectly incorrupt, legitimate leadership. Veterani, who had been a scribe at Federico di Montefeltro’s fabled library, makes the duke say in a poem of 1517 that he is now in heaven, ‘cum superis’, with the gods, and that his incorrupt honesty in life could be judged by the integrity of his corpse.26 That Federico, supported by Ottaviano, aimed at a posthumous veneration that verged on the religious in a pagan sense is clear from the adoption of the epithet ‘divus’, posthumously conferred also on Julius Caesar and used also by Federico’s employer Alfonso the Magnanimous of Naples. Federico appears as ‘divus’, for example, in a tondo paired with Ottav­ iano’s in the portico of San Francesco in Mercatello, and in a medal by Sperandio Savelli. Such was the architectural and funerary context of Piero’s altarpiece for Federico. Piero responded by painting in celestially rich architecture the enthroned Virgin and child flanked by standing angels and saints (illus. 60). Heaven opens. In it, kneeling in adoration of Christ, is the brilliantly armoured Federico, ‘cum superis’. He is, therefore, life-size and on his own, without need of a saint to introduce him. Like an Albertian window, the painting would have seemed to open the wall space of the apse, suggestive of the actual choir behind, substituting the friars at prayer with a heavenly court. Its elongated rectangular format and frame (see illus. 57) resemble the elegant forms of the windows in the hall in

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the Montefeltro palace in Gubbio, started in 1477 by Francesco di Giorgio at the design of Luciano Laurana. A barbe at the top of the paint layer indicates that the panel had an applied frame, and that the bare wood edges where it was applied are now missing. A sliver of the composition was cut at the bottom and there is damage right across the eyes of the Virgin and the faces of the saints, where a seam between the planks opened up. The support is constructed of horizontally placed planks connected by iron omega-shaped pins, the loops of which project at the back, probably for attaching it to the wall, as in the panels made for Federico’s studiolo in the mid-1470s (see illus. 92).27 The difficulty of transporting such a support suggests that Piero worked on the altarpiece in Urbino, set up shop there, and frequented the Montefeltro palace like a courtier. The painted architecture provides a continuation of the interior of San Bernardino, which Piero may have discussed with the architects in its planning phases.28 The painted church is in the Corinthian order, allusive of triumph over death, and based on the pilasters of the Romanesque Floren­ tine baptistery, which was thought to be antique. It is in white marble, with wall revetment of coloured stone slabs as in the Pantheon in Rome, the Cappella del Perdono in the Monte­ feltro palace in Urbino and Alberti’s tempietto of the Holy Sepulchre in Florence. The frieze below the arches is in red porphyry, the frieze above them, as is just visible at the very top of the painting, in verde antico. To a single rectangular presbytery, four spaces with coffered barrel vaults are attached. The impression is of a centralized ground plan such as San Bernardino’s. Laurana had applied a similar corner solution

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in the courtyard of the palace in Urbino with a void in the angle between the pilasters. Like Laurana in the triumphal loggias on the palace facade, Piero employs cassette vaults known from the triumphal arches of Titus and Septimius Severus in Rome. It is Piero depicting the triumph of heaven, a glorious celestial reality after death. In the painted architecture, the light coming from the left is consonant with the southeastern illumination in the church of San Bernardino, which was unusually built along a south– north axis, because it was constructed at an angle next to the oriented pre-existent church of San Donato. In the picture, from the left chapel or transept arm, the cassettes of the vault and the apse’s shell, and the pendant ostrich egg in the other­ wise shaded apse, are highlighted, the egg with back reflection; a phenomenon that was later commented upon by Leonardo.29 A different light source illuminates the picture’s figures. They receive their light from a source beyond Piero’s section of fictive space, possibly a nave window as in San Bernardino itself, or another side chapel.30 As indicated by the elbow of the Baptist overlapping the front pier of the crossing, the heavenly court is not, as might appear at first sight, in the apse, but in the nave, in front of the crossing, and therefore in front of the light streaming in from the visible left transept arm or chapel. By such minute areas of overlap and vista, Piero magisterially creates the possibility for the viewer to grasp his construction of space and light. It is only by this perspectival trick of placing the figures far in front of the apse that he can show a large section of the architecture and make it the picture’s lead actor. The architecture is so carefully conceived that its ground plan and elevations can be

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drawn and this might be the procedure by which Piero, almost as much an architect as a painter, conceived of the church in his Montefeltro Altarpiece. By carefully staging space and light, Piero brings the solemn figures close to the viewer. The viewer’s world is even included in the painted, heavenly one, by means of the reflection in the shoulder plate of Federico’s armour: a reflection of the arched open door (see illus. 58) of the actual church of San Bernardino. It is another indication that the altarpiece was made while the church was being planned. It is a device employed by the Netherlandish painters that were all the vogue in Urbino. An example is the mirror in Jan van Eyck’s lost but documented Bathing Women, which was with Federico’s beloved brother Ottaviano. In the reflection, the doorstep is not horizontal, but accurately observed as at an angle, because the rounded upper arm piece of Federico’s armour is not on axis with the central door and viewing point, but to the right of it. Piero used both tempera and oil to bind his pigments and, in a Netherlandish way, isolated his white gesso ground with a thin coat of oil so that the colours would not sink in. In oil he could achieve his luminous effects on a par with the Netherlandish painters. His brushwork is free and, to give vibrancy to the contours of his figures, he used with great bravura his device of leaving some of the white ground bare while blocking in the figures and their garments (illus. 61). There is more of Federico’s own world than the reflection of the interior of San Bernardino in the painting. Piero’s Virgin is dressed in a blue mantle with gold-embroidered and pearl-studded border, over a dress in red gold brocade, that most expensive of fabrics such as Federico sometimes

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received in gratitude for his military services and such as he also relished displaying in his palace, for example on the ceiling of his bed-alcove and of his room of Famous Men.31 The Virgin sits on an imperial sella curulis standing on a platform covered by an oriental carpet of a type that also graced Federico’s palazzo in Urbino.32 Behind and slightly below the Virgin, at the exact eye level of the spectator, four opulently 61 Piero della Francesca, cross in the hand of St Francis, detail of illus. 60.

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dressed angels are in attendance, wearing jewels similar to the countess’s at the Urbino court (see illus. 65). At the Virgin’s right, an angel wears an expensive transparent tunic and the issue of angelic gender only remains unresolved because of the overlapping head of the sleeping Christ child. As can be seen in X-radiography, Piero initially adorned the Virgin’s hair with a huge jewel, likewise similar to the attire of the countess. Piero’s heavenly court is like his patron’s earthly one. The Virgin and Federico have their hands folded in adoration. Their focus is the blissfully sleeping child on her lap (illus. 62), which they almost seem to want to wake with their prayers. Christ is nude, showing his full humanity, except for a necklace with a rock crystal bead and a coral pendant (see also illus. 69). Rock crystal was thought to be crystallized, pure snow and was compared to the light of the heavenly 62 Piero della Francesca, sleeping Christ child, detail of illus. 60.

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Jerusalem (Revelation 21:11).33 Coral was and is used in Italy for babies to ward off evil. Because of its colour and shape of curdled blood, it also alludes to Christ’s redemptive death. Vertically over the Virgin’s head, hanging from the shell in the apse, is an ostrich egg, a symbol of the Resurrection that, like the shell in the apse, was often found in the vicinity of altars and tombs.34 In the funerary polyptych of Federico’s father, that motive was present in the shape of an actual Resurrection in the central pinnacle over the likewise sleeping Christ child. At either side of Piero’s Virgin are two groups of exclusively male saints, known for the severity of the lives they had chosen. At the left are the Observant Franciscan Bernardino, to whom the church was eventually dedicated, a penitent Jerome whose feast day saw the start of construction on the Monte­feltro palace, and who as the translator of the Bible resonated with Federico’s literary interests,35 and John the Baptist as name saint of Federico’s beloved wife Battista and maybe as the titular of the church in its planning phase. At the right are the Dominican Peter Martyr, also the only Dominican to be included in Piero’s Arezzo cycle and in the 1491 choir stalls of the upper church of San Francesco in Assisi; Francis, who was so dear to Federico that he invoked him on his deathbed;36 and the elderly John the Evangelist with his Apocalypse as another literary patron. Francis’s cross and the Evangelist’s book, as appropriate tokens of faith and learning, frame the face of Federico. Federico is a condottiere in full plate armour. In choosing such a military rendering, he was again preceded by his fatherin-law Alessandro Sforza of Pesaro, who commissioned a

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Crucifixion triptych with his donor portrait in armour from Rogier van der Weyden (illus. 63). Federico has deposited his commander’s mace, steel gauntlets and helmet on the floor in front of him, so that he can fold his hands in prayer and watch Christ. He still wears his sword girded at the left, the golden spurs of a knight, and a half-tabard, or mezza giornea in red gold brocade. The altarpiece dialogued with Federico’s tomb and shows him ideally resurrected and received by the heavenly court of his liking. Tomb monuments, including for example that of Pope Pius ii (Sant’Andrea della Valle, Rome), often include both a gisant, a reclining figure of the dead, and their resurrected semblance being presented to Christ. Whereas Federico’s embalmed body was dressed in red civic clothes, in the altarpiece that flanked it he appears before Christ and the Virgin in the military role that had brought him fame and that he chose for most of his public portraits. Likewise Piero depicted him in red civic clothes in 63 Workshop of Rogier van der Weyden, Sforza Triptych, 1458, oil on panel. Central panel: Crucifixion with the Mourning Virgin and St John the Evangelist and the Kneeling Costanzo, Battista and Alessandro Sforza. Wings: Annunciation and Sts Bavo and Francis and Sts John the Baptist, Catherine and Barbara.

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a bust-length portrait (see illus. 66), but in armour in the triumph of Fame on its back (see illus. 67). Federico’s face is rendered true to nature. Piero resorted to the trick of painting the face in profile – described by Pliny in his Natural History (xxxv.90) as employed in Antiquity by Apelles for the one-eyed king Antigonus – so as not to show that Federico’s right eye had been missing ever since a lance slid under his visor during a joust in 1451. Therefore, and pos­­­ sibly because the left eye was associated with military prowess, Federico is at the sinister, not at the honorific dexter side.37 Nonetheless, Piero’s rendering of his nose, which was damaged in the same incident, along with the wrinkles and warts, shows that Federico appreciated Piero’s faithfulness. Federico’s hands, however, probably did not find the patron’s approval: they were overpainted, possibly while the altarpiece was in stor­­age awaiting the construction of the church of San Bernar­ dino. ‘Petrus Hispanus’, who was resident at court by 1476 and engaged to touch up the Famous Men by Justus of Ghent in Federico’s studiolo, may have been asked to do it when Piero was absent from court. The way in which Piero had originally designed Federico’s hands, as seen in infrared reflectography (illus. 64), was more elegant and generic than the rendering of the face. Federico, sensitive about verisimilitude, would have disapproved of such slender hands. He suffered from gout, which would have made his finger joints swollen and his skin red, just as in the overpainting of Piero’s idealized hands.38 The later painter also added two bezel-set diamond gold rings and one ruby ring similarly set. They cannot have been Piero’s, as for an artist with the logic of Piero it would have been inconceivable to put rings on fingers that have only

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just emerged from steel gauntlets. They are certainly not his wedding ring and the rings of the wives of the two-time widower, because in the Renaissance men did not wear wedding rings, as only women were thought to need the extra stimulus for constancy.39 The reason that three rings were added around 1476, while Federico was still alive, might be that rings often signified diplomatic envoys (Pliny, Natural History, xxxiii.11). Whatever the case, it is remarkable that in the overpainting Federico did not insist on the explicit trappings of the honours received in 1474. But then, he would also exclude them from his burial. Piero scanned the soaring verticals of his painting’s format, architecture and standing figures by the horizontals of the church’s entablature; the aligned faces; the aligned waists tied by folded sashes, knotted ropes and bejewelled belts; and by the lower legs, gauntlets and mace of Federico. A diagonal slashes through, made up of Federico’s sword, praying hands and the sleeping Christ child. It fervently underscores Federico’s prayer, in front of a heavenly court, the ‘thronum fulgidum aeternae maiestatis’ of the church’s dedicatory inscription, for a life beyond death as illustrious as it had been 64 Piero della Francesca, the hands of Federico di Montefeltro, detail of illus. 60 in infrared reflectography and in photography.

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on earth and for commemoration by posterity that verged on a request for idolatry. Painted for the planned church of San Bernardino and eventually flanked by the embalmed body of Federico di Montefeltro, Piero’s altarpiece was meant for a funerary and dynastic function. The painter responded by presenting Federico united with a heavenly court and by extolling incorrupt faith and perfect legitimacy, probably in the face of a bleaker truth, with luminous conviction and verisimilitude. the double portr ait of battista sfor za and federico di montefeltro As in Rimini for Sigismondo Malatesta (see illus. 22, 23), at Urbino Piero painted Federico di Montefeltro in an indepen­ dent portrait in addition to including him as a donor figure in a picture in a church. Piero’s diptych of Federico and his wife Battista Sforza is now in the Uffizi in Florence (illus. 65, 66).40 The design of Federico’s head is identical in both altarpiece (see illus. 60) and diptych, but their scale is different. Piero prob­­ably based it on a drawing that served as a point of reference.41 The drawing, and another, single portrait derived from it, may have been made by 1466. This is suggested by an epigram on a portrait of Federico written by the Carmelite friar Giovanni Andrea Ferabos, who frequented the court in Urbino before that year.42 He does not mention the portrait of Battista and might therefore refer to a different, independent portrait that Piero did of Federico. He glorifies Piero for giving lifelike shape to the prince, and Federico for infusing his soul in it. It may have been closest to the armoured, bareheaded profile portrait of Federico in the altarpiece, as that

65 Piero della Francesca, Portrait of Battista Sforza, c. 1472, egg tempera and oil on panel.

66 Piero della Francesca, Portrait of Federico di Montefeltro, c. 1472, egg tempera and oil on panel.

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is the type that would become canonical in representations of Urbino’s ruler, and distinguished also Federico’s employer Alfonso the Magnanimous in a lost portrait that was possibly also by Piero (compare illus. 17). In the diptych, which was once hinged, Piero showed Federico facing left, looking at his wife. He fully painted the count’s head as in the altarpiece, but later added a conical red hat, or beretta, and thickened the neckline. Federico now dons the red doublet of the ruling classes that he chose also in death. With the light coming from the right, his face is in shade, making the likeness deeper, and wrinkles, warts and damaged nose more ruthlessly truthful. At the same time, by simplifying volume and colour, enlarging the massive neck, and showing the eyeball in its socket under the olive skin, Piero turned a faithful portrait into a powerful abstract composition of intersecting globes, cones and cylinders. Such abstraction gives the portrait the desired decorum. The humanist Battista Panetta compared Piero rendering one-eyed Federico in profile and from the left, reverently omitting his great defect, to Apelles doing homage to Antigonus, while another humanist, a certain Contes Fantinus, praised Piero’s portrait for rendering Federico’s brilliance or luminosity, an important topos in praise of princes.43 Federico is silhouetted against a bristling blue sky that turns pale towards the low horizon. It makes clear that the viewer is reverentially below the prince. And that the vast expanse of choreographed landscape is further below and extends much behind its ruler. Earlier, as in the Resurrection (see illus. 46), Piero used a middle ground and distant background in his landscapes without differentiation of colour.

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Probably under the influence of the art of the Netherlandish painters that was cherished at the court of Urbino, Piero’s landscape has undergone a metamorphosis and become atmospheric. Towards the horizon the hills turn blue, whereas, as can still be seen in the lower right corner of the portrait of Battista, in the foreground they were once emerald green (now turned brown). Van Eyck’s Bathing Women, which Ottaviano Ubaldini treasured at Urbino, according to the humanist Bartolomeo Fazio, included a view of ‘men, mountains, groves, hamlets and castles carried out with such skill you would believe one was fifty miles distant’. 44 Alessandro Sforza in Pesaro probably possessed three paintings by Rogier van der Weyden (for example illus. 63). So Piero had examples at hand. He probably also understood the principle that the distinctness of objects diminishes the farther they are and the vaster the atmosphere or air that is interposed. Leonardo described it as the ‘prospettiva de’ perdimenti’, or perspective of disappearance, and we now know its physical cause: water in the air filters out the longer wavelengths of light and therefore tinges the air and the distant landscape blue, which, due to scattering of the light, becomes less saturated and more veiled the greater the distance from the viewer. 45 About 1470–75 Hans Memling (fl. 1465–94) painted a double portrait against a landscape background (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, and Louvre, Paris). Like his Netherlandish colleague, Piero paints the landscapes using as a medium the malleable oil with its gradual transitions. A difference in crackle suggests that he may have used tempera for greater precision and luminosity in the faces, making them stand out against the more indistinct landscape. 46 Although the hills are those of central Italy, no

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specific place seems to be intended, in particular because no lakes existed in Montefeltro territory. In portraits of couples, the man is usually at the honorific dexter side (spectator’s left), with his wife to his left. Here, because Federico missed his right eye, he is at the sinister side. He would have had little scruple about it, as, in a uniquely happy arranged marriage, he cherished his wife as his equal. Aged fourteen, the highly intelligent and educated Battista Sforza had become his spouse in 1460. She was the daughter of Alessandro Sforza of Pesaro and Costanza da Varano, and the godchild of Francesco Sforza. She is seen against a landscape that is continuous with that behind Federico, if allowance is made for the width of the now-missing original hinged frames. Her gaze can interlock with Federico’s, as her head is raised to his level upon a neck as high and smooth as a column sculpted in the most polished of marbles. Her Renaissance beauty also shows in her paleness, high shaven forehead and fair hair. She is elaborately coiffed. A transparent veil sits on top of her head along with a brooch or brocchetta da testa with pearls and a ruby set in gold, which is rendered in perfect profile. It is pinned to a white headband that in turn fastens the coiffure, composed of circling strands of hair bound in white ribbons, adorned by another brocchetta and enlivened by curls, over her ear arranged against her cheek in military order, and springy golden tips of hair at the end of the tress left unbound. The coiffure secures the starched and crinkled white veil of a married woman that sits like a pro­­truding ring around the back of her head and ends in a train covering the back of her neck. Encircling her neck are strings of pearls separated by rosettes of rubies, sapphires and coral set in gold. Attached

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to this collar is a single string of pearls, falling over the chest in a semicircle and held in place at the centre by a vertical string of bigger pearls. Like the brooch on top of her head, this string of bigger pearls is in a profile as perfect as Battista’s. It supports, below the necklace’s semicircle of pearls, a gold chain with a gold pendant possibly set with a cameo. Battista wears a gamurra in the heraldic blue (now almost black) of the Sforzas, with detachable sleeves in gold-and-red brocade. The portraits formed the inside of the hinged diptych. Their reverses are also painted and have a Triumph of Federico di Montefeltro and Fame and a Triumph of Battista Sforza and Pudicitia (illus. 67, 68).When closed the diptych would have looked like a book, with Battista’s Triumph on the front cover and Federico’s on the back. When opened, not only would the portraits have been revealed, on their backs the compositions of the Triumphs would have aligned as though the carts ride towards each other against a continuous background. They roll over a high rocky platform parallel to the picture plane in front of an atmospheric landscape extending as far as the eye can reach. Other than the Netherlandish masters, and more than he did in the portraits, Piero has systematized his hills, arranged like subservient pawns on an invisible chequer­ board. The only signs of human activity are castles, roads and boats on a lake. Piero here gives a systematic, rational reply to the latest Netherlandish novelties. Carried in a symbo­ lical triumph, Federico and Battista dominate their symbolical territory. The idea of the allegorical triumph was Petrarch’s.47 The library at Urbino held his work, including the Trionfi, the triumphs of Love, Pudicitia (Chaste Modesty), Death, Fame,

67 Piero della Francesca, The Triumph of Federico di Montefeltro and Fame (reverse of illus. 66), c. 1472, egg tempera and oil on panel.

68 Piero della Francesca, The Triumph of Battista Sforza and Pudicitia (reverse of illus. 65), c. 1472, egg tempera and oil on panel.

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Time and Eternity. Battista got the triumph of Pudicitia, Federico that of Fame. Petrarch’s triumphs had often been represented in the guise of a personified Virtue hoisted on a pageant, as Petrarch based the idea of the allegorical triumph on the victorious entry of Roman emperors on chariots (Trionfi, 1, 13–15). Piero went further. He harked back both to Petrarch and to antique custom in placing both the Virtues and the rulers on his carts. The plain wood carts seem manufactured by a rustic carpenter, with the exception of the perch, which could be the work of a classical craftsman and is shaped like the calyx of a flower, as Maso di Bartolomeo did in the arms of his neoclassical bronze chandeliers. The charioteers of the loving spouses are amorini, winged nude infants. Federico’s cart is drawn by two white stallions, the horses associated with Jupiter as sun god in the antique triumphs of Camillus and Caesar (Livy v.xxiii.5–6; Plutarch, Life of Camillus 7; Cassius Dio xxxxiii. xiv.3). They are amblers: by moving first both left legs forward and then both right legs, they go at an easy gait, making for a leisurely ride worthy of the illustrious burden they are drawing. Federico is seated on a sella curulis on a platform covered in red-and-gold brocade. He wears plate armour (the same as in Piero’s altarpiece for him), rests the helmet on his lap, and raises the commander’s baton with his gaze fixed steadily ahead. The winged personification of Fame standing behind him holds a crown over his head. Rather than the common laurel crown, with its dashes of white, it appears to be the grass crown, or corona graminea, made from little plants and flowers picked on the battlefield, which was the highest of Antiquity’s nine crowns and due to a general who had delivered a besieged

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city or army (Pliny, Natural History, xxii.4). 48 Fame is the only figure in Piero’s Triumphs with her head against the sky, above the horizon. True to Fame in Virgil’s Aeneid (iv.177), she has her feet on the earth, and her head in the clouds. In front of Federico’s platform are seated the Cardinal Virtues. At the front of the cart, resting their feet on the chains of the perch, are Fortitude, piecing a broken column together, and Prudence, examining her young face in a mirror in front of her and looking prudently back with her second old, bearded grey man’s face. According to Roberto Valturio’s De re militari (On the Military Arts; v) written for Sigismondo Malatesta, of all Cardinal Virtues Fortitude and Prudence are to be treasured most in a commander. At the side of the cart confronting the viewer is Justice with sword and scales. The lady seen from the back at the other side of the cart must be the fourth of the Cardinal Virtues, Temperance. Like the attic of a triumphal arch, a stone inscription tablet is painted below the scene. In a Latin Horatian Sapphic metre it reads: ‘Gloriously is carried in noble triumph he whom the eternal fame of the virtues celebrates as equal to the greatest commanders, worthy to hold the sceptre.’49 Federico is celebrated for his leadership, which would be consolidated in 1474 with the commander’s mace of the papal army and the ducal crown. The diminutive Federico is facing right and Piero painted him with an eye miraculously healed, contrary to the portrait on the reverse of the diptych, where he showed the left eye associated with military and secular insight as exemplified in the triumph. The right eye that Battista turns to the spectator’s side in her portrait was considered the spiritual one and it is the Theological Virtues that grace her triumph.50 If Federico

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is Fame’s most blatant success, Battista is chaste modesty incarnate. Unicorns, symbols of chastity, because according to legend only a virgin could catch them, pull her cart. Veiled as a married woman, donning a red dress with detachable gold-and-red brocade sleeves, she, like him, is seated on a commander’s sella curulis. During Federico’s absence it was Battista who ruled the state of Urbino, and Cardinal Bessarion, who baptized her and her children, was one of many who referred to her as dux.51 With lowered gaze she reads from a book that, judging from its small format, might be a prayer book. Behind her stand two figures, instead of the single figure of Fame crowning Federico. They seem to represent two facets of the virtue celebrated in her triumph. In white peplos, the fair hair crowned by a white band and laurel crown, is Chastity. She is accompanied by the matronly figure of chaste modesty, or Pudicitia, as seen on antique coins and described by, for example, Livy (i.lviii.5), as a woman’s modesty and loyalty to her husband, despite her great beauty. Piero painted the figure of Pudicitia in the nude before wrapping her body and veiling her head. Seated in front of Battista’s platform are the Theological Virtues. At the front is Charity in heraldic Sforza blue, with on her lap the pelican that nourished its children back to life by picking its chest until it bled. Facing the viewer is Faith with cross, chalice and faithful dog. At the other side of the cart the blond hair, white collar and hem of the green (now browned) dress of Hope are only just visible. Piero’s rendering of Battista’s virtues is in accordance with the praise she received from contemporaries such as Federico’s biographer Pierantonio Paltroni, who extolled her as virtuous, prudent and sage, and a ‘true mirror of

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pudicitia and chastity’.52 It is above all in accordance with her representation in the funeral oration by papal delegate Giovanni Antonio Campano. She had died on 9 July 1472 and the oration was pronounced on 17 August of that year, in the church of San Francesco in Urbino.53 Representatives of many cities and courts gathered in mourning attire to honour her friendship and righteousness, as well as her husband’s glory. Campano extols her for the male virtues that, occurring in a woman, he deems even more worthy of praise. The grace of her body, long and shapely, or ‘formosissima’, was like a man’s and she shunned adornment except when Federico forced her to wear the purple, gold and gems owing to her dignity. She relished Federico’s career and victories, encouraged him to go to battle for greater glory, and took care of his affairs when he was away. She was pious and said her prayers as frequently as a priest. She stunned all by the eloquence of her Latin speeches. She was versed in literature, moderate in affairs of state, modest in life, tempered in fortune and refined in religion. Federico’s exploits would not have been as glorious if he could not have offered them to his wife. Campano tells about Federico’s despair at receiving the message of her impending death, his immediate departure for Gubbio, their last wordless embrace, and her death in his arms. He is exhorted to feel blessed by the gifts she left him. She possessed such fame of chaste modesty as could be expected in a matron, not a young girl. She left him a single son to continue the state uncontested and eight daughters who could rejoice in the glory of their father, as much as in the memory of their mother. Federico has to be grateful to God ‘who gave you such a wife, no lesser than the husband’.54

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In a like tenor, begging praise of those who had known her, the inscription on the triumphal attic in Piero’s Triumph of Battista reads: ‘She who kept measure in good fortune, adorned with the fame of the achievements of her great husband, is on the lips of all men.’ The perfectum, the tense of completed action, of ‘kept measure’, or ‘retained modesty’, indicates that Battista had already passed away.55 The diptych seems to have been conceived in the spirit of the oration, probably in the same raw (and political) moments of Federico’s grief, in which he organized the funeral and framed the rem­ embrance of his wife. Federico had the oration published in Cagli, in 1476 and distributed at the cities and courts of Italy. Between 1472 and 1474 he had also assembled in an expensively bound and decorated volume the many condolences and odes to his wife that he received (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Urb. lat. 1193). The diptych would have been there to show to the children, friends and guests of a man who pledged never to marry again.56 Widowed, he now doubly needed allied support. It would take only two years before he received high honours. Battista continued to be his adornment, as much as he had been hers. To render her faithfully, Piero may have used her death mask, possibly earlier drawings of her, and his memory. Piero and Federico selected the type of the double portrait that could be found in the Netherlands and France. Gentile da Fabriano had probably also already painted such a diptych and the type may have resonated with portraits of couples on Roman tombs. Likewise, Alberti in On Painting (ii.25) remarks that the main function of portraiture is rem­ em­brance: ‘Painting possesses a truly divine power in that

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not only does it make the absent present (as they say of friendship), but it also represents the dead to the living many centuries later, so that they are recognized by spectators with pleasure and deep admiration for the artist.’ Piero immortalized Battista for Federico. And Federico procured for Piero immortal fame. the senigallia madonna Federico remained faithful to Piero, even when the duke had attracted a ‘solemn master’ of Netherlandish art, Justus of Ghent, to work at the court of Urbino in the mid-1470s.57 Years after the Montefeltro Altarpiece (see illus. 60), Federico commissioned Piero to paint the intimate image of the Virgin and Child with Two Angels in a Domestic Interior (illus. 69).58 Or so it seems. It may have been a wedding gift to his third-born daughter Giovanna (1463–1514). Her betrothal had been part of the alliance that Federico was engin­eer­ing with the papacy. In 1474 he had promised Giovanna to Giovanni della Rovere (1457–1501), the nephew of Sixtus iv.59 In return the pope gave Federico the coveted title of duke. In 1478, when the bride was fifteen, the wedding was celebrated in Rome. A year later Giovanni and Giovanna made their entry into Senigallia on the Adriatic coast to the east of Urbino. Between 1479 and 1483 a citadel, the Rocca Malates­ tiana, which served as both a fortification and a palace, was reconstructed for them to the design of Luciano Laurana and then Baccio Pontelli.60 Piero’s Madonna may have been part of Giovanna’s dowry, along with household items, as was the custom in Renaissance Italy, and along with an immense sum

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of 12,000 ducats, and the cities of Senigallia and Mondavio. The Rocca at Senigallia could have been the first home of Piero’s small devotional panel. The citadel’s residential part has at the first floor a little vaulted chapel with a floor surface of about 3 by 3 metres with an eastern altar wall to which the terracotta angels of the pendentives direct their attention and where Piero’s Madonna may have gone. Later, possibly after it had received many a prayer from Giovanni and Giovanna, Piero’s Madonna seems to have become the pawn of a vow. Two sons of the devout and art-loving couple had died in childhood. When on 25 March 1490, the Feast of the Annunciation, Giovanna gave birth to a son who survived, called Francesco Maria, they pledged to build a church for the Observant Franciscans dedicated to the Virgin. Once Santa Maria delle Grazie was in working order, certainly by the time that the body of Giovanni was put on top of its choir screen, or tramezzo, they may have placed Piero’s Madonna on one of its altars.61 It is in this church that in 1822 the painting is first documented. It is now in the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche in Urbino. Maybe underlining its Montefeltro lineage, the face of the Senigallia Virgin resembles her sister’s in Piero’s altarpiece for Federico, but in reverse. The angel with the frank outward gaze is also repeated at a smaller scale. As in the altarpiece, the Virgin has no halo but her majesty to underscore her holiness. As in the altarpiece, Piero’s setting is an interior.62 Piero placed the Virgin in her home. He paints in as ‘solemn’ a fashion as the Netherlandish painters that were the vogue at Urbino. By comparison with their detailed domestic interiors, he introduced harmonious rigour and framed a close-up section of

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space. Almost within touching range, at three-quarter length, flanked by two angels a step behind her, the Virgin stands with her child on her arm. The spectator is with them, the object of the attention of Christ and the angel at the left. Like all Piero’s Virgins and like an honest Renaissance lady appearing in 69 Piero della Francesca, Senigallia Madonna: Virgin and Child with Two Angels in a Domestic Interior, c. 1478, egg tempera and oil on walnut.

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public, Mary’s eyes are lowered. She is dressed in a transparent short veil with decorative white stitching along the edges, a white camicia, red gamurra and ermine-lined blue mantle, a point of which she has folded back over her right arm. The room is flooded by sunlight from an invisible window at the left. A sliver of pavement visible behind the hip of the angel in blue indicates the floor level and its terracotta tiling. The back wall is plastered grey and pierced by the frames of a doorway and a semicircular niche in pietra serena. The architec­tural detailing with, in particular, the candelabrum carved on the frame of the niche is reminiscent of the interiors of the Della Rovere dwelling in Senigallia. Piero made sure that the stretch of bare wall was behind the central Virgin. To do so, Piero had to show more of the door opening at the left and less of the niche at the right. This left–right counterpoint is through-composed at the left in the verticals in the back room, the mantle’s fold over the shoulder continuing plumb down the leg of the child, the painting’s vertical axis marked by the laced front opening of the Virgin’s dress, and the taller stature of the angel at the left contrasting with the horizontal shelves in the niche and the aligned faces of the Christ child and the shorter angel at the right. The result is movement in a symmetrical painting. The angel at the left is in blue, just like Mary – lighter, but just as virginal. It wears a gold woven necklace with a pendant of rock crystal, allusive of divine light, and has gold palmettes embroidered on its sleeves. It stands in front of a doorway opening onto a second room, a bedroom with a beamed ceiling, a pole for hanging a textile, and two windows at the left. Each window has a set of shutters resting against the embrasures, which in Piero’s oblique view obscure a view

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of the window itself. Piero suggests that they have the rare luxury of glazing as the light playing over the shutters and the back wall is tinged and patterned. He implies the invisible. The window panes must be composed of roundels of white bottle-bottom glass set in lead and alternated with small blue lozenges. The Chapel of the Cardinal of Portugal of 1460–68 at San Miniato in Florence still has such glazing. The sun not only casts spots of light, but it reflects on flecks of dust that dance in its beams and make the light tangible as two parallel beams from the two windows. Lucretius in De rerum naturae (On the Nature of Things; ii.114–20), Alhazen and later Leonardo observed this phenomenon. Piero was the first to paint it and went even further in his observation.63 The light beam from the nearest window opening casts a pool of light on the wall. Behind it is the light beam of the further opening, strong where it overlaps the front beam, but vague at the top where it operates on its own. Piero painted each particle of dust individually, perhaps with a one-hair brush. There is a counter-reflection on the bottom of the pole that runs parallel to the back wall. The atmosphere indoors is observed and rendered as carefully as it was outdoors in the landscape in the Monte­feltro Diptych (see illus. 65–8). An invitation to slow looking, the Senigallia Madonna is also a vehicle for encouraging the devotee’s meditation. Bernard of Clairvaux had famously compared Mary remaining a virgin after conception and childbirth to glass being unbroken yet brilliantly transfigured upon the passage of light. The left-hand side of Piero’s painting is an illumination of the purity of the Virgin. In the composition, the diagonal cast by the beams of the sun through the windows is continued in the shoulder line of

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the Virgin (which Piero lowered on purpose during the painting process) to direct attention to the child on her arm. God incarnate, he blesses the spectator at his eye level. He holds a pure white rose with a bud at either side, possibly a sign of the Trinity. He is wrapped in a white blanket draped like a toga over his left shoulder. Around his neck is a necklace of coral beads with the same coral amulet as in the Montefeltro Altarpiece. Its sheer redness is allusive of his future Passion and so is the pink of the angel watching him at the right. Behind it in the niche some of the Virgin’s sewing materials sit on wood shelves. The wicker basket with white pieces of cloth is a reference to her legendary sewing of Christ’s shroud and the veil of the Temple. The circular wood box looks like a pyx and might carry Eucharistic meaning. The right-hand side of Piero’s painting is an illumination of Christ’s sacrifice. Piero invited Giovanna and Giovanni into the intimacy of the Virgin’s home. They could have had similar experiences within her Nazareth house, allegedly brought miraculously to Loreto. It was a devotional practice that was finding visual expression in Netherlandish art and had precedents in the Sienese fourteenth-century painting of Ambrogio Lorenzetti, who for greater empathy painted the Holy Family with the Virgin’s handiwork. Piero elaborates on that tradition by his use of perspective, as well as close-up and demanding detail, and manages to implicate the viewer. Piero’s technique is as subtly new and precisely judged as his treatment of the age-old theme of the Virgin and Child.64 He transferred his design by means of incisions for the architecture and outermost contours of the figures, as well as possibly reinforcing the spolvero of a cartoon with charcoal.

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He selected a horizontally grained, single panel of wood cut from a huge walnut tree. The sides of the panel, including slivers of the composition, may have been cut, perhaps inside the frame, although it is not clear whether the painting ever had a traditional applied frame or a more modern separate frame. He applied the thinnest of gesso grounds on his walnut panel, as Netherlandish masters were wont to do. It seeped into the wood so that its fibres now show in the paint surface. The absorption of the ground might also explain why the palette is darker than usual in Piero, even though on top of it he applied a layer of white lead. Piero painted his figures in a mix of oil and tempera in thin, superimposed layers, and then worked on the background. He painted the body of Christ before adding the blanket. He painted the hair and ears of the Virgin before painting her veil, which he also applied in layers so that it appears first folded in a point and then in horizontals over her forehead. He painted highlights in the 29 pairs of gold eyelets for lacing the Virgin’s dress, but not where they are in the shadow of her bosom. Piero may have seen in his already installed Misericordia Madonna (see illus. 42), for example, that ultramarine in oil did not work well. The Virgin now has a mantle in azurite, although since too much oil was admixed, here too it developed a crackle, whereas ultramarine mixed with white lead produced the more effective surface of the sky-blue dress of the angel at the left. Piero, changing his earlier practice, used dark lines to emphasize facial features in the subtle sfumato of his flesh parts. In the angel in blue he also resorted to painted lines when adding a grey line along the shadowed left cheek to make it stand out against the hair. As if reflecting a changed

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aesthetic, the eyes are smaller than ever before in his work and they are surrounded by closed black lines. Such technical experimentation resulted in a soft tonality and smoothness that are remarkably new in the oeuvre of the ageing painter. Piero would not have needed to be present in Urbino while painting his small Madonna. He could have done it in his workshop at home, in Borgo, where he spent much time between 1472–5 and 1477–81. It did not diminish his alliance with the court at Urbino. When Federico di Montefeltro died in 1482, Piero reflected upon his service as courtier in Urbino in the preface of a mathematical treatise, the Libellus, which he dedicated to Guidubaldo, the young orphaned son of Federico and Battista. He reflects that talent and arduous study alone are not enough for a painter to ensure lasting fame, unless it is done for a virtuous patron. His own works and pictures, the courtier Piero muses, ‘have taken all they have of lustre from the highest and most glittering star and the greatest luminary of our time, that of your father, the best of men’.

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he systematic mind that guided the brush of Piero the painter likewise dictated the pen of Piero the author. He wrote two treatises on mathematics and one on linear perspective. They are the fruit of many decades of study and were produced with the cooperation of a translator, scribes and a calligrapher at his home turned scriptorium in Borgo. By the mid-1460s he completed the Trattato d’abaco, a treatise of abacus, or commercial arithmetic. In about 1482 he presented the work of his old age, the Libellus de quinque corporibus regolaribus (The Little Book on the Five Regular Solids), to Federico di Montefeltro’s son Guidubaldo. He asked that the Libellus be placed near his De prospectiva pingendi (On Perspective in Painting), which was already in the library at Urbino. These treatises are the work of a state-of-the-art mathematician.1 They are also testimony to a painter who conceived of his art as science and placed his draughtsmanship at its service. Piero emphasized the scholarly nature of his studies by using the elitist, university language of Latin either in accessing his sources, or in presenting his work, or both. Piero probably kept acquiring and improving his Latin and written and drawn mathematics throughout most of his life, starting early.

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latin and mathematics As a child in Borgo’s grammar school, Piero would have acquired some reading knowledge of Latin.2 He would have improved it in courtly environments, such as at the Vatican, or in Urbino, where the polymath Francesco di Giorgio also achieved proficiency. Piero’s reading of Latin must have come easily as he made an in-depth study of Latin translations of the work of Greek mathematicians Euclid (c. 300 bc) and Archimedes (c. 287–212 bc). Piero composed his treatises in the vernacular, but could annotate, in somewhat vernacularizing Latin, the Latin translations made by his friend, the grammar master Matteo di Ser Paolo d’Anghiari (d. 1487). He also copied the Latin translation of Archimedes in his own hand. Knowledge of Latin was rare for an artist. Leonardo da Vinci in the foreword to his notes for a treatise on painting even admitted that he might be judged an unlettered man, a ‘homo sanza lettere’, because of his lack of it. A humanist such as Alberti in 1435 had composed his treatise on painting in the vernacular, aiming at the artists rather than the patrons, but a year later claimed scientific recognition in addition to the workshop floor with a Latin translation. In having his last two treatises translated into Latin, Piero’s claims and stakes were just as high.3 Relatedly, Piero did not select the medium of the printed book, although it was invented while he wrote. Whereas the presses might have given his work greater distribution, Piero opted for the elitist manuscript. He may have been inspired by Federico di Montefeltro’s fabled manuscript-only library in Urbino. The manuscript also allowed him to add detailed geometrical and perspectival

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drawings that would not have been as precise had they been printed. By writing in his own hand, Piero could also showcase his sober semicursive humanist script, which was hardly a residue of grammar school, but rather a sign of his contact with learned men. In his painted work, as first documented in Rimini (see illus. 23), he also adopted humanist capitals. Piero’s schooling in mathematics is less clear than his training in writing Latin and painting. Borgo had no abacus school. The local boys set for a mercantile career probably took lessons from merchants and surveyors. It would also have held true of Piero’s compatriot and cousin-once-removed, Francesco dal Borgo, who would become the papal architect. Piero may have received lessons from his merchant father. As a young adult in Rome, Ferrara and Florence, Piero moreover would have had the benefit of collegial instruction in matters mathematical and perspectival from peers such as Francesco dal Borgo or Alberti. When in 1458–9 he arrived at the Vatican, he must have been thrilled to find an intellectual climate where both the literary and scientific heritage of Antiquity were investigated. It was Francesco dal Borgo who commissioned copies of Latin translations of the work of Greek mathematicians, including Euclid’s Elements (1457) and Optics (1458). A special case is the translation of the works of Archimedes that the humanist Jacopo da San Cassiano finished in 1453 for Nicholas v. Francesco illustrated it and borrowed it from the library, never to return it. He also made his own copy. From these two copies Piero in turn drafted his own autograph, illustrated manuscript (Biblioteca Riccardiana, Florence, Lat. 106; illus. 70). 4 Piero, who cited it only in his late Libellus, but not in the Abaco, wrote and drew it on paper

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with watermarks indicative of a date in the late 1470s and a location at Borgo. Piero learned about curved solids from Archimedes, whereas Euclid taught him about angular solids. What set Piero’s mathematics apart from others was that he grafted the discursive and deductive reasoning of the Greek mathematicians upon the commercial system of his own day. 70 Piero della Francesca, handwriting and drawing, and an unidentified calligrapher, initial: S, late 1470s, pen and ink on paper, Works of Archimedes, Biblioteca Riccardiana, Florence, Lat. 106, fol. 1r.

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abaco Piero’s first treatise, the Trattato d’abaco (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, Ashburnham 359*), is a kind of maths schoolbook.5 But not quite. Traditionally, the abacus presented the practical arithmetic and basic geometry used to train merchants and guild apprentices. The first Liber abaci was written in 1202 by Leonardo Fibonacci, who knew Arabic mathema­ tics with its easy numerals and had indirect knowledge of Archimedes. The abacus taught practical matters such as surveying, calculating exchange rates and the volumes of barrels. In his Abaco, Piero drew on this tradition, but also directly on Euclid’s more abstract Elements. Piero’s Abaco is, unlike other such books, not a student’s notes of a master’s lectures or a teacher’s working copy, but a fair manuscript to showcase abacus and its author’s versatility. He instructs and gives mathematical puzzles for pastime. The book consists of 480 propositions in which rules are stated and problems explained by solving examples. It is divided into sections covering arithmetic, algebra, geometry and mixed mathematical problems. In the arithmetic part, Piero explains fractions and then the merchant’s basic trick, the rule of three, the proportional theorem whereby a single unknown variable can be solved using a:b=c:d. To explain it, as one of many examples of increasing difficulty, Piero posits a price for a certain length of cloth and calculates how much a different length of the same fabric would cost. Next is the rule of double false position, whereby a single unknown factor in an equation is found by positing two estimates, and calculating the exact solution on the basis of the estimates and their

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errors. Piero’s algebra treats whole numbers, fractions, squares and roots, and the equations needed to find variables with them. Unlike traditional abacus books, he uses algorithms instead of geometry to find the answer and is able to tackle equations not only up to the second, but to the fifth degree. Piero visualizes both his arithmetic and algebra with examples relating to the selling and bartering of fabrics, leather, jewels, spices, wax, vitriol, nitre, horses, fish and melons, as well as to exchange rates, the components of metal alloys and the division of shares in a company. His geometry does not take examples from daily life. It is abstract. It rests on theorems such as that by Pythagoras (Euclid, Elements, i.47) that in a triangle with a right angle, the square of the side opposite it is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. In constructing a pentagon and hexagon he applies Fibonacci’s so-called extreme and mean ratio, in which the whole is to its larger (extreme) part as the larger part is to the smaller (mean) part (see also illus. 70). Piero does not pontificate on any mystic overtones of the extreme and mean ratio, unlike Pacioli who would call it the ‘divine’ proportion (On the Divine Proportion, i.5). It is now known as the golden section. Piero proposes four ways to calculate the surface of a regular pentagon with a given side length, including one that, as he will claim in his later Libellus (i.37), is of his own, not Euclid’s invention (five-eighths of the diameter of the circumcircle times the length of the transversal line from one angle to the second angle following it). Piero’s extensive discussion of the regular polyhedra – the only five equal-faced, equiangular solid bodies of which all vertices touch a circumscribed sphere – is extraneous to the

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practical context of abacus and better suited to intellectual, elitist pastimes. It would receive even greater attention in his Libellus. Where the abacus tradition had discussed three, Piero encompassed all five. Described in book xiii of Euclid’s Elements, as well as books xiv and xv (ascribed to Euclid in Piero’s time, but now excluded from his oeuvre), they consist of the tetrahedron (four equilateral triangular faces), hexahedron (or cube; six square faces), octahedron (eight equilateral triangular faces), dodecahedron (twelve regular pentagonal faces) and icosahedron (twenty equilateral triangular faces). Euclid established their measurement with geometry, Piero with algebra. Although Plato in Timaeus had identified four of the regular polyhedra with the four elements and the fifth, the dodecahedron, with the universe because it has to be constructed with the golden section, Piero again refrains from mystifying his science. On the first page Piero writes that his book is ‘about abacus necessary to merchants’, ‘on commercial issues such as barters, values, and companies’ (illus. 71). He claims that he composed it at the bidding of an unnamed person, ‘such that his requests to me are like commands’. He accepted the invitation, ‘not to be presumptuous, but to obey’. Piero’s revered patron was probably a compatriot, as one of the propositions (258; fol. 37v) is about a merchant travelling from Borgo to the Adriatic cities of Pesaro, Ancona, Recanati and Fermo. He would not have been a great humanist, nor necessarily a man of Latin letters, since Piero opted for the genre of the instructive schoolbook, using cheaper paper as opposed to parchment, and for the vernacular instead of the elitist Latin. In a town without maths schools, though, a treatise

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on abacus would have been a precious and status-enhancing possession. It would also have been a playful stimulus to a mind set for maths, as well as a professional and hardly presumptuous demonstration of the abilities of one of Borgo’s most accomplished sons. In the early 1460s the instigator of the book may have been Piero’s respected octogenarian merchant father.6 His requests may have been like commands to the firstborn son. Piero’s subservient dedication is in the spirit of Alberti, who in his book on the family instructs that ‘The young should respect the old, but more especially their own fathers.’7 Piero wrote the extant, fair copy of the Abaco in his own hand, on paper with watermarks that were common in Borgo and Arezzo between the years 1462 and 1468.8 A working copy may have preceded it, as Piero knew where to place his geometrical drawings before writing the text that sometimes overlaps them. He drew the 131 illustrations in the thinnest of ink lines using pen, compasses and straightedge. The simpler ones were composed on the book’s pages with construction lines that left slight impressions but no ink. The more compli­ cated ones, for example of the dodecahedron and icosahedron, were transferred from a pre-existent design by pricking the intersections of the lines. For initials of important paragraphs, Piero left blank spaces over a height of two lines and an indication of the letter for the calligrapher (illus. 72). He probably did the bulk of the work at the time of the acquisition of the paper, so in the mid-1460s, but the manuscript stayed with him for almost two more decades. He continued to tinker with it while also working on his last treatise, the Libellus. An addition to a proposition in the Abaco (525;

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fol. 115r) is in the same ink that he used to change a similar proposition in the Libellus (ii.11; fol. 28r). Possibly while still in Piero’s scriptorium, the Abaco was accessible to Pacioli, who used it in 1477–8 in his manual for students in Perugia and published some of its propositions in his Summary of Arithmetic.9 The manuscript may have lingered around for so long because something had happened to the original instigator. If Piero had meant it for his father, it would have been the latter’s death in 1464 that intervened. Then, around 1480, Piero changed plans. He embellished it so that he could give it away. A calligrapher inserted the initials in the spaces left blank throughout the text. This probably happened close to 1480, because the same calligrapher added very similar initials in a copy of De prospectiva pingendi (Bibliothèque Municipale, Bordeaux, 616), which, judging by its watermarks, was prepared in Piero’s scriptorium around 1475–7. Also around 1480, Piero commissioned decoration for the Abaco’s frontispiece.10 The illuminator was probably a Ferrarese or Bolognese epigone of the illuminator Taddeo Crivelli of Ferrara (fl. 1451–79), who around that time worked in a style close to, but looser than, the illuminations in the Bible of 1455–61 for Borso d’Este (Biblioteca Estense, Modena). Piero may have met his miniaturist in the bustling scriptorium of the library in Urbino. The miniature in the Abaco was an afterthought, as is indicated by the text area that Piero laid out like the rest of the manuscript with little if any marginal decoration in mind. Unlike the frontispieces of the Works of Archimedes (see illus. 70), copies of De prospectiva pin­ gendi (see illus. 75) or the Libellus (fol. 2r) produced in Piero’s scriptorium, the frontispiece of the Abaco does not have an

71 Piero della Francesca, text and handwriting, mid-1460s, and a Ferrarese or Bolognese epigone of Taddeo Crivelli, miniatures, c. 1480, pen and ink and gold and egg tempera on paper, Trattato d’abaco, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, Ashburnham 359*, frontispiece.

72 Piero della Francesca, text, handwriting and drawing, mid-1460s, and unidentified calligrapher, initial: L, c. 1480, pen and ink on paper, Trattato d’abaco, mid-1460s, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, Ashburnham 359*, fol. 91v.

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extra-large space reserved for the initial, but simply the same area allowed for initials throughout the text. The miniaturist had to improvise, resulting in an uneven distribution of the decoration. The illumination was necessary to make the re-destination of the manuscript clear. It was readied for a member of the noble Pichi family of Borgo. The bas-de-page includes their coat of arms with picchi, or woodpeckers, and 73 Stamped leather binding, c. 1480, of Piero della Francesca, Trattato d’abaco, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, Ashburnham 359*.

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the margin a scroll possibly reading ‘pi[co de]texi [scrip] si’, ‘I revealed and wrote this for a Pichi’. To wrap up his gift, Piero had the treatise bound in a stamped leather binding also datable to around 1480 (illus. 73).11 The occasion for the rededication of the treatise could have been the wedding on 3 December 1480 that Piero brokered for his niece Romana, the daughter of his brother Antonio. She married Paolo di Meo Pichi. Their vows were witnessed by, among others, Piero’s friend and translator master Matteo. Maybe the treatise was part of Romana’s dowry, which also comprised a considerable 350 florins. Maybe it was a gift from Piero to his new, important member of the family. It is unknown when Romana or her husband died, but she may have returned to her paternal home with some of their belongings. Early twentieth-century descendants of the Della Francesca recollected that the manuscript was in the family estate until the wedding of Giuseppe Franceschi Marini and Caterina Frescobaldi in 1835.12 At that time it was borrowed and kept by the local historian Francesco Gherardi Dragomanni. Only in 1917 did it become known to the world at large as a work by Piero.

libellus Lasting fame would come to Piero’s second mathematical treatise, but not under its author’s name. Luca Pacioli published Piero’s Libellus de quinque corporibus regularibus in its entirety and without the name of its author in the vernacular as the second part of his On the Divine Proportion (Venice, 1509). This manual on proportion in architecture inspired Leonardo,

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Albrecht Dürer and Daniele Barbaro. As early as 1550 Vasari denounced the plagiarism, but only in 1916 did Girolamo Mancini publish the original treatise under Piero’s name. It is a small, signed parchment manuscript in Latin and is now in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Urb. lat. 632).13 It arrived there in 1657, a generation after the death of the last duke of Urbino in 1632, together with the rest of the Montefeltro manuscripts. Piero had intended it for the library in Urbino, but its gestation had known tortuous paths. The Libellus partially reflects Piero’s maths of the time of the Abaco. Of its 140 propositions, Piero repeated, reworked, clarified or compressed 88 that had appeared in his earlier treatise. Not being fluent in composing Latin, Piero would have written a first draft of the Libellus in the vernacular, which may be the version that Pacioli had access to. Subsequently, Piero commissioned a Latin translation so that he could reach an elitist readership. He procured a booklet with pages of parchment. More expensive than paper, it was used in books for people of consequence. In this fair copy he then worked in tandem with a scribe. While he redid, page for page, the 174 drawings in the same technique as in the Abaco, the scribe seconded him, page for page, putting in the text. With his selection of the manuscript in the age of print, parchment and Latin, Piero was working with an important patron in mind. It may have been Federico di Montefeltro, who held manuscripts, but also mathematics, in high esteem. When the count appointed the architect Luciano Laurana as engineer and overseer of all masters working at the construction of his palace in 1468, he expressed his esteem for ‘the virtue of architecture as founded in arithmetic and geometry,

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which are part of the seven liberal arts, and among the most important, because most certain’.14 Piero may have meant the Libellus as another pearl to the string of works he had already done for Federico (see illus. 37, 60, 65–8). When in September 1482 the duke died and was succeeded by his ten-year-old son Guidubaldo, under the tutelage of Federico’s natural brother, the astrologer and art-lover Ottaviano Ubaldini, Piero was eager to affirm his continued fidelity to the Montefeltro. With a prefatory letter, he dedicated the Libellus to Guidubaldo on a leaf that originally was the numbered central folio of the manuscript’s final quire. He moved it to the beginning of the manuscript as an afterthought. This operation happened while the drawings and text had already been placed at the beginning of the manuscript, but not in the final quire. Piero had another translator and another scribe compose and write the dedication to turn the Libellus into an eloquent captatio benevolentiae for the new duke. Once the scribes had finished, Piero revised the manuscript. He made some corrections in his own hand, but missed many, maybe because he was in a hurry to please the young duke. When Pacioli published the treatise, he made other minor organizational and mathematical corrections, maybe ones that Piero had subsequently made on the vernacular first draft that had stayed with him. According to the library inventory of about 1487, the presentation copy had a purple binding. Piero offered it to Guidubaldo, to ‘be within you and your famed house a pledge and monument of me and my old affection and perpetual service’.15 He asked that a little corner be found for it in the library, close to De prospectiva pingendi, which was already there. Piero claims in a wording derived from the

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prologue to the third book of On Architecture by Vitruvius, the architect of Julius Caesar and Augustus, that Federico had been the one who had given lustre to Piero’s works, just as Augustus had added to Virgil’s fame, and other great princes of Antiquity had made the difference between famous and lesser-known artists. In his vernacular De prospectiva pingendi (iii, prologue) Piero also included that Vitruvian walk of fame, showing that it was he and not only his translator who knew the classical treatise. Piero dedicated the Libellus to Guidubaldo, hoping it would be ‘saved from obscurity by being illuminated by your radiance’. He considered it the ‘last mathematical exercise of my [old] age, which I disclosed, lest the mind should become torpid by inaction’. He likened it to the ‘meagre and effete fruits’ of a ‘little plot of land, which has had its day and is almost consumed with age, from which also your most illustrious father received more abundant ones’, and continues the pastoral metaphor by saying he hopes Guidu­ baldo accepts it, for ‘it is not the custom not to admit once in a while upon a most opulent and luxurious table, rusticities and fruits cultivated by a rough and inept peasant’. The tone of the introduction indicates that it was composed not long after the death of Federico, by a Piero nostalgic about the past, and eager to ingratiate himself. The Libellus is a lifetime’s distillation of a mind gifted with spatial visualization. Although strictly mathematical, its artistic and particularly architectural applicability is patent. Like the Abaco, it takes its inspiration from the discussion of the five regular polyhedra in Euclid’s Elements. The edition of Euclid used by Piero in the Libellus no longer came via a medieval compendium, but was the newly translated version from the

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Vatican. He also makes direct reference to his Latin copy of Archimedes. The first three sections concern geometrical figures on a plane, regular bodies contained in a sphere, and regular bodies nested within one another. The geometrical relationships between regular bodies, which had been put into words by Euclid, are ‘newly expressed in arithmetical terms’, as Piero proudly states in the introduction. He is fully aware of his originality and continues with the courtly, understated wish that the Libellus ‘despite its novelty . . . may not displease’. Piero added a fourth section, not foreseen in either title or introduction, which is mainly dedicated to irregular bodies, two of which had received attention in the Abaco. Piero was navigating almost uncharted waters here. His only guiding star was the statement by Pappus of Alexandria in the fourth century that Archimedes, in a since-lost treatise, had described the irregular bodies. Piero single-handedly reinvents the construction of five of the thirteen irregular bodies, those that can be derived from the five regular bodies by truncating the vertices. By this method, a tetrahedron, for example, can produce an irregular solid of four equilateral triangles and four equilateral hexagons. It is Pacioli (On the Divine Proportion, i.71, fol. 23r) who makes explicit the import­ ance of polyhedra for intarsia workers. Federico’s studioli in Urbino and Gubbio have such intarsia representing faceted solids. The fourth section of the Libellus also includes some mixed problems. Without knowing it, Piero here revives a celebrated mathematical problem of Antiquity: the volume shared by two cylinders intersecting at right angles. Archimedes, in a treatise unknown during the fifteenth century, had challenged

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his friend Eratosthenes with exactly this puzzle. Thanks to his own visual acumen, Piero both invents and solves it (iv.10). Its applicability to the columns and vaults of architecture is evident from his next proposition, which treats of cross-vaults, which are composed of two intersecting halved cylinders. When a solid, such as a statue of an animal, was too irregular to be measured by geometrical or algebraic calculation, Piero described how to determine its volume by submersion in water. The architectural applicability of Piero’s mathematics is explicit in these last few examples, but implicit in others. Piero is, for instance, the first to calculate surface and volume of a solid with 72 faces (iv.1), but refrains from discussing its applications. According to Pacioli (On the Divine Proportion, i.54), however, this solid was often used by architects to design domes, as in the Pantheon in Rome, or apses and vaults, as in Bramante’s Santa Maria presso San Satiro of 1482–6 in Milan. Piero would have known the Pantheon, but stated so in painting (see illus. 23, 28, 60), not in writing. And Piero was indeed the source for Bramante. The Milan-born humanist Fra Sabba da Castiglione (1480–1554) recorded in his Ricordi overo amaestramenti (Venice, 1549, cxi) that Bramante, who was a student in Urbino in the early 1470s, was trained in perspective by Piero. Bramante took his cue for the Milanese church from Piero’s 72-faced solid, and, much as in the Prevedari engraving, looked very hard at Piero’s Montefeltro Altarpiece (see illus. 60). Where Piero had been implicit in his reason for destining a treatise on mathematics to the Montefeltro library, Pacioli was explicit when he dedicated his Summary to Guidubaldo on the grounds that Federico had used geometry

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and proportion in constructing and embellishing his palazzo in Urbino. Pacioli is the unacknowledging advocate of the architectural importance of Piero’s abstract mathematics. Piero’s treatises had other artistic implications. The math­­ e­­matical treatises of Antiquity had come without illustrations. Piero added to classical geometry by not only expressing it in arithmetical terms, but visualizing the planes and solids that are its object, drawing on the tradition of the abacus and his draughtsmanship. The drawings in his treatises pre­ suppose preliminary studies, and so do his paintings. Piero’s visual database, ‘books and drawings and possessions of master Piero’ worth 100 ducats, were still in his house when several heirs disputed his inheritance in 1515.16 Piero probably drew inspiration from Vitruvius in his three-dimensional renderings. He could consult On Architecture in both an eleventh- and a fifteenth-century copy in the library at Urbino, from which Francesco di Giorgio made the first translation in the vernacular around 1475.17 Vitruvius (i.i.2) explains how an architectural idea can be expressed in a ground plan (ichno­ graphia), elevation (orthographia) and perspectival view (scaenographia). Raphael, indebted to Piero via Bramante, whom he knew in Rome, interpreted this in his letter of 1519– 20 to Pope Leo x de’ Medici (r. 1513–21) to be orthogonal, or right-angled renderings of the ground plan, elevation and section of a three-dimensional object from which exact measurements can be taken. In the Abaco, Libellus and the third part of De prospectiva pingendi Piero also draws the ground plan, elevation and section of his objects and puts them together to form an axonometric projection. A beautiful example is his rendering in the Libellus (iii.4) of the inclusion of an

74 Piero della Francesca, text and drawing: Inclusion of an Icosahedron in a Cube, and unidentified scribe, handwriting, pen and ink on parchment, Libellus de quinque corporibus regolaribus (c. 1482), Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Urb. lat. 632, fol. 40v.

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icosahedron in a cube, which was, moreover, a geometrical puzzle of his own invention, not Euclid’s (illus. 74). Such a rendering of spatial objects is indebted to his interpretation of Vitruvius’ modes of architectural design.18 The Montefeltro dukes showed their appreciation of both the mathematical and architectural relevance of Piero’s work by welcoming his Libellus in the library at Urbino. Judging by the inventory of 1632, it was in the library’s third bookcase in which the works of Piero’s mathematical heroes Euclid and Archimedes were also held, along with his architectural examplars, Vitruvius and Alberti.

de prospectiva pingendi Piero fully realized the potential of geometry in the field of both construction and art in De prospectiva pingendi.19 He made several copies in both the vernacular and Latin, all on paper with watermarks of around 1475–7. He gave one to Federico di Montefeltro in Urbino and therefore finished it before the duke’s death in 1482. He made several copies, on paper and in two languages, so that he could reach an artisanal and an elitist audience.20 In his scriptorium at home in Borgo, however, Piero was reluctant to let go of his books. While also elaborating the Abaco and the Libellus, he prepared an initial, now-lost manu­ script of De prospectiva pingendi in the vernacular. As recorded by Pacioli (Summary, fol. 68v) he then asked master Matteo di Ser Paolo d’Anghiari to translate it. The result was an ‘ornate and precise’ translation in a manuscript that is now in Bordeaux (Bibliothèque Municipale, 616). The scribe who copied it for

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Piero also copied the main text (but not the prefatory letter) of the Libellus. Piero checked the Latin manuscript of De prospectiva pingendi and made eighty corrections and additions in his own Latin. He presumably also rechecked the now-lost original in the vernacular. The two updated versions were 75 Bartolomeo della Gatta or an artist close to him, unfinished miniature: Frieze with a Candelabrum Surmounted by the Montefeltro Eagle, c. 1475–82, and unidentified scribe, handwriting, egg tempera and ink on paper, Piero della Francesca, De prospectiva pingendi, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, C307 inf., fol. 41v.

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then copied by yet another scribe, and resulted in a Latin copy now in Milan (Biblioteca Ambrosiana di Milano, S.P. 6bis) and a vernacular copy now in Reggio Emilia (Biblioteca Comunale ‘A. Panizzi’, A 41/2). Piero continued to make corrections and additions in all these copies. On the basis of the manuscript now in Reggio (probably with yet another intermediary manuscript, now lost) he then made the most polished, final version of all the surviving manuscripts. It is now in Parma (Biblioteca Palatina, 1576). It is in the vernacu­ lar and in Piero’s own hand. As in the Abaco and the Libellus, before copying the text Piero made drawings that served as elucidation and proof of his discourse. Piero subsequently asked a calligrapher to insert decorative initials in both the first Latin manuscript of De prospectiva pingendi, now in Bordeaux, and the long-finished text of the Abaco. He gave a Latin copy of De prospectiva pingendi to Federico di Montefeltro, as Piero states in the prefatory letter of the Libellus and Pacioli in the Summary (fol. 2r) and the On the Divine Proportion (ii.19).21 This was probably the copy now in Milan, which has two unfinished miniatures possibly by Bartolomeo della Gatta, one of the illuminators active in Urbino. The second (illus. 75) has a candelabrum surmounted by the Montefeltro eagle with outspread wings. Strangely, no copy was recorded in the inventories of the ducal library, either when it was in Urbino or when it was transferred to the Vatican. Federico’s De prospectiva pingendi may have been taken, never to be returned, perhaps while it was being illuminated, or maybe when condottiere and cardinal Cesare Borgia, in the company of his engineer Leonardo da Vinci, raided Urbino and its library in 1502.22

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Fellow painters were, after all, the primary readers that Piero had in mind. It was probably master Matteo who at the end exhorts the reader in elegiac distichs to praise the ‘extraordinary painter’ for the book that ‘comes as precious help to art’ with the following words: May the powers of genius, the wisdom of the mind, and virtue Be your perpetual companions, Piero; You already make the name of Borgo celebrated among Italian towns And you make your name famous through your art. You are our ornament! We, combatants, follow your signs [instructions], With which everybody can take inimical fortresses. Matteo praises his friend Piero as a genius, an instructor and a citizen that Borgo can be proud of. Whereas Piero’s name does not figure in the Abaco and the Libellus, it appears in the first line of the treatise on perspective. Contrary to his intentions in the Abaco, he also admitted that he had hazarded to undertake the work ‘as a presumptuous one’, because he was ‘zealous of the glory of art and of this age’ (De prospectiva pin­ gendi, iii, preface). Master Matteo also added a short epilogue in which he addressed the author, expressing the hope that now that the work could be sent into the world, it would render him due glory. Renaissance artists had indeed invented perspective without immediate teachers, a feat that Alberti proudly claims in the prologue of On Painting. The stories by Pliny taught

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them that painting in Antiquity had been realistic enough to fool the eye of man and animal alike. Vitruvius (vii.11) came closest to revealing the secret (if there was one) when describing the set that Agatharchus had made for a tragedy by Aeschylus staged in Athens, which beguiled the eye ‘if a fixed centre is taken for the outward glance of the eyes and the projection of the radii’. Ghiberti in I commentarii (Commentaries; i.viii.11) interpreted Pliny’s story about Apelles triumphing over Protogenes in drawing an even more perfect line next to his colleague’s, as perspective. Piero underlines the import­ ance of perspective by giving the names of painters of Antiquity who, he says, earned perpetual fame through its use. How exactly was un­clear, as no Greek or Roman painting was known in the fifteenth century, but the Renaissance painters wanted to rival what they had read but not seen. Brunelleschi had pioneered linear perspective in his demonstrations with panels showing the Florence Baptistery and Palazzo della Signoria and helped Masaccio to plan almost correctly foreshortened buildings. Alberti codified their rule without being able to prove it. To express the correctness of perspective construction in writing needed somebody with a grasp of geometry at the level of the mathematicians of Antiquity. This was Piero. De prospectiva pingendi is written like a user manual before the invention of the repeat mode. It is meant to be worked through, not read. It is the first illustrated artist manual. Piero teaches by examples, but has some focused introductory remarks in the prologues of the first and third books. Painting, he says, consists of disegno, commensuratio and colorare. Disegno is the artistic starting point, because it is that ‘which a man wants

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to make’. He defines it as the drawing of the outlines and sections of an object as it is. Commensuratio is the proportional placement of the outlines and sections of the object as it appears, or perspective.23 Taking together the vernacular and Latin versions of the treatise, Piero’s definition of perspective can be paraphrased as the proportional ratio establishing the correct degradation of the appearance of things at a certain distance from the eye on a given picture plane so that one can judge their relative distance. Finally, colorare is putting in the colours as they appear, light and dark according to the way they change in the light. Alberti in On Painting (ii.30–31) also had a tri-partition: circonscrizione (drawing outlines), compo­ sizione (composition) and ricevere di lumi (the reception of light). Piero’s partition is similar, but has the addition of optics. In the elaboration, he sidesteps colour. Of the three components of painting, the treatise is really only about perspective and uses drawing or design in an auxiliary, but essential role. Here is how it goes. Perspective, according to Piero, leaning heavily on Euclid’s Optics, has five ingredients. The first is the eye, conceived of as a single point. The second is the form of the thing seen. The third is the distance between the eye and the thing seen. The fourth is the external lines of the visual cone between the eye and the outer contours of the thing seen. The eye emitted, according to Euclid, visual rays that, like a geometer’s dividers, encompass the thing that it looks at. The perceived or apparent size of the thing is related to the angle the visual cone makes at the eye. Parallel lines receding from us (think of standing between railway tracks) remain parallel, but do not look parallel, as they seem to come together as they recede. The reason is that the equal distances

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between them (the railway sleepers) appear successively smaller, as they subtend smaller angles at the eye. With the fifth ingredient of perspective, Piero treads beyond Euclidean optics. This is the picture plane, which is placed at a certain distance between the eye and the thing seen. It ‘intercepts’ the rays of the visual cone, whereby the apparent, perspectival, or, in Piero’s words, degraded object is delineated on it. Coming from perspectiva naturalis, or direct vision, Piero has here entered the new field of perspectiva artificialis, or painted perspective. Whereas optics describes things as they are, perspective describes things as they appear. Piero observes that the distance between the eye and the thing seen influences the shape of the thing’s appearance, whereas the distance between the eye and the picture plane determines the size of the thing’s appearance. He expresses the relationship between these variables in a rule that allows him to calculate, independ­ ently from the placement of the picture plane, the successive, regular degradation of objects of equal size at equal distances. It means that Piero can actually construct, not merely represent, space in his paintings. Piero can design reality. The first book of the treatise deals with plane geometry. Through both mathematics and demonstrative drawing, Piero gives the proof that perspective is correct. Imagine a square wall. If you look at it head-on, it also appears square. Now imagine that it is tilted backwards ninety degrees to become a floor. It is still a square, but it no longer looks like one; its left and right side seem to converge as they recede. Now, imagine an eye in front of the original standing square which, however, has become a window or picture plane through which the eye can see the tilted floor. This is your frontal view

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of the situation. Look at the situation again, not head-on, but from the side. Note the eye, or viewpoint, note the visual cone that from the eye encompasses like dividers the front and back edge of the floor. Note how the visual cone intersects the picture plane at two points, the lower at its bottom, resulting in a line fragment between them that corresponds to the height of the floor as perceived on the picture plane. This is your second, lateral view. Now imagine yourself hovering like a bird over the situation. You see the eye, the picture plane and the floor from above. You see how the visual rays extend from the eye to the corners of the back of the floor and intersect the picture plane resulting in a line-section that corresponds to the perceived width of the back of the floor. This is your third, aerial view. In modern terms, you now have x-, y- and z-coordinates. The three views can be combined in a final diagram that optically proves in three dimensions what is seen perspectivally by the eye on the picture plane, the foreshortened, trapezoidal image of the square. Piero implies the vanishing point, where the lines perpendicular to the picture plane seem to converge, because he equals it to the mirror image of the viewpoint, or eye, but he omits to give it a name (this only happened in the eighteenth century). Piero has thus proved the scientific correctness of perspective. He now gives his wall square tiles, which is easy, as they are un-foreshortened and therefore look square. He draws a diagonal of this square. He then proceeds to give the same tiles to the relevant ‘floor’, the foreshortened version of the square. He draws equal strips perpendicular to the picture plane with their lines converging in the ‘vanishing point’. He draws the diagonal of the square floor and where

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it intersects the perpendiculars, he places the subdivisions of the tiles that are parallel to the picture plane, on the geo­ metrical premise that a diagonal bisects both a square and smaller partitioning squares contained in the square along the diagonal. Alberti had only used the device as a control 76 Piero della Francesca, text, handwriting and drawing, The Foreshortening of a Cube Placed at an Angle, c. 1475–7, pen and ink on paper, De prospectiva pingendi, Biblioteca Palatina, Complesso monumentale della Pilotta, Parma, 1576, fol. 18r.

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mechanism, not as a construction device. Piero now has at his disposal an un-foreshortened, square, tiled ‘wall’ and, attached to it, its foreshortened image or ‘floor’. In this way he can construct plane figures and their foreshortened appearance. He first draws the proper form of a plane object on the un-foreshortened square and then transfers it to the degraded square by plotting its distinctive points or coordinates in relation to the diagonal, first in the proper square and then in the degraded one. Piero makes two disclaimers. He states that the illusion of perspective depends on whether, and works best if, the eye is fixed and looks in one direction, perpendicular to the picture surface (i.12). Second, he limits the visual field to an angle of no more than ninety degrees (i.30). This rules out that the perspectival image becomes bigger than the actual object, which results in anamorphosis and seems at odds with direct vision. This is Piero’s disclaimer for those who, misled by such marginal aberrations, and unobservant of the correct angle of the visual field, think that perspective is not a ‘true science’, and therefore through ignorance fault it. Part two of the book allows for the construction of solid cubical or faceted objects. Piero instructs how to erect them (‘edificare’, ii.4), as though he is actually building in space, rising vertically over the degraded floor, which he uses as a ground plan in perspective, and determining the degradation of equal heights by flight lines converging in the ‘vanishing point’. A cube, a building with a square ground plan, a temple with an octagonal ground plan, and a cross-vault over arches can all be represented, or constructed, in this way (illus. 76).

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Part three of the treatise presents a different method for representing difficult objects under several angles. The objects of Piero’s examples include a mazzocchio (the faceted ring used in men’s hats), a composite capital, the human head and an apse. Piero proposes a second method because he finds it 77 Piero della Francesca, A Human Head in Profile, Frontal and Sectional View, c. 1475–7, pen and ink on paper, De prospectiva pingendi, Biblioteca Palatina, Complesso monumentale della Pilotta, Parma, 1576, fol. 59v.

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easier to explain and because it facilitates the great number of lines that he needs in the perspective construction. Piero again not only instructs how to render things as they appear, but actually explains how to construct them in pictorial, virtual space, with such precision that they could be reconstructed in three dimensions.24 For his drawings he needs, in addition 78 Piero della Francesca, A Human Head in Profile, with a Frontal and Sectional View with Coordinates of Significant Points, c. 1475–7, pen and ink on paper, De prospectiva pingendi, Biblioteca Palatina, Complesso monumentale della Pilotta, Parma, 1576, fol. 61r.

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to the paper, pen, compasses and straightedge of the previous drawings, much more paper, a pin, some horsehair, several thin wood straightedges, twice as many paper strips, and wax. As in the first method, the premise is that the artist starts by drawing, freehand, that which he wants to make, in its proper shape. Like an architect, the artist draws the frontal view, side view and top, bottom and sectional views of the real thing. In the case of the human head this means that he draws first a frontal and profile view, at the same scale and aligned next to each other (illus. 77). He establishes a vertical axis of the head. He then conceives of eight horizontal circum­fer­ ences, or cross-sections of the head. He projects these sections, as though they were actual slices of the head, below the profile drawing at the same scale and aligned, condensing four in a top view and the other four in a bottom view. Although he can transfer the depths of the sections by extending lines from the profile view and the widths by transferral with dividers from the frontal view, the grasp of the shape of such horizontal slices of the head attests to the level of anatomical insight for which Piero would have needed an actual model in, for example, clay or wood. The sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti writes (Commentaries, ii.vi.1) that he supplied many artists with model-figures, and Vasari in his Life of Piero mentions auxiliary tools like this, though here for studying the fall of drapery. With the vertical axis appearing from above as a central point in the cross-sections, Piero divides them into sixteen segments. The intersections of the lines of these segments with the contours of the cross-section are then numbered for each cross-section. Some extra points are chosen for complicated areas such as the eyes or the ear. Piero then transfers

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the drawings by pricking to the next piece of paper (illus. 78). The numbers of the cross-sections are now also placed next to the relative points in the frontal and lateral view of the head. Piero has established a cloud of coordinates for the entire head. It has actually been constructed in (a virtual) space. This set of drawings is the painter’s dowry, the material from which he can implement the head in his paintings under whatever degradation he wishes. His use of pricking a design for transfer to any surface – paper, panel or wall – attests to this coherent preparatory process. 79 Piero della Francesca, The Coordinates of Sectional Views of the Human Head as Seen from a Fixed Viewpoint and Projected on a Picture Plane, c. 1475–7, pen and ink on paper, De prospectiva pingendi, Biblioteca Palatina, Complesso monumentale della Pilotta, Parma, 1576, fol. 63v.

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With the ‘force of the lines according to the rules of the art’ (iii, prologue), the head can now be foreshortened as it pleases the artist, with a viewpoint of his choice and with a picture plane placed at a specific distance between the object and the eye. Piero transfers the sectional views of the head to the far side of a new piece of paper (illus. 79). He draws an x-axis along the tip of the nose and, parallel, the line that represents the desired picture plane. At the other side of the paper he marks the viewpoint by a pin. He attaches a horsehair to the pin to serve as the rays of the visual cone. 80 Piero della Francesca, The Coordinates of a Profile View of the Human Head Seen from a Fixed Viewpoint and Projected on a Picture Plane, c. 1475–7, pen and ink on paper, De prospectiva pingendi, Biblioteca Palatina, Complesso monumentale della Pilotta, Parma, 1576, fol. 65r.

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He has prepared eight thin wood straightedges, one for each cross-section of the head. One by one, he places them parallel to the line representing the picture plane. For each, he stretches the horsehair from the pin or viewpoint to each of the coordinates on the relevant cross-section that are visible from the viewpoint, one by one. He marks the intersection of horsehair and picture plane on the wood straightedge, noting the number of the relevant coordinate. In this way

81 Piero della Francesca, Foreshortened Image of the Human Head (illus. 77), c. 1475–7, pen and ink on paper, De prospectiva pingendi, Biblioteca Palatina, Complesso monumentale della Pilotta, Parma, 1576, fol. 66v.

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he assembles the x-coordinates for each cross-section of the head on a wood straightedge specific to that cross-section. He now repeats the operation to obtain the y-coordinates. The lateral view of the head is transferred to the far edge of a new piece of paper (illus. 80). The y-axis is drawn through the tip of the nose and, parallel to it, the picture plane, at the same distance as in the sectional view. Again a pin is inserted in the chosen viewpoint. With the horsehair stretching from

82 Piero della Francesca, A Perspectival Rendering of the Human Head (illus. 75), Rotated along Three Axes, c. 1475–7, pen and ink on paper, De prospectiva pingendi, Biblioteca Palatina, Complesso monumentale della Pilotta, Parma, 1576, fol. 76v.

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the pin/viewpoint to each consecutive coordinate of the cross-section, the intersections with the picture plane are now marked and numbered on strips of paper, this time two for each cross-section. This operation has to be repeated seven times, so that all the cross-sections have been projected on their relevant set of strips of paper. On the paper for his final drawing, Piero marks the y-axis as point of reference (illus. 81). Parallel to it, at the edges of the paper, he attaches with wax the paper strips relevant to the y-coordinates of the first cross-section of the head. He now moves the wood straightedge corresponding to the same cross-section down between the paper strips, stopping at each y-coordinate signed on them to mark on the paper the relevant x-coordinate of the wood straightedge. Piero had opted for wood straightedges for the x-coordinates and paper strips for the y-coordinates, not only to be able to tell them apart, but also because it is easier to attach paper strips to the final drawing sheet and because the wood straightedge could move with confidence between them. The operation is repeated for the other cross-sections. The coordinates can now be connected and the foreshortened image emerges. Piero then gives instructions for a painter who wants to represent the same head, but inclined. On the basis of the desired pose and his knowledge of anatomy, he first establishes in each of the existing frontal, lateral and sectional views of the head how the three-dimensional tilt affects them. This produces a new set of such views, which are then elaborated with the wood straightedges, paper strips, pin and horsehair, to produce the foreshortened image of the inclined head under the chosen viewpoint and placement of the

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picture plane. By this means, Piero is now at liberty to rotate a head, or whatever ‘thing’ he has designed in space ad libitem and put it in perspective (illus. 82). The resulting representation is so precise that it can serve as the basis to reconstruct the represented object. Piero can perform operations in threedimensional space. Piero knew that perspective was not just plausible, but perfect and correct. It was a ‘vera scientia’, a true science. the wider perspective By the bolstering power of geometrical perspective, Piero has raised painting, which is but ‘the demonstration of surfaces and solids degraded and enlarged on the picture plane according to the way in which the actual objects are perceived by the eye under different angles on the picture plane’ (iii, preface), to a science-based art. Self-confident, zealous of glory in his art and time, he has emancipated painting and made it scientific. His examples were the classics. Vitruvius (On Architecture, i.i.4) and Pliny (Natural History, xxxv.36) both wrote that perfection in art is impossible without arithmetic and geometry. Over-eager as usual, Pacioli (On the Divine Proportion, i.3) went a step further, claiming that pictorial perspective was as much a proportional, mathematical discipline as the liberal art of Music and therefore should also be a liberal art. The scientific nature of creation in Piero means that he can steer completely clear of hazard. Everything can be planned. Everything can be repeated. A figure, once drawn, can be reproduced infinite times and, like a living human being, in whatever pose. Piero had a visual database. With

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breathtaking composure and patience he crafted unity of style, a trademark. Little wonder that the chronology of his works is hard to establish, but that there is hardly any dis­agreement about attributions. His paintings are images of images transformed by geometry. Paramount, however, is the starting point of disegno, the artistic idea. Piero’s perspective is but a way to render a drawing an artist has done in a repeatable and 83 Piero della Francesca, text, handwriting and drawing: A Perspectival Rendering of a Palazzo, c. 1475–7, pen and ink on paper, De prospectiva pingendi, Biblioteca Palatina, Complesso monumentale della Pilotta, Parma, 1576, fol. 27r.

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scientifically correct way. His careful selection of the initial drawing and its subsequent fully controlled manoeuvring in space allow him an art in which he can choose the essential moment representative of an idea. He can select the most rep­­ resentative still of a story, or a character. The similarity of the house in De prospectiva pingendi (illus. 83) to that in the Trial of the Crosses (see illus. 34), and of the tilted head in De prospectiva pingendi (see illus. 82) to one of the sleeping soldiers in the Resurrection (see illus. 46) is only a superficial sign of profound command and consistency. Thanks to the repeatable rigour of his rule, purposeful exceptions can be made. When he uses the same face for God and hubristic Chosroes in Arezzo (see illus. 30, 35). Or when in the Resurrection he paints the soldiers from below, but Christ face to face. Or when in the Vision of Constantine the emperor is painted larger than perspective would dictate so that the eye is led to him instead of his guards in the foreground (see illus. 31). Or when in the Monte­­­feltro Altarpiece he situates the figures further from the apse than appears at first glance, so that he can show more of the surrounding architecture while still making the figures stand out, inviting the viewer to identify the heavenly court with the painted church (see illus. 60). Piero’s perspective therefore bolsters painting as an art and objectifies it. Uncannily, it also subjectifies it. It is not only about what is seen in the painting, it is also about something not seen, but seeing: the observer. One of perspective’s parts is the eye, the spectator whose viewpoint determines the image. From this moment on, Western art has scientifically implicated the viewer. The twenty-first-century outcome of the development that Piero set in motion is virtual reality,

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in which art affects the spectator by hooking on to the viewer’s sense of space. Art has become a point of view. But it is the point of view of the artist. He is the one who sets it and thereby governs the perception of the beholder. This is how Piero’s Risen Christ could transfix the governors of fifteenthcentury Borgo, or Aldous Huxley in ‘The Best Picture’, just as much as current spectators. The artist has become a manipulator of reality, a creator, an artificer. Through geometrical perspective, Piero can actually build reality. He not only paints the objects and figures as they appear, he creates them in their space. To Dante geometry mattered because of its true, Godlike propositions. To Piero it described the world around us. He lowered the gaze from heaven to earth, in equal wonder. And he imitated and recreated it. In the act of an actual creation of his objects and figures, he imitated, maybe more than artists before him, God. That he gives due attention in particular to the construction of the human head, ties in with Renaissance infatuation with the fourth-century church father Lactantius, of whose wellknown Workmanship of God a more reliable text had been found in 1426 and printed in 1465, and who deals with the human body as crafted by God, as his greatest masterpiece.25 By codi­ fying a repeatable creative process in De prospectiva pingendi, Piero’s painter is no longer an artisan, but a Godlike artificer. Piero has invented the artist.

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ome six years before Piero’s birth, Cardinal Giovanni Dominici (c. 1356–1419) recognized the liberty of the artist with respect to his patron. In a treatise on the Magnificat, the theologian compares the humble, glorifying Virgin to a patron, and the painter to God. . . . if you want to glorify a painter who is excellent in his art and who paints a very beautiful image in your room, you have to allow him everything and you have to leave him free to work whenever and however it pleases him . . . you cannot put hand to his work, nor can let others do so, and you may not attribute any part of the painting to yourself or others, but only to the master. Thus you exalt him by the praise of every spectator and you make sure that nobody claims praise due to the painter.1 Dominici’s metaphor illustrates the autonomy that the artist enjoyed in the early Renaissance. In Piero’s case, the role of patron and artist even merged. He built and decorated his own palazzo.

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home At the edge of Borgo, the corner at the northwestern end of via Borgo Nuovo (now via Piero della Francesca) had been the site of the family home since the 1340s (illus. 84, 85).2 The plot consisted of houses built against either side of a thirteenth-century city wall cut by via Borgo Nuovo. In 1433 Piero’s father purchased adjacent property. When in 1465 a relative, the priest Luca di Meo Manaria, gave the family another neighbouring house, at the outer side of the old city wall, along the via delle Giunte (present via Niccolò Aggiunti), the various existing buildings were reconfigured and amalgamated around an inner courtyard-with-stairwell abutting the inner side of the old city wall (illus. 86).3 Piero, who headed his extended family now that his father had died, oversaw the palazzo’s expansion. The enlarged house dominated three streets. On via delle Giunte, where the most recent acquisition had been made, overlooking the church of San Francesco and the countryside beyond, he gave the palazzo a regular facade with tabernacle windows resting on a string course over a high ground floor. The central tabernacle windows illuminate a hall. Before the current, probably sixteenth-century, rusticated doorframe was put into place, a portal as wide as the tabernacle windows, now inside the house (illus. 87), may have originally formed the exterior entrance, much like in late fifteenth-century palaces at Urbino. Piero’s workshop may have been at this side of the building with its northern exposure, preferred by artists. At the east side of the palazzo, the facade grows deeper by a floor as the road plunges down. Carving a presence in the city

84 At the design of Piero della Francesca, the front facade of Palazzo Della Francesca in Sansepolcro, late 1460s. 85 At the design of Piero della Francesca, the rear facade of Palazzo Della Francesca, late 1460s.

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fabric, the building juts out into the via Borgo Nuovo, giving it a view down the street, where at the Canto dei Graziani the family business was located. At the southern side, the facade had a double loggia in correspondence with the inner courtyard, overlooking the Badia with the family tomb, and the town beyond. On the lower level were cellars, stables and shops. Above were the quarters for splendour and for 86 At the design of Piero della Francesca, the inner courtyard of the Palazzo Della Francesca, late 1460s.

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living. In 1550 Vasari praised the artist for leaving in Borgo ‘excellent property and some houses that he himself had built for his own use’. A fire later damaged the house and deprived it of its second floor, where the bedrooms of Piero and his brothers’ families would have been. The house was restored 87 At the design of Piero della Francesca, portal, possibly originally the exterior main entrance, pietra serena.

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towards the end of the sixteenth century by the then-owner, Luigi Graziani, who had his name chiselled in one of Piero’s tabernacle windows and probably added the corner rustication (see illus. 84).4 The facade along via delle Giunte, with its high groundfloor and first-floor windows regularly arranged over a string course, is like the stuccoed palazzi that Piero painted in the Flagellation (see illus. 37) and in the Trial of the Crosses (see illus. 34), even though there, before he experienced the elegance of the Urbino of Laurana and Francesco di Giorgio, the windows are arched and without frame. In his treatise on perspective he would draw a palazzo (see illus. 83) with rectangular window openings and a central rectangular door that seems a simplified version of his home. Piero’s painted architecture resembles details of his own palazzo such as its corbels, door and window frames, and ceilings. The Corinthian capitals are similar to those in the Augustinian and Montefeltro Altar­ pieces, and so is the anthemion and palmette frieze of the doorframe (see illus. 53–5, 60, 87). An inventory from the year 1500 gives an idea of the interior’s elegance, mentioning that there were paintings and that some of the furniture had wood inlay, including a lettuccio, or daybed, and cassoni.5 In his treatises Piero approached drawing with the architect’s three-dimensional mind. In old age, he put his design to built practice in Borgo, in his own house and beyond: in 1474 he advised on the ‘walls’, or structure of the Palazzo della Residenza; in 1480–83 he was one of the overseers of a now-lost but once-influential carved stone Pichi chapel of the Virgin in the Badia; in 1489 he evaluated construction of a chapel in Sant’Agostino; and in the last year of his life

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he assessed building activity at the Franciscan convent of San Leo della Strada beyond the city walls. He may have looked into building practicalities when in 1466 the family’s leather and woad shop moved from Borgo’s main square to the equally well-positioned street corner of the Canto dei Graziani.6 At Bastia, a couple of kilometres down the road leading from Borgo to Monterchi, the family had a country estate consisting of a palazzo and a tower.7 They shared it with families of note, including the Baglioni, who were instrumental in getting Piero a commission in their native Perugia (see illus. 52). It is probably the place still known as Le Bastie, which is a group of houses around a thirteenth-century tower. In 1467 Piero’s brothers extensively rebuilt it. They may have relied on his advice. During an outbreak of the plague in 1468 he certainly spent time in Bastia. On that occasion one of his workshop assistants may have painted the image of the plague saint Sebastian (Museo Civico, Sansepolcro) in the church of San Biagio in nearby Gricignano.

hercules Piero himself painted in the family palazzo in Borgo, after its reconfiguration. In the main hall, at the piano nobile, he painted the Hercules that is now in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (illus. 88).8 The fragmentary, detached fresco shows the life-size hero, young and beardless, nude except for the lion skin tied around his neck and loins. He holds his club, which protrudes beyond an opening with a stone frame. Behind him, depicted steeply from below, are the beams of a ceiling resting on corbels. Originally Hercules stood

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proud over a door in the corner of the hall. Light strikes the hero from the left, corresponding to the illumination of this position from the windows in the hall. Reflected light fondles the shadow-side of his limbs, where the contours are held in reserve so that the white plaster serves as light. In its corner position, high up on the wall, the frescoed space continued the real ceiling of the hall (illus. 90). The hall’s original wood ceiling would have been similar to the fifteenthcentury example surviving on the lower floor of the house (illus. 89). It consists of volute-shaped corbels carved with a pod-motive supporting big beams with applied planks along their tops. Resting on the beams are the smaller joists. The open spaces above the beams and between the joists are closed by planks with a barely visible decoration of white palmettes on a red ground. Resting on top of these joists and planks is a grid of strips of wood supporting the ceiling’s wood square boards (illus. 91). The strips have a frieze of alternating white and green triangles on their side edges and white and black leaves on a red ground on their downward-facing sides. All these elements recur in the ceiling that Piero painted behind Hercules. The ‘vanishing’ point of the ceiling’s perspective is on axis with the figure and much below it, aimed at the eye level of somebody entering the hall from the opposite door. In painting the trompe l’œil continuation of the ceiling, Piero chose the exact viewpoint from where the bottom of the foremost beam coincides with the first decorated strip atop the palmette board above the next beam. The degradation of the parallel beams is carefully scored in the plaster. By giving the fresco a viewpoint whereby the horizontals of the ceiling are visible,

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but (almost) not the verticals of the joists, Piero created visual ambiguity. The telescopic perspective is compar­able to the deep space behind the Virgin in the Montefeltro Altarpiece and the later Gherardi painting (see illus. 60 and 95). In the Hercules the tour de force of the di-sotto-in-su of the architecture creates an impermeable background behind the hero’s torso, 88 Piero della Francesca, Hercules, late 1470s, fresco, egg tempera and oil on plaster (detached from Palazzo Della Francesca).

89 The ceiling with 15th-century detailing at the ground floor of Palazzo Della Francesca compared to the ceiling depicted in Piero’s Hercules (illus. 88).

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underlining his strength. This is also because the figure of Hercules himself, carefully transferred by spolvero, is represented frontally. The fresco has a disparity of viewpoints similar to that of the Resurrection (see illus. 46). The Hercules may have been part of a series of illustrious men around the room.9 Significantly, Petrarch in the genre’s literary corollary, De viris illustribus (On Illustrious Men), opens the series of men who achieved fame through virtue and great deeds with the Greek hero. Piero could have known about painted cycles of famous men in the homes of the powerful, including the Medici in Florence, the Orsini in Rome and the Baglioni in Perugia. By choosing a similar programme for his own home, he placed himself on a par with them. Among Piero’s own clientele, Federico di Montefeltro commissioned a series from Justus of Ghent for his Urbino studiolo. Here, the backgrounds are continuous between each pair of portraits. In for example the Euclid and Vittorino da Feltre this consists of a ceiling with beams (illus. 92). Likewise, 90 Reconstruction of the Hercules (illus. 88) in the hall of Palazzo Della Francesca.

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the beams behind Piero’s Hercules may have continued behind other figures to its left. The short 5.9-metre-long walls of his hall in Borgo could have accommodated up to four figures in niches, the long 11-metre wall twice as many, and the outer wall with its three windows possibly four more. The archi­ tectural scheme could have been similar to the classicizing architecture with niches containing illustrious men and women that Castagno frescoed around 1449 in Villa Carducci near Florence. Castagno’s cycle – in its celebration of local heroes, including Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, and in its architectural organization – follows the recommendation by

91 Pictorial decoration of the 15th-century ceiling at the ground floor of Palazzo Della Francesca.

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Alberti in De re aedificatoria (On the Art of Building, ix.4) of 1443–52 that it is ‘most appropriate for a portico or a dining hall to be painted or sculpted with scenes of bravery by the citizens’ and he recom­mends ‘separate stone frames in which to place pictures’.10 According to Suetonius’ second-century Life of Augustus (xxxi.5), statues in niches distinguished the porticos of the forum of Augustus. Piero’s fictive architecture thus lays claim to Roman credentials. Castagno’s walls each have a central vanishing point. If Piero’s Hercules in its corner was part of a cycle, the vanishing point of the short wall would instead have been off-centre, in correspondence to the viewer entering the hall from the door opposite it. This was the taste of the 1470s. Bramante, who owed his knowledge of perspective to Piero, employed 92 Justus of Ghent, finished by ‘Petrus Hispanus’, Euclid and Vittorino da Feltre, c. 1473–8, oil on poplar.

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an off-centre vanishing point in his first commission. Painted in 1477 on the facade of the Palazzo del Podestà in Bergamo, Bramante’s series of philosophers has a viewing point geared to the square’s main, lateral entrance. Antique antecedents inform the architecture as much as the figure in the Hercules. It is unusual that the hero is beardless. There is the precedent of Nanni di Banco’s Hercules of about 1400 in the Porta della Mandorla of Florence Cathedral. But an antique prototype may have had greater actuality in Piero’s time. During the pontificate of Sixtus iv a gilt bronze Hercules was excavated at the Forum Boarium in Rome (illus. 93).11 The pope had it placed on a high pedestal in the courtyard of the Palazzo dei Conservatori, where he had assembled other antique bronzes, including the famous Thorn-puller, in a political move to return venerable Antiquity to the Roman people. The contrapposto, youth, extended club and high placement of the Lysippian bronze may have provided Piero with the inspiration to fresco Hercules in his own house. When the bronze was discovered it may have been identified with a statue from the altar that, according to Pliny (Natural History, xxxiv.16) and Livy (i.7), as reiterated in 1445 by Flavio Biondo (Rome Restored, lxxv), long before the foundation of Rome, King Evander had dedicated to Hercules in the cattle market, where Hercules would have slain the cattle-thief Cacus. As Ghiberti (Commentaries, i.vi.14) knew, Pliny mentioned the statue at the beginning of the history of art to show that ‘the art of statuary was familiar to Italy also and of long standing there’. Piero, by painting his own timid interpretation of the fierce antique bronze as though it were a polychrome statue in an architectural niche, would seem to reflect on the beginnings of art. By

93 Roman sculptor, Hercules, 2nd century bc, gilt bronze.

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taking his clue from statuary, he might also have reflected on disegno, defined in the words of Ghiberti as the ‘origin and base’ (i.i.1) of both sculpture and painting. Filarete in his treatise on architecture (xviii–xix) would recommend for the architect’s house depictions of famous predecessors. Vasari would decorate his Aretine and Florentine homes with painted allegories of 94 Donato Bramante (attr.), Argus, c. 1490, fresco on wall, Treasury of the Castello Sforzesco, Milan.

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the history of the visual arts. Maybe Hercules, as the beginning of the arts and the beginning of Petrarch’s walk of fame, was the start of the cycle, over the entrance to what may have been Piero’s room. Perhaps he was seconded by other heroes in classical guise that reflected on the history of the arts. The Della Francescas were not alone in enjoying Hercules. There were visitors. The Argus (illus. 94) that Bramante painted over the door of the treasury in the Castello Sforzesco in Milan around 1490 builds on its example. The semi-nude Argus pro­ trudes from a door opening with his right hand extending beyond the frame just as Piero’s Hercules. In the Argus a foreshortened ceiling with beams extends even further in depth. The commission of the Argus came from Ludovico Sforza, who, much taken by perspective, as duke of Milan would also hire Pacioli in 1496 to teach mathematics.12 The duke would have appreciated the invention made by Piero as patron: impact forged by the manipulation of perspective. the gher ardi madonna Like Piero, the nobility of Borgo started to embellish their homes with figurative painting. Piero probably did the Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Angels (illus. 95) now in the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, for a palazzo in Borgo.13 It has a provenance from ‘Gherardi Christofori’, possibly either Gherardo di Cristoforo Gherardi, or his son Cristoforo, rich merchants active in the local government in the second half of the fifteenth century.14 It is unlikely that it was the family’s public altarpiece. Although the Gherardi were patrons of the single altar in the chapel of San Leonardo

95 Piero della Francesca, Gherardi Madonna: Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Angels, late 1470s, egg tempera and oil transferred from poplar to fabric on panel.

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in the cloister of the Badia, Piero did not include either the titular saint of the chapel, or Borgo’s founder saints, Arcano and Egidio, whose relics were kept there. The Madonna would have been meant for a Gherardi palazzo instead. In 1583 the carpenter Berto Alberti reported framing a painting by Piero in a Gherardi palace in Borgo, probably because its old frame was outdated, or worn.15 A date in the late 1470s is indicated by the aesthetic of enamel smooth skin and small eyes that Piero also employs in the late Senigallia Madonna (see illus. 69). For the first time in his oeuvre, anticipating the figure of the Virgin in Piero’s last known work, the Adoration (see illus. 96), Christ in the Williamstown painting has red hair. The idea of the telescopic background of the Hercules (see illus. 88) was fresh in Piero’s mind. The designs for the rectangular formats of the Monte­ feltro Altarpiece and Senigallia Madonna were still on his drawing table. As in these late paintings, but never before, Piero situated both figures and viewer within the painted architecture. The Gherardi Madonna may be the first mediumscale panel painting with a rectangular format made in Borgo. It may have been its novel destination that gave Piero the liberty to adopt this format, at a time when painters such as Giovanni Bellini were also introducing quadri, paintings for the home that transcend devotional purpose and aim at a patron’s artistic pleasure. The Gherardi Madonna is indeed meant for close observation and devotion. Seated on a sella curulis raised on a two-stepped platform, the Virgin offers the Christ child sitting on her knee a pink rose as a sign of his future Passion. Nude, showing he is God incarnate, Christ accepts, both

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hands outstretched. At each corner of the platform an angel stands guard. While three of them look sternly at the omin­ ous tenderness between mother and child, the angel in the right foreground confronts the beholder, whom he invites to participate in the angelic adoration. Dressed in red, this angel might refer to the Passion, as well as to the theological virtue of Love. The angel in white could embody Faith, its shadow folding over the steps of the platform and ending right under Christ. The angel in green complements the triad as Hope. It has a wreath of pink roses in its hair, like the one the Virgin is proffering Christ, confiding that Salvation will come through the Passion. The fourth angel is in blue, the most celestial of colours, and Mary’s. The gathering is set against the corner of a colonnaded atrium. With its white pilasters and entablatures framing coloured marble slabs embellished by marble garlands, it is reminiscent of the palatial architecture of St Sigismund’s audience hall, Solomon’s palace and Pilate’s praetorium (see illus. 23, 28, 37). No built equivalents exist for the architecture that Piero painted, but he made eclectic use of antique precedent and of cutting-edge architectural theory and practice of his own day. He adheres to the Vitruvian canon when he puts a trabeation on his columns, where Luciano Laurana had deviated from it for Federico di Montefeltro in the courtyard of the Urbino palace, placing arches on columns. With a sense of varietas worthy of Leon Battista Alberti, Piero invents a corner solution by employing a pier instead of a column, which is moreover Corinthian, not Composite like the columns. Piero’s bipartite trabeation, with a cornice and frieze, but no canonical architrave, reflects experiments such as

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Maso di Bartolomeo’s portal of 1451–4 for San Domenico in Urbino. It might ultimately be inspired by the use of spolia in, for example, San Lorenzo fuori le mura in Rome, where door lintels and friezes are made to rest directly on the columns. The finely sculpted floral scrolls in the frieze are perfectly measured to make eight loops per intercolumniation. Piero’s architecture is not an imitation, but a recreation of Antiquity, the historical time of the Virgin and Child. Piero drew the outlines of his figures in charcoal, probably after transfer by spolvero from a pricked cartoon. He chose oil as a binder in the flesh parts, but the more precise tempera in the architecture. This he transferred with incisions, likely on the basis of a scale drawing of a larger section of the imag­ ined space. True to his own dictum that only perspective can determine the exact distances of things seen in a picture (De prospectiva pingendi, iii, prologue), Piero gives several clues to reconstruct the painted space.16 One full and one partial inter­columniation are visible of both the back and the side colonnade. The repeating scrolls in the frieze indicate that all intercolumniations have the same width as the one at the back, parallel to the picture plane. At the painting’s right edge, behind the angel in red, Piero left visible the base of the column of the side colonnade, to reveal the colonnade’s height. This column base also serves to establish a flight line that, together with the flight line of the entablature of the side colonnade, converges in the ‘vanishing point’. Piero marked it in the gesso along the painting’s vertical axis at the top of the Virgin’s lap. When extending the lower flightline through the column bases and also the ground line of the picture up to their intersection to the right of the painted surface and when

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considering that the degradation of the intercolumniations along the flightline must be as regular as that of the rectangular tiles in a foreshortened floor, the side colonnade can be calculated to extend for a total of six intercolumniations between the figures and the back colonnade. Piero gives two clues about the depth of the back colonnade. Behind the angel in white there is the base of a pilaster of the back wall and the shadow of the colonnade’s column with which it is paired, but which is just beyond the picture plane. At the right side of the painting, the perspective of the side colonnade results in a view whereby the top of the corner pier’s capital aligns with the bottom of the capital of the column in front of it, whereas the capital of the pilaster behind it is at a remove equivalent to double the height of a capital, indicating that the colonnade’s depth is twice that of an intercolumniation. As in the Montefeltro Altarpiece and Hercules, Piero treats his setting as if it were a slice of an interior view while using a telescopic perspective. In the Gherardi Madonna, the figures are close to the beholder, but at a dazzling remove from the back of the atrium against which they are silhouetted. The intersection of the diagonal of the perspective of the side colonnade with the painting’s vertical axis dictates a viewpoint at a distance roughly equivalent to the painting’s width. It forces the beholder in a close, kneeling and adoring position, the eyes only just above the Virgin’s knees. The correct eye level is underscored by the alignment of objects of equal height along it: the waistbands of the angels and the knobs topping the front and back arms of the sella curulis. Whereas in Piero’s polyptychs the sparseness of architectural circumscription of space made his figures monumentally present, but heavenly

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distant, in the Gherardi painting the space is accessible and the beholder implied in it, consonant with private viewing. Piero chose the perspective in such a way that its pro­ jection on the picture plane creates both ambiguity and meaningful juxtapositions in the composition. The Virgin’s head flanks a capital and its top touches the base of the entablature of the back colonnade, which in turn perfectly aligns with the top of the entablature of the back wall. It makes for a sturdy backdrop for the Virgin, much as the beams give strength to Piero’s Hercules, maybe because the Virgin is often compared to the edifice of the church. She is exactly along the vertical axis, although simple symmetry is avoided by the uneven fall of her veil and the poise of her body to support and counterbalance the weight of Christ on her left knee. Although positioned in the right part of the painting, the figure of Christ is anchored in the composition by placing him at the centre of the only full intercolumniation of the back colonnade. On a rectangular panel, Piero created a deep architectural space, which in its accessibility, verisimilitude and learned antique precedent is quite different from his polyptychs for Borgo (see illus. 3, 41, 53). He painted an image that in its spatial and temporal dimensions provides for slow looking, intellectual pastime and devotional exercise. It may have been the novelty of the type in town – a panel painting meant not for a high altar, but probably for a house – that allowed the artist to give free rein to humanist interests in Antiquity and perspective. It may also have provided the inspiration to do something similar for his own home.

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the ador ation In addition to the Hercules and its possible companions, there were also panel paintings in the Della Francesca palazzo.17 The Adoration of Christ (illus. 96), which is now in the National Gallery in London, was part of Piero’s heritage.18 It was inventoried in the family house in 1500, 1514 and 1515. In 1500 it was in the room then occupied by Sebastiano, son of Piero’s brother Marco, but formerly by Laudomia, widow of Sebastiano’s elder, deceased brother Francesco – indicating it may have been the master bedroom as its successive proprietors were related to the successive heirs down the male line. Some time before 1825, when the painting was put up for sale, it was in a chapel in the house.19 Slightly larger than the Gherardi Madonna (see illus. 95), its size is that of a small altarpiece such as Filippo Lippi’s Adoration (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin) for the chapel of the Palazzo Medici. Other, now-lost paintings by Piero in the house, including two images of the Annunciation, one on panel and one on fabric, and a St Jerome, were unfinished and may have been commissions left incomplete, but the inventories have no such qualification for the Adoration. The painting is much abraded, but not unfinished as also in the worn parts there are remnants of glazes and highlights.20 It seems to have been a painting that Piero made for his own home, for private delectation, and not a commission left incomplete in his workshop at his death. It is his last surviving work and may have been finished in the mid-1480s. His mastery of oil now allows him a more perfect mix of medium and blue pigment, even softer, enamel gradations over dark under-modelling in the flesh parts, and

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more luminous reflections in the background river than before. Taste has changed. In the Adoration Mary is more elongated and even more gracious than Piero’s earlier Virgins. A pearl necklace with ruby hanger echoes the V-shaped neckline that plunges to the high waist of her gown according to the fashion of the 1480s.21 This style is also worn by Lorenzo Torna­­buoni’s wife Giovanna degli Albizzi in the fresco of her and the Graces (Louvre, Paris) that Botticelli did in about 1486. The rusticity of the setting and of the shepherds, along with the spindly nude of the Christ child and the abundant fall of the drapery of Mary’s mantle, are reminiscent of the Adoration by the Nether­­ landish master Hugo van der Goes (Uffizi, Florence) that had arrived to great acclaim in Florence in 1483. Piero, now past seventy, seems to have gone back to Sant’Egidio, where in his youth he had been on the scaffolds in the main chapel when Domenico Veneziano did the frescos that now surrounded the altarpiece by the Netherlandish master. It was one more immersion in the Netherlandish realism, both refined and rustic, that he and his patrons had admired so much. This is what Piero painted for the enjoyment of himself, his family and their visitors. In front of a dilapidated shed with thatched roof on a small promontory, overlooking a river­ scape and a town reminiscent of Borgo in its Tiber valley, the Virgin is kneeling in adoration of her child on the ground. She has let her mantle slide from her shoulders to her waist and placed the nude Christ on the mantle spread on the ground before her. As she adores her newborn, he lifts his arms to her, just as St Bridget of Sweden (1303–1373) had famously seen in a vision. In attendance are two shepherds, dressed in short brown tunics and holding staffs. Like their predecessors

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in Alesso Baldovinetti’s Adoration of 1460–62 in the Santissima Annunziata in Florence, they appear to have just climbed the hill. Piero drew the anatomy of the shepherd on the left, with his intricate posture with one arm raised, before ‘clothing’ the figure. The old Joseph sits on the donkey’s leather saddle, as he has just brought the Virgin from Nazareth to Bethlehem and is ready to take her and Christ to Egypt, away from the wrath of King Herod, who knew the child would be the new ruler of the world. Joseph mirrors the pose of the Antique 96 Piero della Francesca, The Adoration of the Christ Child, mid-1480s, oil on poplar.

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bronze Thorn-puller (Musei Capitolini, Rome) that Piero could have seen installed by Sixtus iv, along with the bronze Hercules, on the Capitol in Rome. Whereas Bridget heard only the voice of angels, Piero dedicated half of his com­po­ sition to a consort of pearl-studded singers and more modestly bedecked instrumentalists. Lacking angelic wings and halos, they might simply be musicians, as in Luca della Robbia’s cantoria for Florence Cathedral. They are dressed in various shades of blue, which Piero’s family with its trade in the blue dye woad would have known to appreciate. The donkey brays while the angels sing. Not without a little irony, the mouths of animal and divine creatures align. All recognize the new ruler, including the ox who ‘knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib’ (Isaiah 1:3). There are two singers, a fiddle-player and two lute-players. Only after 1470 did lute duets appear, involving one luteplayer singing the soprano part and plucking with a plectrum a structural voice (bassus or tenor) on his instrument, while another accompanied him by playing with his fingers both the altus line and the structural voice not taken by the singer. This is also the music of the angels in Giovanni Bellini’s San Giobbe Altarpiece of about 1478–80. Using the fingers, instead of a plectrum, made it possible to play several strings at the same time and to perform polyphony on a single lute. Consequently, to expand the lute’s range, to the instrument’s four courses, or sets of strings, were added a fifth and eventually sixth course. As is indicated by their tuning keys, Piero’s lutes have six. They also have many frets, allowing for a more secure intonation when playing two or more notes simultaneously. The shape of the lute-bodies is based not as before on a

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design of two circle segments, but on two circle segments plus an elliptical segment for the upper part, as became common only in the 1470s. Piero took great pains to represent the lute of polyphony. He would have heard and seen them at the court of Federico di Montefeltro, who had lute-players living in his palace, possessed manuscripts of secular polyphony, and had the instrument represented in an intarsia in his studiolo. The composer Johannes Tinctoris in De inventione et usu musicae (On the Invention and Use of Music) of 1481–3 identifies the lute with the ancient lyre and writes that in his day it is used ‘at feasts, dances, and public and private entertainments’. Piero seems to have painted the harmony of polyphony as a festive re-enactment of the scientific music of Antiquity as realized by the musicians of his day.22 The Milanese composer Franchino Gaffurio in Theorica musicae, or The Theory of Music, of 1480 explained that music was a liberal art because its harmony was based on arithmetical proportions. Pacioli (On the Divine Proportion, i.3) compared music measuring time to perspective measuring distance. Lik­­ewise, Piero aimed to base the art of painting on the proportions of Euclid, aiming to emancipate it as a true science. In painting, Piero confronted figurative problems with mathematical commensuratio, much as the liberal art of Music did. The depiction of architecture, even in the guise of a humble shed, allowed him to do so. Uniquely in his oeuvre, in his Adorations, also in the tiny one in the bishop’s mantle of St Augustine (see illus. 54), the shed is placed askew to the picture plane. Piero had explained such foreshortening in the second book of De prospectiva pingendi (esp. ii.8; and see illus. 76), providing the upbeat to two-point perspective that would be

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codified by Jean Pélerin in De artificiali perspectiva (On Artificial Perspective) of 1505. Piero may have paired the reasoned angulation of the shed with the harmonious proportions of polyphonous music, designed and played to herald the coming of a new era with Christ and with the liberal arts of the Renaissance. Like the musicians, the magpie, proudly sitting on the corner of the shed’s roof, recognizes his newborn lord, as in the fourteenth-century chapterhouse decoration at Pomposa where magpies flank the sacrificial Lamb over the door, or in the thirteenth-century mosaics in the Florence Baptistery, where in the spandrels of the triumphal arch they witness the Eucharist during Mass. The magpie probably took its symbolism from the 76th epigram by Martial, quoted in medieval bestiaries and published in 1471 by philologist Giorgio Merula as part of the first comprehensive edition of the Epigrammata: A chattering magpie, I greet you as ‘lord’ with a clear voice. If you did not see me, you would say I am no bird. Piero’s magpie is thus part of the choir of creatures recognizing their Saviour, or ‘master’. In later times the magpie would be exposed as an ordinary scoundrel, as a thief of small glistening objects. Even nature recognizes its Saviour. Piero divided the hilltop into two distinct areas. The Virgin kneels on bare soil, whereas Christ, representing a new era, lies on a verdant patch. It is close to the budding and evergreen trees as symbols of rebirth in Piero’s Resurrection (see illus. 46). In the Adoration,

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rejuvenation in religion – and the arts – is present in the seedling at the foot of a cut tree at the end of the path leading to the river. In front of it, goldfinches allude to Christ’s salvific Passion, as according to legend the bird’s head was stained red when it extracted a thorn from Christ’s head. Since one shepherd points up directing the gaze of the other, the Adoration may have included an upper section, streng­ th­­ening its salvific iconography. Like Andrea della Robbia’s Adoration of about 1485 from Santa Chiara in Borgo (Museo Civico, Sansepolcro), it may have had an Annunciation in a 97 Bartolomeo Suardi, known as Bramantino, The Adoration of the Christ Child, c. 1485, egg tempera and oil on poplar.

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lunette. This may be identifiable with one of the Marian paintings listed in the inventories of Piero’s house. In the final decades of the fifteenth century, lunettes became a longlasting fashion for altarpieces in Borgo and Piero may well have been the instigator. Piero seems to have shown the Adoration to guests. Braman­ tino, who may have trained in Tuscany, interprets Piero’s Virgin and wing-less musicians in a bizarre mode in his Adoration of 1485 (illus. 97). The man with a wreath of oak leaves who rests on a trumpet has been interpreted as Virgil, the author of the Fourth Eclogue in which the Tiburtine Sibyl, whom Bramantino may have depicted at the right, prophesied the coming of a Golden Age. That theme of a fecund era succeeding a barren one is clear in the verdant and dry tree, as in the Piero. Slightly smaller than Piero’s picture, the Bramantino was probably a devotional panel for a Franciscan patron.23 Piero painted his Adoration for the devotional, artistic and humanist musings of himself and the cultured visitors to his home. It was a declaration of renewal, a new era, and the revolutionary persona of the artist that Piero had helped to create. In his family house, Piero was a gentleman, like his patrons. In it, he was artist and patron by design. He masterminded both architecture and painting. He recreated the past – classical and Christian – in the present, to make its historical time and truth palpable, and controllable. By juxtaposing the representation of architecture with the arts of sculpture and music, as well as with Antiquity, he established the art of painting as a liberal art. If not a science.

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hen on 22 April 1482 Piero stipulated a year’s rent of two rooms along with the use of the courtyard, orchard, well, wine and firewood in the house of a noblewoman in Rimini, he is given the title of master and of an ‘egregius vir’, a man unlike the rest of the herd. The act is witnessed by a local painter, a certain Gabriele di Stefano, and drafted in the house of Raniero Migliorati, a notary and humanist who owned the haunting Dead Christ with Four Angels (Museo della Città, Rimini) by Giovanni Bellini. Piero could have taken cues from its soft modelling and slowly muting hues in, for example, his late Adoration (see illus. 96). It seems that in Rimini Piero’s work of the 1450s for Sigismondo Malatesta was still held in such esteem that he was re-invited. Maybe he was summoned by Sigismondo’s son Roberto il Magnifico (c. 1441/2–1482).1 And maybe the captain’s un­­ expected death in the year of Piero’s arrival prevented the commission from materializing. death In his final decade Piero continued to dedicate his time to family and painting in Borgo. After finishing the Adoration,

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he may have worked on the panel paintings that are listed as unfinished in inventories of his house. He was able to work almost until his death. When he wrote the outline of his testament for a notary in 1487, his hand was still firm. It still was when in January 1492 he and his brothers Antonio and Marco divided the family property. In his last months the light in his eyes died.2 He needed a boy, Marco di Longaro, to lead him through Borgo.3 On 12 October 1492 the ‘famoso pictore’ was buried in the family tomb in the chapel of San Leonardo in the cloister of the Badia. His heirs – his brothers and their sons – overlooked it from the family house that Piero built. Along with a few small bequests to local shrines, a life spent painting and describing God’s creation would have ensured the passage of his soul to the beyond. fame Piero’s fame to contemporaries also went beyond. It was due to his artistic invention and to his invention of the artist. As a pupil who had apprenticed in and beyond his home town, his well-to-do mercantile and mathematic background and his multifaceted formation gave him a sui generis status among painters. An arduous traveller to centres of regeneration, he absorbed a variety of local styles and in turn inculcated artists such as the Lendinara in Ferrara, Bramante in Urbino, Luca Signorelli in Tuscany, and, beyond the grave, Leonardo in Milan. A rhetorician who directed his narrative like a stage director, he equalled the painter’s art to the poet’s. A master able to select the moment indicative also of the past and future of an action, he captured the attention of the most illuminated

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minds of his day. A citizen through merit and vocation, he participated in local politics and transfigured the face and identity of the city with his art and architecture. A devotee by argument, not submission, he offered his public the visual tools for reconstructing truth. A courtier, he engin­eered fame for a Renaissance prince by the intellect, innovation and sheer authorship of his works, in the process crafting his own fame. A fully fledged scientist not merely at the service of his painting, he was able to construct figures in space and thereby equalled his role to that of the Creator. A patron by his own design, Piero invented his status as an independent artist. In mathematics Piero’s fame was most durable. Less than a decade after his death, Pacioli called Piero among mathematicians the ‘monarch of our day in painting and architecture’ (On the Divine Proportion, i.19). In the next century Vasari judged him ‘the best geometrician of his time’. Piero remained the reference point for masters and admirers of perspective. They ranged from Leonardo, who may have helped steal De prospectiva pingendi from Urbino and knew about Piero’s copy of Archimedes in Borgo, 4 to the mathematician Egnazio Danti in the preface to Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola’s Le due regole della prospecttiva pratica (Two Rules of Practical Perspec­tive, 1583), the painter Joachim von Sandrart in his Academia nobilis­ simae artis pictoriae (Academy of the Most Noble Art of Painting, 1630), the antiquarian Filippo Buonarroti’s Osservazioni istoriche sopra alcuni medaglioni antichi (Historical Observations about Ancient Medallions, 1698) and Stendhal in L’Histoire de la peinture en Italie (History of Painting in Italy, 1817). In painting Piero’s fame soon dwindled. In providing the illustrations for Pacioli’s On the Divine Proportion, Leonardo had

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actively engaged with Piero’s work also in a representational mode. Vasari in his autobiography had mentioned training his hand by drawing the best frescos in the churches of Arezzo, presumably including Piero’s. To Piero, perspective had been the distinctive factor that turned painting into a true science. It meant emancipation for his art and its practitioners, also those that followed him. To Piero, it also meant something deeper. Only through perspective could relative distances within the seen world be gauged and could space and time be constructed. Art without perspective could receive praise, but it was false judgement, falso giuditio. Perspective was the way to gauge the truth. Piero often teased true judgement out of his spectators by playing on their doubts. He presented seeming ambiguity in his pictures that always resolves into a ‘true’ comprehension of perspective and space, and manipulates meaning. Piero’s truthfulness to nature, God’s creation, is an argued search for artistic invention and spiritual truth. A younger generation found it in design and colour. With Leonardo and Vasari, the emphasis of artists shifted from perspective to colour and design, two of the three components of the art of painting such as Piero perceived it, but over which he had let the third, perspective, prevail. For the next three centuries, this consigned Piero’s artistic importance to the back burner. fortune Changing interests and taste notwithstanding, many of Piero’s works were lovingly preserved over the following centuries. Restorations of the Legend of the True Cross in Arezzo (see

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illus. 24–36) were called for and put into practice in 1486–7 by Giovanni da Piamonte, in 1553 by Benedetto Spadari, in 1858 by Gaetano Bianchi, in 1901–11 by Umberto Tavanti, in 1915 by Domenico Fiscali, in 1960–64 by Leonetto Tintori, and in 1985–2000 by Umberto Senserini for the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Florence. In the sixteenth century the Gherardi Madonna (see illus. 95) was reframed as a work of ‘mastro Pietro di la Francesca’, in 1624 panels of the Augustinian Altarpiece (see illus. 53) changed hands as works by Piero ‘principale delli antichi’, between 1639 and 1649 the Binoni brothers made a gilt baroque frame for the Misericordia Altarpiece (see illus. 41), and in 1717 the Flagellation (see illus. 37) was reframed as a notable, or ‘riguardevole’ work.5 In 1792 Abbot Luigi Lanzi included Piero in a web of precedents and followers in the first modern history of Italian painting, which ramified much beyond Vasari’s story and was the start of historical research and local pride. About 1830 the local neoclassical painter Vincenzo Chialli made paintings of Piero teaching and of his reception at the Vatican for Piero’s descendant Giuseppe Franceschi Marini in the Palazzo Monti, Borgo Sansepolcro.6 Chialli’s pupil, the caricaturist Angiolo Tricca, engraved some of Piero’s paintings for Giovanni Rosini’s Storia della pittura italiana (History of Painting in Italy, 1839–47) and about 1876 painted Piero Dictating the Rules of Geometry to Luca Pacioli (Museo Civico, Sansepolcro). Shortly after the sale of the Baptism (see illus. 2) and the Hercules (see illus. 88), in 1859 and 1903 respectively, copies were put in place in Sansepolcro (now in the Badia and the Aboca Museum). Meanwhile, collectors, artists and connoisseurs in Germany, England and France established a taste for Piero and exported

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him by way of drawings, descriptions or actual fact.7 In the 1830s Johann Anton Ramboux, in his search to provide his German contemporaries with examples of a more Christian art, included drawings of Piero’s Legend of the True Cross and Flagellation in his collection at Cologne. In 1837 the Gherardi Madonna was the first Piero to be bought by a foreign collector, the British geologist Sir Walter Calverley Trevelyan. In 1855 Austen Henry Layard, the discoverer of Nineveh, made tracings of details of the Legend of the True Cross (Victoria and Albert Museum, London) and praised Piero’s monumentality and mastery of the fresco medium. Like him, Sir Charles Eastlake, director of the National Gallery and a painter, travelled to Italy and admired Piero, comparing notes on his light and tonality with the connoisseur Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle and acquiring the Baptism and the Archangel Michael (see illus. 55) for the National Gallery. In 1872–3 the copyist Charles Antoine Loyeux made coloured tracings of scenes from the Arezzo cycle (see illus. 34–5) at the behest of Charles Blanc, director of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, who meant them as study material for the academicians. In 1873 they were placed in the school’s chapel. Here the French muralist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes could have reacquainted himself with the master whose work he had already seen during a trip to Italy in the mid-1840s. In his rustic Le Repos of 1863 for the Musée de Picardie in Amiens he grafted space and figures on Piero’s Death of Adam (see illus. 27). Rediscovery did not come without reserve. Cavalcaselle, with J. A. Crowe, in 1858–61 found Piero wanting for his ‘Moorish’ and ‘vulgar’ facial types. Jacob Burckhardt in his 1860 history of the civilization of the Renaissance found him

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‘naïve’. Bernard Berenson in 1897 discerned an ‘impersonality’ in Piero that he found also in archaic Greek sculpture. In 1901, however, painter and critic Roger Fry, soon-to-be apostle of post-Impressionism and the Bloomsbury group, dedicated a couple of lectures to Piero in Cambridge admiring him for his innovative technique and as a pure painter of form and colour, whose works, ‘with no will to be other than scientific . . . appear to us charged with poetry and romance’.8 Fry saw Piero as a modern and in 1910, while preparing the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, declared him a precursor of Cézanne and in the 1920s a forerunner of the motionlessness of Seurat. In light of the early twentieth-century sense for Piero’s purity of form, the earlier epithets of impersonality and archaism became something positive for Cubism that was also rooted in archaic and tribal cultures. To the Italian painter Gino Severini, when the chaos of the Great War had made him abandon his militant Futurism for a neo-Renaissance Cubist phase in which he hoped to find order, Piero’s sciencepainting was his beacon. He copied Piero’s method for foreshortening a human head in his treatise Du Cubisme au classicisme (1921). The new love for Piero’s peaceful humanity found its most poetic advocate in art historian Roberto Longhi. Based on an essay of 1914, his influential monograph appeared in 1927. Piero is the solemn, silent, unemotional painter of a rustic Tuscany kissed to life by the primordial light and sense of space developed in Renaissance Florence.9 Longhi’s focus on poetic detail and his frequent cropping of images, all in black-and-white, affected the close-up, distilled and formal way in which Giorgio Morandi and Giorgio de Chirico

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looked at Piero’s work in their still-lifes and landscapes. The visual fragmentation, soon followed by myopic iconographic studies, informed Salvador Dalí’s Madonna of Port Lligat of 1949, now in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where exclusive focus on the Montefeltro Altarpiece’s shell and egg have turned the Virgin into a faceted creature hovering over the sea. Andy Warhol took it to a point of mass culture and ridicule in a screenprint of 1984, which isolates the semi-dome of the apse with the ostrich egg of the Montefeltro Altarpiece and carries the title Details of Renaissance Paintings (Piero della Francesca, Madonna del Duca da Montefeltro, c. 1472). By then Piero was beloved by the public at large. In the Second World War Sansepolcro had been saved because of Aldous Huxley’s essay ‘The Best Picture’, as he lauded Piero’s Resurrection (see illus. 46). In 1954 Berenson could write, with a nod to his rival Longhi, that ‘The mass admiration for Piero della Francesca, which started a quarter of a century ago, took me by surprise.’ Kenneth Clark published his ‘calm and majestic’ Piero della Francesca in 1969 and the 1992 bbc documentary The Piero Trail endeared the public at large to the artist, ‘a bit of a gent’. In 1991 John Pope-Hennessy had described this well-trodden trail that tourists were wearing out from Arezzo, via Monterchi and Sansepolcro to Urbino. Piero also found his way to the movies. The neo-realist film director Pier Paolo Pasolini writes about taking inspiration from Piero for Il vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to Matthew) of 1964. The kalimavkia of his high priests are taken from Piero’s Arezzo cycle. More significantly, the film’s Annunciation consists of a long, black-and-white shot with no human voice but only swallows shrieking in the

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sky, with the Virgin impersonated by a rustic girl realizing she will be mother of God. The rusticity and black-andwhiteness of the scene is grafted on Longhi’s Piero, while its silence and minimal movement echoes Berenson’s verdict on Piero as ineloquent. Yet Pasolini went further. A narrator like Piero, he presents the essential moment indicative also of what preceded and will follow. Pasolini understood that Piero’s art is the still that captures the essence of a story. Modernism rebelled against the Renaissance because it was associated with an idea of Hegelian progression and with the realism of the nineteenth century. It wanted to do without such shackles. Revisiting the onset of the Renaissance results in an altogether different picture and explains why Piero may have been an exception for modernists. The early Renaissance was an era that broke as radically with the past as Modernism did. Its time was marked by great awareness of change, rebirth and fathomable reality, not yet necessarily of progression, as codified by Vasari. The radical Renaissance of Piero, a movement of historical awareness for time’s sake, was of renewed actuality to the very modernists of the twentieth century. Maybe it is as relevant today, now that alternative historical narratives are sought and physics has returned the quantity of time to the humanities, as the only measure humans possess to scan life, and history. Piero’s appeal re-emerges, because he is a luminous example of how artists invent, their work and themselves.

references

For documents concerning Piero’s life and work that are cited in this book by giving their full date, James R. Banker, Documenti fondamentali per la conoscenza della vita e dell’arte di Piero della Francesca (Selci-Lama, 2013). English-language translations of the Bible come from the Douay– Rheims version, of classical texts from the Loeb edition, and of Leon Battista Alberti’s Della pittura (1435–6) from On Painting and On Sculpture, ed. and trans. Cecil Grayson (London, 1972). Unless otherwise stated, other translations are my own.

Introduction 1 Zbigniew Herbert, Barbarian in the Garden, trans. Michael March and Jarosław Anders [1962] (San Diego, ca, 1985), p. 162. 2 Piero della Francesca, De prospectiva pingendi, i.30 and iii, ‘Proemio’. Leon Battista Alberti, Della pittura (1435–6), ‘A Filippo Brunelleschi’. Flavio Biondo, Historiarum ab inclinatione Romanorum imperii decades (1439–53), first published 1483. 3 Aristotle, Physics, iv.10–12; Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time, trans. Erica Segre and Simon Carnell (London, 2018). Keith Moxey, Visual Time: The Image in History (Durham, nc, and London, 2013). 4 Roberto Bellucci and Cecilia Frosinini, ‘Piero della Francesca’s Process: Panel Painting Technique’, in Painting Techniques: History, Materials and Studio Practice, ed. Ashok Roy and Perry Smith (London, 1998), pp. 89–93. 5 On Piero’s alleged elusiveness, see for example Carlo Ginzburg, The Enigma of Piero (London and New York, 2000); Silvia Ronchey,

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L’enigma di Piero (Milan, 2006). For complex readings of his iconographies, see Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, Piero della Francesca (London, 2002). On his supposed silence, see Bernard Berenson, The Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance (London, 1897), pp. 68–75 and Piero della Francesca or the Ineloquent in Art (London, 1954).

1 Pupil 1 Gian Paolo G. Scharf, Cronisti borghesi del Quattrocento (Selci-Lama, 2011), pp. 30–31, 145–6; Mario Sensi, ‘Arcano e Gilio, santi pellegrini fondatori di Sansepolcro’, in Vie di pellegrinaggio medievale attraverso l’Alta Valle del Tevere, ed. Enzo Mattesini (Sansepolcro, 1998), pp. 17–58. 2 For Piero’s birth date, family and home town, see James R. Banker, The Culture of San Sepolcro during the Youth of Piero della Francesca (Ann Arbor, mi, 2003). 3 For Antonio d’Anghiari, of whose oeuvre I exclude the warrior figures, but not the Crucifixion in the Lambardi Chapel in San Francesco, Arezzo, see Frank Dabell, ‘Antonio d’Anghiari e gli inizi di Piero della Francesca’, Paragone, 417 (1984), pp. 73–94; Andrea De Marchi, ‘Antonio d’Anghiari e gli inizi di Piero’, in Arte in terra d’Arezzo: il Quattrocento, ed. Liletta Fornasari, Giancarlo Gentilini and Alessandra Giannotti (Florence, 2008), pp. 99–106. 4 The Virgin and Child (Newark, de, Alana Collection) with a trompe l’œil intarsia on its reverse is often thought to be Piero’s earliest work. Its condition makes it hard to judge, but its use of incisions, incorrect perspective and vivid interaction between mother and child are unlike Piero. 5 Andrea De Marchi, ‘Matteo di Giovanni ai suoi esordi e il politico di San Giovanni in Val d’Afra’, in Matteo di Giovanni e la pala d’altare nel senese e nell’aretino: 1450–1500, ed. Davide Gasparotto and Serena Magnani (Montepulciano, 2002), pp. 57–75; Banker, The Culture of San Sepolcro, pp. 225–36, 253–6; Machtelt Israëls, ‘Piero della Francesca’s Panel Paintings for Borgo San Sepolcro’, in Nathaniel Silver, Piero della Francesca in America: From Sansepolcro to the East Coast, exh. cat., Frick Collection, New York (2013), pp. 46–9. An extensive, yet far-fetched interpretation is Marilyn Aronberg

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References

Lavin, Piero della Francesca’s ‘Baptism of Christ’ (New Haven, ct, and London, 1981). John Shearman, ‘Refraction and Reflection’, in Piero della Francesca and His Legacy, ed. Marilyn Aronberg Lavin (Washington, dc, 1995), pp. 212–21. Roberto Bellucci and Cecilia Frosinini, ‘Ipotesi sul metodo di restituzione dei disegni preparatori di Piero della Francesca: il caso dei ritratti di Federico da Montefeltro’, in La pala di San Bernardino di Piero della Francesca: nuovi studi oltre il restauro, ed. Emanuela Daffra and Filippo Trevisani (Florence, 1997), pp. 177–8. Scott Nethersole, ‘Landscapes of Piero della Francesca’, lecture (Frick Collection, New York, 1 May 2013), www.frick.org/interact/ nethersole, accessed 9 June 2019. For Gentile and Pisanello at the Lateran, see Andrea De Marchi, ‘Gentile da Fabriano et Pisanello à Saint-Jean de Latran’, in Pisanello, ed. Dominique Cordellier and Bernadette Py (Paris, 1998), pp. 161–213, esp. 176–9; Bernhard Degenhart et al., Corpus der italienischen Zeichnungen, 1300–1450, iii/2, Verona: Pisanello und seine Werkstatt (Munich, 2004), pp. 443–8. Carl Brandon Strehlke and Mark Tucker, ‘The Santa Maria Maggiore Altarpiece’, in The Panel Paintings of Masolino and Masaccio: The Role of Technique, ed. Carl Brandon Strehlke with Cecilia Frosinini (Milan, 2002), pp. 115–23. On young Domenico in Rome, see Hellmut Wohl, The Paintings of Domenico Veneziano (Oxford, 1980), pp. 6–12. Ideas that Piero apprenticed with Domenico have to be revised now that we know that Piero was born around 1412 and not in 1415–16 or 1419. Domenico was Piero’s fellow pupil, not his master. James R. Banker, ‘The Program for the Sassetta Altarpiece in the Church of San Francesco in Borgo San Sepolcro’, I Tatti Studies, iv (1991), pp. 17–21, 48–50 doc. 2; Machtelt Israëls, ‘Polyptychs without Painting: Sassetta, Piero della Francesca, and the Rejection of Unpainted Altarpieces’, in Sassetta: The Borgo San Sepolcro Altarpiece, ed. Machtelt Israëls (Florence and Leiden, 2009), pp. 243–53; Andrea De Marchi, ‘Il polittico di Sassetta per San Francesco a Sansepolcro perlustrato’, Prospettiva, 139–40 (2010), pp. 115–30 (pp. 118–22).

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13 Machtelt Israëls, ‘New Documents for Sassetta and Sano di Pietro at the Porta Romana, Siena’, Burlington Magazine, cxl (1998), pp. 436–44. At the National Gallery in London Rachel Billinge and Britta New are investigating Piero’s use of cartoons in the Baptism.

2 Traveller 1 See Silvia Ronchey, ‘Piero, Pisanello e i bizantini al concilio di Ferrara–Firenze’, in Piero della Francesca e le corti italiane, ed. Carlo Bertelli and Antonio Paolucci, exh. cat., Museo Statale d’Arte Medievale e Moderna, Arezzo (Milan, 2007), pp. 13–19, who, however, shares the common opinion that it was only in Florence that Piero saw the Council-goers. 2 Vespasiano da Bisticci, Le vite, ed. Aulo Greco (Florence, 1970–76), vol. i, p. 19; Francesca Chieli, La grecità antica e bizantina nell’opera di Piero della Francesca (Florence, 1993). 3 On the Florence of Piero’s visits, see Alessandro Angelini, Piero della Francesca (Milan, 2014), pp. 48–89, putting (too) much emphasis on the artist’s Florentine formation. 4 Carmen C. Bambach, Drawing and Painting in the Italian Renaissance Workshop: Theory and Practice, 1300–1600 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 199. 5 Francesco Caglioti, ‘Nouveautés sur la Bataille de San Romano de Paolo Uccello’, Revue du Louvre, li (2001), pp. 37–54. 6 Filippo Camerota, ‘Piero della Francesca: il disegno’, in Piero della Francesca: la seduzione della prospettiva, ed. Filippo Camerota and Francesco P. Di Teodoro, exh. cat., Museo Civico, Sansepolcro (Venice, 2018), pp. 33–4. 7 Laura Cavazzini and Aldo Galli, ‘Scultori a Ferrara al tempo di Nicolò iii’, in Crocevia estense: contributi per la storia della scultura a Ferrara nel xv secolo, ed. Giancarlo Gentilini and Lucio Scardino (Ferrara, 2007), pp. 7–88. 8 On the early fifteenth-century Este court, see Michael Baxandall, ‘A Dialogue on Art from the Court of Leonello d’Este: Angelo Decembrio’s De Politia Litteraria Pars lxviii’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xxvi (1963), pp. 304–26; Werner L. Gundersheimer, Ferrara: The Style of a Renaissance Despotism (Princeton, nj, 1973).

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9 Jan Lauts, ‘Zu Piero dei Franceschis verlorenen Fresken in Ferrara’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, x (1941–2), pp. 67–72; Jan Lauts, ‘A Note on Piero della Francesca’s Lost Ferrara Frescoes’, Burlington Magazine, xcv (1953), pp. 166–7. On the subject-matter of the murals, see Eugenio Battisti, Piero della Francesca (Milan, 1971), vol. i, pp. 44–9; Ronald Lightbown, Piero della Francesca (London, 1992), pp. 71–2. 10 Angelo Decembrio, De politia literaria (Basel, 1562), p. 92, as cited by Michael Baxandall, review of Giovanni Paccagnini and Jane Carroll, Pisanello (London, 1973), Art Bulletin, lvii (1975), pp. 130–31. 11 Luke Syson and Dillian Gordon, Pisanello: Painter to the Renaissance Court, exh. cat., National Gallery, London (2001), pp. 48–57. For the Lancelot chamber, see Le muse e il principe: arte di corte nel Rinascimento Padano. Saggi, exh. cat., Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan (Modena, 1991), pp. 190–91. 12 Carlo Bertelli, ‘Piero da Perugia a Roma’, in Piero, ed. Bertelli and Paolucci, pp. 34–5. 13 Lightbown, Piero, pp. 71–2. 14 Baxandall, ‘A Dialogue’, esp. pp. 318–21. 15 Margrit Lisner, Holzkruzifixe in Florenz und in der Toskana von der Zeit um 1300 bis zum frühen Cinquecento (Munich, 1970), p. 56. 16 Roberto Bellucci and Cecilia Frosinini, ‘La pianificazione dell’opera e il disegno preparatorio nel Polittico della Misericordia’, in Ripensando Piero della Francesca e il Polittico della Misericordia di Sansepolcro, ed. Mariangela Betti, Cecilia Frosinini and Paola Refice (Florence, 2010), pp. 199–200. 17 Mauro Lucco, ‘Burgundian Art for Italian Courts: Milan, Ferrara, Urbino’, in Till-Holger Borchert, The Age of Van Eyck: The Mediterranean World and Early Netherlandish Painting, 1430–1530 (Ghent and Amsterdam, 2002), pp. 109–12. 18 Andrea Di Lorenzo, ‘Le Muse di Belfiore nelle descrizioni degli umanisti’, in Le muse e il principe, Saggi, pp. 326–7. 19 Maria Teresa Sambin de Norcen, Le ville di Leonello d’Este: Ferrara e le sue campagne agli albori dell’età moderna (Venice, 2012), pp. 133, 208 doc. 38. 20 Giuseppe Antenore Scalabrini, Memorie istoriche delle chiese di Ferrara e de’ suoi borghi (Ferrara, 1773), p. 331; Mario Marzola, Per la storia della chiesa ferrarese nel secolo xvi (1497–1590) (Turin, 1976), vol. i, p. 371.

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21 Andrea Di Lorenzo, ‘Documents in the Florentine Archives’, in From Filippo Lippi to Piero della Francesca: Fra Carnevale and the Making of a Renaissance Master, ed. Keith Christiansen, exh. cat., Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (New Haven, ct, 2005), pp. 291–2, 294. 22 Maria Rosaria Valazzi, ‘Piero scomparso a Pesaro e Ancona’, in Piero e Urbino, Piero e le corti rinascimentali, ed. Paolo Dal Poggetto, exh. cat., Palazzo Ducale, Urbino (Venice, 1992), pp. 428–30. 23 On Piero (not) at Loreto, see Tom Henry, The Life and Art of Luca Signorelli (New Haven, ct, and London, 2012), p. 342 note 173. Only as of 1471 was a church constructed around the tiny foundation-less chapel at Loreto. Floriano Grimaldi, La chiesa di Santa Maria di Loreto nei documenti dei secoli xii–xv (Ancona, 1984), pp. 17–78. 24 Battisti, Piero, vol. ii, p. 247; Frank Dabell, ‘Piero della Francesca: Arezzo, Monterchi and Sansepolcro’, Burlington Magazine, cxlix (2007), p. 580. 25 Antonello da Messina, ed. Ferdinando Bologna and Federico De Melis, exh. cat., Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Rovereto (Milan, 2013), pp. 16–18. 26 On Pisanello in Naples, see Joanna Woods-Marsden, ‘Art and Political Identity in Fifteenth-century Naples: Pisanello, Cristoforo di Geremia and King Alfonso’s Imperial Fantasies’, in Art and Politics in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Italy, 1250–1500, ed. Charles M. Rosenberg (Notre Dame, in, and London, 1990), pp. 11–37. 27 On the Polyhymnia, the studiolo at Belfiore in Ferrara, and its programme by Guarino, see Le muse e il principe, Saggi, part iii; Andrea Bacchi, in Le muse e il principe, Catalogo, pp. 408–16 cat. 97 (as possibly early Francesco del Cossa); Di Lorenzo, ‘Le Muse’, pp. 322–3. For Piero’s inculcation of the artist of the Polyhymnia, see Caroline Elam and Carl Brandon Strehlke, ‘Le Muse e il Principe: Milan, Museo Poldi Pezzoli’, Burlington Magazine, cxxxiii (1991), p. 862. 28 For Piero and the family of his patron in Ancona, see Matteo Mazzalupi, ‘“Uno se parte dal Borgo . . . e va ad Ancona”: Piero della Francesca nel 1450’, Nuovi studi, xii (2006), pp. 37–54.

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29 Anthony F. D’Elia, Pagan Virtue in a Christian World: Sigismondo Malatesta and the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge, ma, and London, 2016). 30 Charles Hope, ‘The Early History of the Tempio Malatestiano’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, lv (1992), pp. 51–154; Antonio Paolucci, ed., Il Tempio Malatestiano a Rimini (Modena, 2010), esp. the essay by Marco Folin. 31 For example Pier Giorgio Pasini, Piero e i Malatesti: l’attività di Piero della Francesca per le corti romagnole (Milan, 1992), pp. 87–90. 32 Michel Laclotte, ‘Il ritratto di Sigismondo Malatesta di Piero della Francesca’, in Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, Piero della Francesca a Rimini: l’affresco nel Tempio Malatestiano (Bologna, 1984), p. 88, for a double portrait by Gentile with black background. 33 Ibid., pp. 75–102. 34 Giorgio Sangiorgi, ‘Reliquie tessili rinvenute nella tomba di Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta in Rimini’, Rassegna d’arte antica e moderna, xxi (1921), pp. 93–100; Mechthild Flury-Lemberg, Textile Conservation and Research: A Documentation of the Textile Department on the Occasion of the Twentieth Anniversary of the Abegg Foundation (Bern, 1988), pp. 440–41, 454–7, 470–71. 35 Cetty Muscolino and Ferruccio Canali, eds, Il tempio della meraviglia: gli interventi di restauro al Tempio Malatestiano per il Giubileo (1990–2000) (Florence, 2007), pp. 278–83. 36 For the embalmed body of Roberto Novello Malatesta, see Oreste Delucca, ‘Cronologia’, in Pier Giorgio Pasini, Il Tempio Malatestiano: splendore cortese e classicismo umanistico (Milan, 2000), p. 196. 37 Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, ‘Piero della Francesca’s Fresco of Sigis­ mondo Pandolfo Malatesta before St Sigismund: θeωi aθanatωi kai thi πoλei’, Art Bulletin, xvi (1974), pp. 345–74; Antonio Paolucci, in Il Tempio, ed. Paolucci, pp. 220–24. For the fresco’s technique, condition and original placement on wall and vault, see Ferruccio Canali, ‘Storiografia, ricerche e restauri nel Tempio Malatestiano di Rimini’, Studi romagnoli, li (2000), pp. 689–710. 38 Monaldo Leopardi, Annali di Recanati, ed. Romeo Vuoli (Varese, 1945), vol. i, p. 208; ‘La santa casa di Loreto: discussioni istoriche e critiche inedite del conte Monaldo Leopardi da Recanati’, Il Cattolico: giornale religioso-letterario, xv (1840), pp. 128–9; Floriano Grimaldi, La historia della chiesa di Santa Maria de Loreto (Loreto, 1993), pp. 241–2, 412.

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39 Hugo van der Velden, The Donor’s Image: Gerard Loyet and the Votive Portraits of Charles the Bold (Turnhout, 2000), respectively pp. 282–4, also for wax effigies of dogs. 40 Battisti, Piero, vol. i, p. 70. For hunting as a worthy occupation for princes and noblemen, see Leon Battista Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence, trans. Renée Neu Watkins (Columbia, sc, 1969), p. 258. 41 For Isotta degli Atti’s inventory of the citadel of 1468, see Angelo Turchini, ‘Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta e Castel Sismondo’, in Castel Sismondo e Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta (Rimini, 1985), p. 259. 42 For general considerations on style as a function of artistic mobility in sixteenth-century theory, see David Young Kim, The Traveling Artist in the Italian Renaissance: Geography, Mobility, and Style (New Haven, ct, and London, 2014). 43 On Piero’s rusticity, see Roberto Longhi, Piero della Francesca [1927] (Florence, 1963), esp. pp. 17–19, 41.

3 Rhetorician 1 For archival, architectonic and functional documentation of the chapel and its restorations, see Giuseppe Centauro, Dipinti murali di Piero della Francesca: la basilica di S. Francesco ad Arezzo. Indagini su sette secoli (Milan, 1990). 2 Ronald Lightbown, Piero della Francesca (London, 1992), p. 123. 3 Barbara Baert, A Heritage of Holy Wood: The Legend of the True Cross in Text and Image (Leiden and Boston, ma, 2004), pp. 350–405. 4 For the choice of the murals’ theme in relation to Bernardino, see Alessandro Angelini, Piero della Francesca (Milan, 2014), pp. 152–4, citing for the Bacci and Bernardino, Pietro Farulli, Annali ovvero notizie istoriche dell’antica, nobile, e valorosa città di Arezzo in Toscana . . . (Foligno, 1717), p. 95. For Arezzo and Bernardino, see also Marina Montesano, ‘Supra acqua et supra ad vento’: ‘superstizioni’, ‘maleficia’ e ‘incantamenta’ nei predicatori francescani osservanti (Italia, sec. xv) (Rome, 1999), pp. 172–80; Lauretta Carbone, ‘Echi della predicazione bernardiniana in un processo aretino contro un negromante . . .’, Bullettino senese di storia patria, xciii (2006),

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pp. 60–64. The ‘Deliberazioni’ of 1425 are missing in the Archivio di Stato di Arezzo. Much has been made of how the iconography and in particular the inclusion of Constantinian scenes, absent in Gaddi’s frescos, might be connected to the crusading fervour that exploded in 1453 when the Ottoman sultan Mehmed ii took Constantinople. The peculiar iconography of Bicci’s Last Judgment indicates, however, that the trigger for the programmatic choice in Arezzo pre-dated that ominous year. On Piero’s fresco technique, see Mauro Matteini, Arcangelo Moles and Maurizio Seracini, ‘Indagini diagnostiche’, in Un progetto per Piero della Francesca: indagini diagnostico-conoscitive per la conservazione della ‘Leggenda della Vera Croce’ e della ‘Madonna del Parto’ (Florence, 1989), pp. 232–55. Some scholars believe that Piero used scaffolding skirting one wall at a time and that he did the right wall first, interrupted the work to go to the Vatican, and returned to do the left wall. That conclusion is neither borne out by the pontate and giornate, nor by the artist’s consistent style. Breathtaking reproductions of the murals before the last restoration are in Jacqueline and Maurice Guillaud, Piero della Francesca: Poète de la forme. Les Fresques de San Francesco d’Arezzo (Paris and New York, 1988), and after restoration in Anna Maria Maetzke and Carlo Bertelli, eds, Piero della Francesca: The Legend of the True Cross in the Church of San Francesco in Arezzo (Milan, 2001). Jeryldene M. Wood, ‘Piero’s Legend of the True Cross and the Friars of San Francesco’, in The Cambridge Companion to Piero della Francesca, ed. Jeryldene M. Wood (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 51–65. On dress and Piero’s iconographic use of it, see Jane Bridgeman, ‘“Troppo belli e troppo eccellenti”: Observations on Dress in the Work of Piero della Francesca’, in The Cambridge Companion, ed. Wood, pp. 76–90. Mark J. Zucker, ‘Parri Spinelli’s Lost Annunciation to the Virgin and Other Aretine Annunciations of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’, Art Bulletin, lvii (1975), pp. 193–5. Andrea Babuin, ‘Later Byzantine Arms and Armour’, in A Companion to Medieval Arms and Armour, ed. David Nicolle (Woodbridge, 2002), pp. 97–104.

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12 Vladimerio Valerio, ‘Piero e gli astri: il primo cielo stellato nella pittura occidentale’, in Piero della Francesca e le corti italiane, ed. Carlo Bertelli and Antonio Paolucci, exh. cat., Museo Statale d’Arte Medievale e Moderna, Arezzo (Milan, 2007), pp. 81–5. 13 Riccardo Fubini and Anna Menci Gallorini, ‘L’autobiografia di Leon Battista Alberti: studio e edizione’, Rinascimento, 2nd ser., xii (1972), p. 73. 14 A magisterial discussion of Piero’s narrative strategies and use of rhetoric and epic is the merit of Marilyn Aronberg Lavin in her Piero della Francesca (London, 2002), pp. 114–80; ‘Piero the Storyteller: Tradition and Innovation in the Legend of the True Cross’, in Piero, ed. Maetzke and Bertelli, pp. 27–37; and Piero della Francesca, San Francesco, Arezzo (New York 1994). 15 Simon Critchley, On Humour (London and New York, 2002). 16 Rudolf Wolkan, ed., Der Briefwechsel des Eneas Silvius Piccolomini, vol. ii: Briefe als Priester und als Bischof von Triest (1447–1450) (Vienna, 1912), p. 10. 17 Giuseppe Centauro and Enzo Settesoldi, eds, Piero della Francesca: committenza e pittura nella chiesa di S. Francesco ad Arezzo (Poggibonsi, 2000), p. 232 doc. 54.

4 Master 1 For a survey of interpretations, see Maria Cristina Castelli, in Piero e Urbino, Piero e le corti rinascimentali, ed. Paolo Dal Poggetto, exh. cat., Palazzo Ducale, Urbino (Venice, 1992), pp. 118–21. For a sound analysis of them and a counterproposal, see Charles Hope and Paul Taylor, ‘Piero’s Flagellation and the Conventions of Painted Narrative’, in Incontri del Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani: Piero della Francesca, ed. Alessandra Uguccioni, special issue of Cultura e scuola, 34 (1995), pp. 48–101. On the non-originality of the inscription ‘tres convenerunt in unum’ (for which see also Irene Hueck, ‘Le copie del Ramboux da Piero e da opere ritenute sue’, in Piero interpretato: copie, giudizi e musealizzazione di Piero della Francesca, ed. Cecilia Prete and Ranieri Varese (Ancona, 1998), pp. 39, 42), often used in interpretations, see Machtelt Brüggen Israëls, ‘The First Known Record of Piero della Francesca’s “Flagellation of

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Christ” and the Question of Its Inscription’, Burlington Magazine, clxi (2019), pp. 488–91. For the identification of the statue, nude, with staff and luminous as Apollo, compare the drawing of about 1501–4 by Albrecht Dürer (British Museum, London). For the identification of Joseph of Arimathea, whom in Rogier’s work I identify as the man in brocade, because he is called ‘rich’ in the Bible, see Creighton Gilbert, ‘Piero della Francesca’s “Flagellation”: The Figures in the Foreground’, Art Bulletin, liii (1971), p. 49; Bram Kempers, Painting, Power and Patronage: The Rise of the Professional Artist in Renaissance Italy (London, 1992), p. 229. Likewise, dating to about 1440, the Hours of Catherine of Cleves (Morgan Library, New York, M.917/945, fol. 67r), brought to my attention by Klara Broekhuijsen, has a miniature of Joseph of Arimathea addressing a seated Pilate. On Bening’s book, see Judith Anne Testa, ‘Fragments of a Spanish Prayerbook with Miniatures by Simon Bening’, Oud Holland, cv (1991), pp. 89–115. Alessandro Marchi, in Il Rinascimento a Urbino: Fra’ Carnevale e gli artisti del Palazzo di Federico, ed. Alessandro Marchi and Maria Rosaria Valazzi, exh. cat., Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino (Milan, 2005), p. 185, first noted the window, whereas Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, Piero della Francesca: The Flagellation (Chicago, 1972), pp. 45–8, reconstructed a divine, one-point light. Franco Negroni, Il Duomo di Urbino (Urbino, 1993), pp. 43–6; Matteo Ceriana, ‘Fra Carnevale e la pratica dell’architettura’ and Matteo Mazzalupi, ‘Documents in the Urbino Archives’, in From Filippo Lippi to Piero della Francesca: Fra Carnevale and the Making of a Renaissance Master, ed. Keith Christiansen, exh. cat., Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (New Haven, ct, 2005), respectively p. 118 and p. 300 doc. 8. Bram Kempers, in a lecture of 15 March 2017 at the University of Amsterdam, first suggested this chapel as the Flagellation’s possible original destination. Alberto Publiese, ‘Note critiche e storia dei restauri’ and Marco Luzi and Maurizio Duranti, ‘Individuazione dei collegamenti fra il palazzo e il duomo’, in Il Palazzo di Federico da Montefeltro, ed. Maria Luisa Polichetti (Urbino, 1985), vol. i, respectively pp. 576–83 and 614–15.

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8 Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Congr. Vescovi e Regolari, Visita Ap. 41, fol. 3: ‘Sanctissimum Sacramentum non quidem in Altari maiori, sed in capella Illustri loco, ac decenti conservatur ornatissime . . . Collocatum illud in maiori altari adhuc non est, cum Altare ipsum tale sit, ut faciem ad populum sacerdos celebrans adversam, non aversam habeat.’, fol. 8: ‘Tabernaculum ipsum ligneum’. Fifteenth-century wood tabernacles survive in, for example, the Museo Diocesano in Gubbio (from Serre Partucci) and in the chapel of San Tarasio at San Zaccaria in Venice. At Urbino, the later ornato, or surround, of the tabernacle consisted of two wood columns and two wood pilasters, suggesting it was a wall tabernacle. Negroni, Il Duomo, pp. 95–6, 104–5. 9 Andrew Butterfield and Caroline Elam, ‘Desiderio da Settignano’s Tabernacle of the Sacrament’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, xliii (1999), pp. 333–57. 10 Francesco Caglioti, in La Basilica di San Pietro in Vaticano, ed. Antonio Pinelli (Modena, 2000), pp. 922–7 nos 1824–7. 11 Cesare Brandi, ‘Restauri a Piero della Francesca’, Bollettino d’arte, xlix (1954), pp. 241–52; Maurizio Seracini, ‘Ricerche diagnostiche’, in Piero e Urbino, ed. Dal Poggetto, pp. 452–5. 12 Christine Smith, ‘Piero’s Painted Architecture: Analysis of His Vocabulary’, in Piero della Francesca and His Legacy, ed. Marilyn Aronberg Lavin (Washington, dc, 1995), pp. 222–53; Arnaldo Bruschi, ‘Urbino: architettura, pittura e il problema di Piero “architetto”’, in Città e corte nell’Italia di Piero della Francesca, ed. Claudia Cieri Via (Venice, 1996), pp. 265–300; Arnaldo Bruschi, ‘Osservazioni sulle architetture dipinte di Piero della Francesca’, in Incontri, ed. Uguccioni, pp. 102–25. 13 Ceriana, ‘Fra Carnevale’, pp. 103–8. 14 Rudolph Wittkower and B.A.R. Carter, ‘The Perspective of Piero della Francesca’s “Flagellation”’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xvi/3/4 (1953), pp. 292–302; Judith V. Field, Piero della Francesca: A Mathematician’s Art (New Haven, ct, and London, 2005), pp. 174–81. 15 Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier: The Singleton Translation, ed. Daniel Javitch (New York and London, 2002), p. 4.

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16 Perry Brooks, ‘Circling the Square: The Meaningful Use of Φ and Π in the Paintings of Piero della Francesca’, in Visual Culture and Mathematics in the Early Modern Period, ed. Ingrid Alexander-Skipnes (New York and London, 2017), pp. 84–109. 17 Giuseppe Zippel, ‘Piero della Francesca a Roma’, Rassegna d’arte, xix (1919), pp. 81–94. 18 Tom Henry, The Life and Art of Luca Signorelli (New Haven, ct, and London, 2012), p. 237. 19 An erroneous interpretation of Vasari’s account of Piero’s Vatican activity as implying that he worked for both Nicholas v and Pius ii is in Ronald Lightbown, ‘La vita e le opere di Piero della Francesca nel Dizionario Biografico: problemi ancora aperti’, in Incontri, ed. Uguccioni, pp. 11–14. Vasari does not attribute the figures related to the reign of Nicholas v to Piero and has no arguments for associating Piero with the Parentucelli pope. 20 Antonio Pinelli, ‘Esercizi di metodo: Piero e Benozzo a Roma, tra cronologia relativa e cronologia assoluta’, Ricerche di storia dell’arte, lxxvi (2002), pp. 7–39; Patrizia Di Benedetti, ‘La cappella d’Estouteville in Santa Maria Maggiore a Roma’, in Benozzo Gozzoli allievo a Roma, maestro in Umbria, ed. Bruno Toscano and Giovanna Capitelli, exh. cat., Chiesa-museo di San Francesco, Montefalco (Cinisello Balsamo, 2002), pp. 238–45, doubting Piero’s authorship of the frescos.

5 Citizen 1 For the documents, see James R. Banker, ‘Documenti relativi alla compagnia di Santa Maria della Misericordia e alla tavola di Piero della Francesca’, in Ripensando Piero della Francesca e il Polittico della Misericordia di Sansepolcro, ed. Mariangela Betti, Cecilia Frosinini and Paola Refice (Florence, 2010), pp. 15–30. 2 Frank Dabell, ‘Sfortuna critica e fortuna “nascosta” del Polittico della Misericordia: vicende documentarie tra Cinquecento e Seicento’, and Andrea Gori, ‘La chiesa e l’oratorio dell’ospedale della Misericordia: due ambienti per il polittico di Piero della Francesca’, in Ripensando, ed. Betti, Frosinini and Refice, respectively p. 32 and pp. 51–2.

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3 James R. Banker, ‘The Program for the Sassetta Altarpiece in the Church of San Francesco in Borgo San Sepolcro’, I Tatti Studies, iv (1991), pp. 53–5 doc. 5. 4 Christa Gardner von Teuffel, ‘Niccolò di Segna, Sassetta, Piero della Francesca and Perugino: Cult and Continuity in Sansepolcro’, Städel Jahrbuch, xvii (1999), pp. 163–208. 5 With respect to the polyptych’s carpentry, design and pictorial technique, see Ciro Castelli and Andrea Gori, ‘Il Polittico della Misericordia: indagini conoscitive e intervento conservativo’, Roberto Bellucci and Cecilia Frosinini, ‘La pianificazione dell’opera e il disegno preparatorio nel Polittico della Misericordia’, and Rossella Cavigli, ‘Osservazioni sulla tecnica pittorica del Polittico della Misericordia’, in Ripensando, ed. Betti, Frosinini and Refice, respectively pp. 145–67, 189–202 and 203–18. 6 On iconography and narrative strategies, see Machtelt Israëls, ‘Commissioni parallele e narrazioni insolite: Piero della Francesca e il Sassetta a Borgo San Sepolcro’, in Ripensando, ed. Betti, Frosinini and Refice, pp. 99–116. 7 Il restauro del San Ludovico di Piero della Francesca, ed. Davide Gasparotto (Montepulciano, 2000). For the inscription, see Francesco Gherardi Dragomanni, Vita di Piero della Francesca pittore (Florence, 1835), p. 23 note 11. 8 Francesca Chielli, ‘Il San Ludovico di Piero da pittura murale a “tableau” museale’, in Il restauro, ed. Gasparotto, pp. 60 doc. xvii, 62 doc. xxvi. 9 Maria Grazia Paolini, ‘Precisazioni sul S. Ludovico di Tolosa: le idee “spaziali” di Piero’, in Quaderno della Cattedra di Storia dell’Arte: ricerche su Piero (Arezzo, 1989), pp. 69–83. 10 On the fresco’s technique, see Guido Botticelli, ‘L’intervento conservativo sul San Ludovico di Piero della Francesca’, in Il restauro, ed. Gasparotto, pp. 67–79 (with on p. 69 and in Maurizio Seracini and Maria Grazia Pancani, ‘Indagini diagnostiche sul San Ludovico’, ibid., pp. 81, 82 fig. 5, an interpretation of the spolvero marks in relief as an indication of the use of a reversed cartoon). 11 Luciana Borri Cristelli, ‘Il Palazzo della Residenza e la Resurrezione di Piero della Francesca’, in Ricerche su Piero (Siena, 1989), pp. 7–33,

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with documents correctly interpreted by James R. Banker, Piero della Francesca: Artist and Man (Oxford, 2014), pp. 107–9. 12 Gian Paolo G. Scharf, Cronisti borghesi del Quattrocento (Selci-Lama, 2011), pp. 16–18, 144–7. 13 On the technique and restorations of the mural, see the documentary ‘La pittura più bella del mondo’ by Luca Criscenti (2018) and the forthcoming publication on the restoration concluded in 2018. 14 Eugenio Battisti, Piero della Francesca (Milan, 1971), ii, pp. 33, 231–2 doc. cxxvi. 15 Enzo Mattesini, ‘Fonetica e morfologia dei trattati in volgare di Piero della Francesca’, Piero, Luca e il Borghese: studi sul dialetto antico e moderno di Borgo Sansepolcro (Sansepolcro, 2016), pp. 268–9. 16 On the fresco’s iconography and composition, see Michael Baxandall, Words for Pictures (New Haven, ct, and London, 2003), pp. 117–64. 17 Keith Christiansen, Piero della Francesca: Personal Encounters, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2014), pp. 32–45, and for technique and perspective, see Roberto Bellucci, Cecilia Frosinini and Chiara Rossi Scarzanella, ‘The Restoration and Technical Examination of Saint Jerome and a Supplicant’, ibid., pp. 73–81, esp. 79. 18 Anna Pizzati, ‘The Family of Girolamo Amadi: A Lucchese Silk Merchant in Venice’, in Christiansen, Piero, pp. 59–71. 19 James R. Banker, ‘Luca Pacioli e Piero della Francesca’, in Pacioli 500 anni dopo, ed. Enrico Giusti and Matteo Martelli (Selci-Lama, 2010), p. 208. 20 Leon Battista Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence, trans. Renée Neu Watkins (Columbia, sc, 1969), p. 47.

6 Devotee 1 James R. Banker, ‘Piero della Francesca: The Commission and Completion of the Sant’Agostino Altarpiece’, in Nathaniel Silver, Piero della Francesca in America: From Sansepolcro to the East Coast, exh. cat., Frick Collection, New York (2013), pp. 72–3. 2 For the fresco and its location, see Giacomo Guazzini and Elena Squillantini, ‘A Visual Context for Piero: The Reconstruction

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of the Frescoes in the Apse of the Church of Sant’Agostino in Sansepolcro’, in Silver, Piero, pp. 131–2; David Franklin, ‘Piero della Francesca’s “St Julian” at Sansepolcro’, Burlington Magazine, clxi (1999), pp. 473–5. Jane Bridgeman, ‘“Troppo belli e troppo eccellenti”: Observations on Dress in the Work of Piero della Francesca’, in The Cambridge Companion to Piero della Francesca, ed. Jeryldene M. Wood (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 82–3. Guido Botticelli, ‘La Madonna del Parto: l’intervento conservativo e il nuovo assetto dell’affresco’, in Piero della Francesca: la Madonna del Parto. Restauro e iconografia, exh. cat., Monterchi (Venice, 1993), pp. 57–76. Thomas Martone, ‘La Madonna del Parto di Piero della Francesca e la sua iconografia’, in Piero della Francesca: la Madonna del Parto, pp. 103–19. Paola Benigni, ‘Su alcuni documenti “perduti” relativi alla Madonna del Parto’, 1492: rivista della Fondazione Piero della Francesca, ii (2009), pp. 7–20. Matteo Mazzalupi, ‘Altari, patronati, opere d’arte al tempo degli abati: un saggio di topografia sacra’, in Andrea Di Lorenzo, Cecilia Martelli and Matteo Mazzalupi, La Badia di Sansepolcro nel Quattrocento (Selci-Lama, 2012), pp. 32–3 (for the Cosmas and Damian) and 20–23, 109–10 doc. 52 (for the chapel of the Madonna della Badia). Anna Maria Amonaci, Conventi toscani dell’Osservanza francescana (Milan, 1997), pp. 74–83; Mario Salmi, ‘La chiesa di Sargiano’, Studi francescani, xiii (1915), pp. 81–91. Silvano Pieri and Carlo Volpi, eds, Visita Apostolica alla città e diocesi di Arezzo 1583 (Arezzo, 2011), i, pp. 106–7. For the Bacci family tree, see Giuseppe Centauro and Enzo Settesoldi, eds, Piero della Francesca: committenza e pittura nella chiesa di S. Francesco ad Arezzo (Poggibonsi, 2000), loose insert. Ronald Lightbown, Piero della Francesca (London, 1992), p. 288 note 10, mistakenly reports 1460 as the date of Piero’s work at Sargiano, whereas in his source of about 1800 – a short commented extract of Vasari on Sargiano (Biblioteca Città di Arezzo, 27, fol. 217v) that mentions ‘un residuo di una Pittura rappresentante Gesù

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nell’orto fatto da Piero della Francesca’ – this date is, equally erroneously, associated with the convent’s foundation. 12 On the Aretine processional banners, James R. Banker, Piero della Francesca: Artist and Man (Oxford, 2014), pp. 115–17. 13 Eugenio Battisti, Piero della Francesca (Milan, 1971), vol. ii, pp. 66–7. 14 For its technique and restoration, see Guido Botticelli and Stefano Casciu, ‘La “Maddalena” di Piero della Francesca nella Cattedrale di Arezzo: il restauro’, I quaderni dell’arte, vol. v (1995), pp. 46–9. 15 On its iconography, see Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, Piero della Francesca (London, 2002), pp. 186–91. 16 On the Netherlandish rendering of the hair, see Anna Maria Maetzke, Introduzione ai capolavori di Piero della Francesca (Cinisello Balsamo, 1998), pp. 252–5. 17 On this part of the portico at Santa Maria delle Grazie, which by 1788 was bricked up and used as extra convent space with whitewashed walls, only to be reopened in 1968–9, see Giovanni Poggi, ‘Restauri a Santa Maria delle Grazie in Arezzo’, L’arte, vii (1904), pp. 187–8; Umberto Tavanti, ‘Notizie d’Arezzo: scoperta di affreschi di Pier della Francesca ad Arezzo’, L’arte, ix (1906), pp. 305–6; Mario Salmi, ‘Il piazzale di Santa Maria delle Grazie ad Arezzo’, Commentari, xxi (1969), pp. 37–51; Angelo Tafi, Santa Maria delle Grazie ad Arezzo: capolavoro di fede e di arte (Arezzo, 1973), pp. 49, fig. 8, 55–6, 70, 109, 121, 125 fig. 29; Battisti, Piero, ii, p. 91. 18 Banker, Piero, pp. 123–4; James R. Banker, Documenti fondamentali per la conoscenza della vita e dell’arte di Piero della Francesca (Selci-Lama, 2013), pp. 90 doc. cviii, 93–4 doc. cxiii, esp. 187–90 doc. ccxliii. 19 Francesco Federico Mancini, ‘“Depingi ac fabricari fecerunt quamdam tabulam . . . ”: un punto fermo per la cronologia del polittico di Perugia’, in Piero della Francesca: il polittico di Sant’Antonio, ed. Vittoria Garibaldi (Perugia, 1993), pp. 65–72. 20 For the altarpiece and (open) issues, including the opening between the churches, see Vittoria Garibaldi, ‘Introduzione’, in Piero, ed. Garibaldi, pp. 19–44. For the church, see also Paolo Lattaioli, ‘Storia e architettura del monastero di Sant’Antonio da Padova’, in Piero, ed. Garibaldi, pp. 57–64. The central wall of the polygonal ending measured from the floor till the onset of the vault about 450 cm in height and 232 cm in width, so that at

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21 22 23

24

25 26

27

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352 × 212 cm Piero’s altarpiece, originally with external framing elements at the sides and top, on an altar plus step at about a metre high, made a neat fit. For the technique of support and paint layers, see Sergio Fusetti and Paolo Virilli, ‘Il restauro’, in Piero, ed. Garibaldi, pp. 137–9. For the iconography, see Lightbown, Piero, pp. 218–27. James R. Banker, ‘Piero della Francesca: The Commission and Completion of the Sant’Agostino Altarpiece’, in Silver, Piero, pp. 68–81; Andrea Di Lorenzo, ‘Il polittico agostiniano di Piero della Francesca: dispersione, collezionismo, restauri, ricostruzione’, in Il polittico agostiniano di Piero della Francesca, ed. Andrea Di Lorenzo (Turin, 1996), pp. 13–46. Nicoletta Matteuzzi, Niccolò di Segna e suo fratello Francesco (Florence, 2018), pp. 198–203 cat. 22; James R. Banker, ‘La chiesa di San Francesco culla dell’arte e la presenza in essa di Piero della Francesca’, in Il beato Ranieri nella storia del Francescanesimo e nella terra altotiberina, ed. Franco Polcri (Sansepolcro, 2005), pp. 8–13; James R. Banker, ‘Piero della Francesca, the Carpentered Altarpiece of San Francesco, His Sant’Agostino Polyptych, and Quattrocento High Altarpieces in Borgo San Sepolcro’, Arte cristiana, lxxxix (2001), pp. 210–18. For the reconstruction, see Di Lorenzo, ‘Il polittico’, pp. 13–46. For Byzantine-antique dress, see Annalisa Zanni, ‘Ricami metallici, armature “all’antica” e velluti’, in Il Polittico, ed. Di Lorenzo, pp. 61–72. Machtelt Israëls, ‘Polyptychs without Painting: Sassetta, Piero della Francesca, and the Rejection of Unpainted Altarpieces’, in Sassetta: The Borgo San Sepolcro Altarpiece, ed. Machtelt Israëls (Florence and Leiden, 2009), pp. 248–51. Others think that the central panel was less wide and showed a Virgin and Child. Nathaniel Silver in Silver, Piero, pp. 109–15 cat. 4.

7 Courtier 1 On the altarpiece and its technique, see especially Emanuela Daffra, in From Filippo Lippi to Piero della Francesca: Fra Carnevale and the Making of a Renaissance Master, ed. Keith Christiansen, exh. cat.,

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Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (New Haven, ct, 2005), pp. 267–71 cat. 46; La pala di San Bernardino di Piero della Francesca: nuovi studi oltre il restauro, ed. Emanuela Daffra and Filippo Trevisani (Florence, 1997), with reprint of Millard Meiss, ‘La Sacra Conversazione di Piero della Francesca’, Quaderni di Brera, i (Florence, 1971). 2 For Piero’s impact on Bellini, a famous tenet of Roberto Longhi, see Susannah Rutherglen, ‘“The Footprints of Our Lord”: Giovanni Bellini and the Franciscan Tradition’, in Susannah Rutherglen and Charlotte Hale, In a New Light: Giovanni Bellini’s ‘St. Francis in the Desert’, exh. cat., Frick Collection, New York (2015), p. 45. 3 On Battista and the contesse, see Vespasiano da Bisticci, Le vite, ed. Aulo Greco (Florence, 1970–76), vol. i, pp. 400–401, 405, 415. 4 Memoria felicissima de lo illustrissimo signor duca Federico et de la sua famiglia che teneva: opera di Susech antiquo cortegiano, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Urb. lat. 1204, fol. 103v; James R. Banker, Piero della Francesca: Artist and Man (Oxford, 2014), p. 147. 5 Emanuela Daffra, ‘Studi e ricerche: 1966–1996’, in La pala, ed. Daffra and Trevisani, pp. 97–113; Francesco P. Di Teodoro, La Sacra Conversazione di Piero della Francesca (Milan, 1996), p. 12. 6 Marinella Bonvini Mazzanti, Battista Sforza Montefeltro: una ‘principessa’ del Rinascimento italiano (Urbino, 1993), p. 49. 7 Sarah Clough Pearson, ‘The Convent of Santa Chiara in Urbino: A New Chronology of Its Construction and Patronage’, Architectural Histories, 3/1, art. 16 (2015), doi.org/10.5334/ah.cs, accessed 9 June 2019. 8 Francesco Paolo Fiore and Manfredo Tafuri, ‘Il monastero e la chiesa di Santa Chiara a Urbino’, in Francesco di Giorgio architetto, ed. Francesco Paolo Fiore and Manfredo Tafuri, exh. cat., Palazzo Pubblico, Siena (Milan, 1993), pp. 260–73. 9 Urbino, Biblioteca Centrale Umanistica, Fondo Antico, Pergamene Congregazione Carità, 302. 10 Alessandro Marchi, in Il Rinascimento a Urbino: Fra’ Carnevale e gli artisti del Palazzo di Federico, ed. Alessandro Marchi and Maria Rosaria Valazzi, exh. cat., Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino (Milan, 2005), pp. 130–33 cat. 27; Machtelt Brüggen Israëls, ‘Madonne dell’Umiltà monumentali nelle Marche tardo-medievali:

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committenze confraternali’, in Pittura del Trecento nelle Marche, ed. Mauro Minardi and Bonita Cleri (Foligno, 2017), pp. 321–2. 11 Vespasiano, Le vite, vol. i, pp. 400, 405–6, 412–13, 415; Giovanni Santi, La vita e le gesta di Federico di Montefeltro duca d’Urbino, ed. Luigi Michelini Tocci (Vatican City, 1985), p. 420. Howard Burns, ‘San Bernardino a Urbino’, in Francesco, ed., Fiore and Tafuri, pp. 233–4 and Machtelt Brüggen Israëls, ‘La pala di Piero della Francesca per il mausoleo di Federico di Montefeltro’, forthcoming, express doubts on the traditional interpretation of Santi’s passage as referring to a mausoleum situated inside the palace. 12 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Diplomatico, Normali, Urbino Pesaro, 22/10/1470. 13 Memorie concernenti la Chiesa e il Convento di San Bernardino, 1723, archive of San Bernardino, Urbino, fol. 107, cited by Filippo Trevisani, ‘Struttura e pittura: i maestri legnaiuoli grossi e Piero della Francesca per la carpenteria della pala di San Bernardino’, in La pala, ed. Daffra and Trevisani, pp. 33–4. 14 Francesco Gonzaga, De origine seraphicae religionis franciscanae (Rome, 1587), vol. ii, p. 213; Federico da Montefeltro, Lettere di stato e d’arte (1470–1480), ed. Paolo Alatri (Rome, 1949), pp. 77–8 no. 64. 15 Vespasiano, Le vite, vol. i, pp. 412–13, 415; Santi, La vita, pp. 420, 743; Baldassare Castiglione, Vita di Guidubaldo duca di Urbino, ed. Uberto Motta (Rome, 2006), pp. 84–5; Pietro Bembo, Volgarizzamento des Dialogs ‘De Guido Ubaldo Feretrio deque Elisabetha Gonzagia Urbini ducibus’, ed. Maria Lutz (Geneva, 1980), pp. 112–13. For indications for an early date for the church project, see Arnaldo Bruschi, Bramante architetto (Bari, 1969), pp. 732–9; Antonella Festa, ‘La chiesa e il convento di San Bernardino in Urbino’, Quaderni dell’Istituto di Storia dell’Architettura, xli (2003), pp. 17–38; nuancing Burns, ‘San Bernardino’, pp. 230–43; Israëls, ‘La pala’. 16 Festa, ‘La Chiesa’. 17 Francesco Paolo Fiore, ‘Laurana, Luciano’, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, xliv (2005), pp. 63–70, provides ample evidence that Laurana was an architect and not only an engineer, as in Arnaldo Bruschi, ‘Luciano di Laurana: chi era costui? Laurana, fra Carnevale, Alberti a Urbino. Un tentativo di revisione’, Annali di architettura, xx (2008), pp. 37–81. For Laurana’s return

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to Federico’s lands from Naples in 1475, see Bonvini Mazzanti, Battista, pp. 182–3. 18 Festa, ‘La Chiesa’. Palladio’s Redentore in Venice has a similar choir. 19 Werner Lutz, ‘Der Architekt Luciano Laurana’, PhD thesis, Universität Augsburg, 1995, esp. pp. 172–89. For triconchmausolea, see Manfredo Tafuri, ‘Le chiese di Francesco di Giorgio Martini’, in Francesco, ed. Fiore and Tafuri, p. 37. 20 Neville Rowley, ‘Between Mantegna and Bellini: Marco Zoppo and the Invention of the sacra conversazione’, in Mantegna and Bellini, ed. Caroline Campbell et al., exh. cat., National Gallery, London (2018), pp. 170–77, 272 note 11. 21 Eugenio Battisti, Piero della Francesca (Milan, 1971), ii, p. 57; Bernardino Baldi, Vita e fatti di Federigo di Montefeltro duca di Urbino [1602–3] (Rome, 1824), vol. iii, pp. 271–2, 383; Girolamo Muzio, Historia di Girolamo Mutio giustinopolitano de’ fatti di Federico di Montefeltro duca d’Urbino (Venice, 1605), pp. 407–8. 22 Bembo, Volgarizzamento, pp. 112–13; Bernardino Baldi, Della vita e de’ fatti di Guidobaldo I. da Montefeltro [1616] (Milan, 1821), i, pp. 28–9; ii, 233, 237. 23 Sebastian Becker, Dynastische Politik und Legitimationsstrategien der della Rovere: Potenziale und Grenzen der Herzöge von Urbino (1508–1631) (Berlin, 2015), p. 352. 24 W. J. Wegener, ‘Mortuary Chapels of Renaissance Condottieri’, PhD thesis, Princeton University, 1989, pp. 148–50. 25 Ida Maietta, ‘L’evoluzione del convento e le vicende del suo patrimonio artistico attraverso i secoli’, in La fabbrica di San Domenico Maggiore a Napoli: storia e restauro, ed. Orsola Foglia and Ida Maietta (Naples, 2016), pp. 100–104; Joana Barreto, ‘Come soavemente dormisse: Les Funérailles des Aragon de Naples entre légitimation politique et exemplarité chrétienne’, Micrologus, xxii (2014), pp. 455–86. 26 Battisti, Piero, ii, p. 57. Muzio, Historia, pp. 406–8 discusses an opening of the duke’s tomb. 27 Nicole Reynaud and Claudie Ressort, ‘Les Portraits d’hommes illustres du studiolo d’Urbino au Louvre par Juste de Gand et Pedro Berruguete’, Revue du Louvre, xli (1991), pp. 82–113; Maria

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29 30 31

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33 34 35 36 37

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Letizia Amadori et al., ‘Le ricerche scientifiche sugli Uomini Illustri’, in Lo Studiolo del Duca: il ritorno degli Uomini Illustri alla Corte di Urbino, ed. Alessandro Marchi, exh. cat., Palazzo Ducale and Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino (Milan, 2015), pp. 85–99. On the style of the painted architecture, see Matteo Ceriana, ‘Sull’architettura dipinta della pala’, in La pala, ed. Daffra and Trevisani, pp. 115–66; Arnaldo Bruschi, ‘Urbino: architettura, pittura e il problema di Piero “architetto”’, in Città e corte nell’Italia di Piero della Francesca, ed. Claudia Cieri Via (Venice, 1996), pp. 291–9. Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven, ct, and London, 1990), p. 267. Corrado Maltese, ‘Federico da Montefeltro e la civiltà urbinate del Rinascimento’, Notizie da Palazzo Albani, xi (1982), pp. 21–31. For Francesco Sforza giving scarlet gold brocade to Federico, see Oratione funerale fatta da Lodovico Odatio nell’essequie del Duca Federico de latino in volgar tradotta, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Urb. lat. 1252, fols. 13v–14r and compare Niccolò Machiavelli’s introduction to Il Principe (1513). Luca Emilio Brancati, ‘I tappeti Montefeltro: presenze annodate ad Urbino’, in Il Montefeltro e l’oriente islamico, ed. Alessandro Bruschettini, exh. cat., Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino (Genoa, 2018), pp. 43, 54–5. Marisa Galvez, ‘Dark Transparencies: Crystal Poetics in Medieval Texts and Beyond’, Philological Quarterly, xciii (2015), pp. 15–42. Isa Ragusa, ‘The Egg Reopened’, Art Bulletin, liii (1971), pp. 435–44; Battisti, Piero, vol. i, p. 515 note 451. Bonvini Mazzanti, Battista, pp. 112, 114, 127. Baldi, Vita, iii, p. 281. On the meaning of the left and right eye, see James Hall, The Sinister Side: How Left–Right Symbolism Shaped Western Art (Oxford, 2008), pp. 94–123. R. Bianucci, A. Perciaccante and O. Appenzeller, ‘“From father to son”: Early Onset Gout in Guidobaldo i da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino (1472–1508)’, European Journal of Internal Medicine, xxxvi (2016), pp. 28–30. Diana Scarisbrick, Rings: Symbols of Wealth, Power and Affection (London, 1993), pp. 7–8, 10–11; Elena Rossoni, ‘Anelli nuziali

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nel xvi secolo’, Annuario della Scuola di Specializzazione in Storia dell’Arte dell’Università di Bologna, i (2000), pp. 10–23. 40 For provenance history, see Nicoletta Baldini, in Piero della Francesca e le corti italiane, ed. Carlo Bertelli and Antonio Paolucci, exh. cat., Museo Statale d’Arte Medievale e Moderna, Arezzo (Milan, 2007), pp. 225–7 cat. 71. 41 Roberto Bellucci and Cecilia Frosinini, ‘Ipotesi sul metodo di restituzione dei disegni preparatori di Piero della Francesca: il caso dei ritratti di Federico da Montefeltro’, in La pala, ed. Daffra and Trevisani, pp. 167–87. 42 Lina Bolzoni, Poesia e pittura nel Rinascimento (Bari, 2008), pp. 151–3. 43 Battisti, Piero, vol. ii, p. 57. See Timothy McCall, ‘Brilliant Bodies: Material Culture and the Adornment of Men in North Italy’s Quattrocento Courts’, I Tatti Studies, xvi (2013), pp. 445–90. 44 Michael Baxandall, ‘Bartholomaeus Facius on Painting: A Fifteenth-century Manuscript of the De Viris Illustribus’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xxvii (1964), pp. 102–3. 45 The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, ed. J. P. Richter (New York, 1970), pp. 127–9. 46 Bellucci and Frosinini, ‘Ipotesi’. 47 Claudia Ceri Via, ‘I trionfi di Piero’, in Piero e Urbino, Piero e le corti rinascimentali, ed. Paolo Dal Poggetto, exh. cat., Palazzo Ducale, Urbino (Venice, 1992), pp. 126–34. 48 For Battista’s knowledge of Antiquity’s nine military crowns, see Martino Filetico, Jocundissimae disputationes, ed. Guido Arbizzoni (Florence, 1992), p. 145. 49 Lina Bolzoni, ‘Le iscrizioni nel dittico di Urbino di Piero della Francesca: il ritratto di Battista e la tradizione metrica’, in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Joseph Connors, ed. Machtelt Israëls and Louis A. Waldman (Florence, 2013), pp. 196–206. 50 Hall, The Sinister Side, pp. 94–123. 51 Bonvini Mazzanti, Battista, p. 172. 52 Pierantonio Paltroni, Commentari della vita et gesti dell’illustrissimo Federico duca d’Urbino, ed. Walter Tomassoli (Urbino, 1966), p. 277. 53 On mourning for Battista and the location of the funeral, see [Ser Gaugello de la Pergola], De Vita et Morte Illustris. D. Baptistae Sfortiae Comitissae Urbini [1472], ed. Adolfo Cinquini (Rome, 1905), esp. p. 32.

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54 Giovanni Antonio Campano, Funebris oratio pro Baptista Sphortia Urbini comitissa ac principe illustrissima, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Urb. lat. 324, fols. 1r–17r (11v for the quote). 55 Creighton Gilbert, Change in Piero della Francesca (Glückstadt, 1968), pp. 29–32, 91–104, convincingly dates the diptych directly after 1472. Alessandro Angelini, ‘Per la cronologia del dittico Montefeltro’, Prospettiva, 141–2 (2011), pp. 65–87, unconvincingly relates the Petrarchan triumphs to the wedding of Federico and Battista in 1460; the past tense in her inscription cannot relate to her premarital sense of measure, which, as transpires from her funeral oration, became of consequence to Federico only during their marriage. 56 On Federico’s pledge, see Walter Tommasoli, La vita di Federico da Montefeltro (1422–1482) (Urbino, 1978), p. 129. 57 For the ‘maestro solenne’, see Vespasiano, Le vite, vol. i, p. 384. 58 Gabriele Barucca, in Bertelli and Paolucci, Piero, pp. 232–4 cat. 87. 59 On the possible first owners of the painting, see Marinella Bonvini Mazzanti, Giovanni Della Rovere: un ‘principe nuovo’ nelle vicende italiane degli ultimi decenni del xv secolo (Senigallia, 1983); Franca Petrucci, ‘Della Rovere, Giovanni’, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, xxxvii (1989), pp. 347–50; Benedetta Borello, ‘Montefeltro, Giovanna di’, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, lxxvi (2012), pp. 58–61. 60 Matteo Ceriana, ‘Ambrogio Barocci e la decorazione del Palazzo Ducale’, in Francesco Paolo Fiore, Francesco di Giorgio alla corte di Federico da Montefeltro (Florence, 2004), vol. i, pp. 300–301; Lutz, ‘Der Architekt Luciano Laurana’, pp. 132–41; Francesco Paolo Fiore, ‘La Rocca di Senigallia e l’architettura militare al tempo di Alessandro vi’, in La quercia dai frutti d’oro: Giovanni della Rovere (1457– 1501) e le origini del potere roveresco, ed. Marinella Bonvini Mazzanti and Gilberto Piccinini (Ancona, 2004), pp. 135–55. 61 Francesco Benelli, ‘Baccio Pontelli, Giovanni della Rovere, il convento e la chiesa di Santa Maria delle Grazie a Senigallia’, Quaderni dell’Istituto di Storia dell’Architettura, xxxi (1998), pp. 13–26, esp. 13–16 for the fifteenth-century church; Bonvini Mazzanti, Giovanni, pp. 224–31. For Giovanni della Rovere’s burial, see Fiorenzo Canuti, Il Perugino (Siena, 1931), vol. i, pp. 124–6.

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62 Jacopo Russo, ‘La restituzione prospettica’, in La luce e il mistero: la Madonna di Senigallia nella sua città. Il capolavoro di Piero della Francesca dopo il restauro, ed. Gabriele Barucca (Ancona, 2011), pp. 144–7. 63 Martin Kemp, ‘New Light on Old Theories: Piero’s Studies of the Transmission of Light’, in Piero della Francesca tra arte e scienza, ed. Marisa Dalai Emiliani and Valter Curzi (Venice, 1996), pp. 37–8; Carlo Bertelli, Piero della Francesca: la forza divina della pittura (Cinisello Balsamo, 1991), pp. 161–2. 64 Costanza Mora, Albertina Soavi and Francesca Fumelli, ‘Il restauro e la tecnica di esecuzione’, in La luce, ed. Barucca, pp. 110–15; Maurizio Seracini, ‘Ricerche diagnostiche’, in Piero e Urbino, ed. Dal Poggetto, pp. 463–5.

8 Scientist 1 In general, see Margaret Daly Davis, Piero della Francesca’s Mathematical Treatises: The ‘Trattato d’abaco’ and ‘Libellus de quinque corporibus regularibus’ (Ravenna, 1977); Margaret Daly Davis, ‘Piero’s Treatises: The Mathematics of Form’, in The Cambridge Companion to Piero della Francesca, ed. Jeryldene M. Wood (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 134–51; Judith V. Field, Piero della Francesca: A Mathematician’s Art (New Haven, ct, and London, 2005); Judith V. Field, ‘Piero della Francesca’s Mathematics’, in The Cambridge Companion, ed. Wood, pp. 152–70; Mark A. Peterson, Galileo’s Muse: Renaissance Mathematics and the Arts (Cambridge, ma, and London, 2011), pp. 95–147. 2 James R. Banker, The Culture of San Sepolcro during the Youth of Piero della Francesca (Ann Arbor, mi, 2003), pp. 57–92. 3 James R. Banker, ‘Piero della Francesca’s Friend and Translator: Maestro Matteo di Ser Paolo d’Anghiari’, Rivista d’arte, xliv (1992), pp. 331–40. On Piero’s knowledge of Latin and his humanist script, see Giovanna Derenzini, ‘Note autografe di Piero della Francesca nel codice 616 della Bibliothèque Municipale di Bordeaux: per la storia testuale del De prospectiva pingendi’, Filologia antica e moderna, ix (1995), pp. 29–55; Piero della Francesca, De prospectiva pingendi: testo latino (Rome, 2017), vol. i, pp. 20–21. On Alberti writing Della pittura first in the vernacular and then in Latin, see Lucia Bertolini, ‘Sulla precedenza della redazione volgare del De pictura di Leon

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Battista Alberti’, in Studi per Umberto Carpi, ed. Marco Santagata and Alfredo Stussi (Pisa, 2000), pp. 7–36. 4 James R. Banker, ‘A Manuscript of the Works of Archimedes in the Hand of Piero della Francesca’, Burlington Magazine, cxlvii (2005), pp. 165–9; James R. Banker, Piero della Francesca: Artist and Man (Oxford, 2014), pp. 188–93; L’Archimede di Piero: contributi di presentazione alla realizzazione facsimilare del Riccardiana 106, ed. Roberto Manescalchi and Matteo Martelli (Florence, 2007). 5 In general, see Piero della Francesca, Trattato d’abaco (Rome, 2012), vol. i, pp. xliv–lxiv. 6 Instead, Andrea Di Lorenzo, ‘I Pichi di Sansepolcro e le loro commissioni artistiche nel Quattrocento’, in Ripensando Piero della Francesca e il Polittico della Misericordia di Sansepolcro, ed. Mariangela Betti, Cecilia Frosinini and Paola Refice (Florence, 2010), p. 90, suggests that Piero meant the Abaco for Borgo’s successful merchant and politician Marcolino di Pietro di Guido Pichi (d. 1466), whereas Banker, Piero, pp. 79–95 suggests that Piero meant it for Francesco dal Borgo. 7 Leon Battista Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence, trans. Renée Neu Watkins (Columbia, sc, 1969), p. 40. 8 On the manuscript’s date, see Piero, Trattato, vol. i, pp. xviii–xix; Banker, Piero, pp. 79–95. 9 Piero, Trattato, vol. i, pp. xix, xxxviii–xliii. 10 Federica Toniolo, cited in Piero, Trattato, vol. i, pp. xxiv–xxv, as confirmed in an oral communication of September 2018, cautiously dates it around 1480. 11 Piero, Trattato, vol. i, p. xxv and compare Tammaro De Marinis, La legatura artistica in Italia nei secoli xv e xvi: notizie e elenchi (Florence, 1960), nos 115, 951, 1576. 12 Girolamo Mancini in Giorgio Vasari, Vite cinque annotate, ed. Girolamo Mancini (Florence, 1917), p. 210 note 2; Vita di Pietro della Francesca pittore dal Borgo Sansepolcro scritta da Giorgio Vasari aretino: arricchita di note illustrative (Florence, 1835). 13 In general, see Piero della Francesca, Libellus de quinque corporibus regularibus (Prato, 1995), vol. i, pp. xix–xliv. 14 For example Arturo Calzona, ‘Leon Battista Alberti e Luciano Laurana: da Mantova a Urbino o da Urbino a Mantova?’, in

337

References

Francesco Paolo Fiore, Francesco di Giorgio alla corte di Federico da Montefeltro (Florence, 2004), vol. ii, pp. 491–2. 15 For an English translation, here used with modifications, see Field, Piero, pp. 350–51. 16 On the drawings in Piero’s home, see Eugenio Battisti, Piero della Francesca (Milan, 1971), vol. ii, p. 246 doc. ccxxxix; James R. Banker, Documenti fondamentali per la conoscenza della vita e dell’arte di Piero della Francesca (Selci-Lama, 2013), pp. 204–5 doc. cclxi. 17 On Francesco di Giorgio’s translation of Vitruvius at Urbino (and not previously, at Siena), see Massimo Mussini, ‘Siena e Urbino: origini e sviluppo della trattatistica martiniana’, in Fiore, Francesco, pp. 319–24. 18 On the architectural nature of Piero’s treatises and drawings, see Davis, ‘Piero’s Treatises’, pp. 139–51; Francesco P. Di Teodoro, introduction to Piero, Libellus, vol. ii, esp. pp. xv–xviii; Francesco P. Di Teodoro, ‘Il disegno di architettura, Piero della Francesca e la linea teorica nel mare magnum della prassi’, in Piero della Francesca: il disegno tra arte e scienza, ed. Filippo Camerota, Francesco P. Di Teodoro and Luigi Grasselli, exh. cat., Palazzo Magnani, Reggio Emilia (Milan, 2015), pp. 52–71. 19 See, in general, the introductions to Piero della Francesca, De prospectiva pingendi: testo volgare (Rome, 2016) and Piero, De prospectiva pingendi: testo latino. 20 On its intended audience, see Lucia Bertolini, ‘Appunti su cronologia e circolazione del De prospectiva pingendi’, in Piero, ed. Camerota and Di Teodoro, pp. 30–31. 21 Mario Salmi, La pittura di Piero della Francesca (Novara, 1979), p. 199; Alessandro Angelini, Piero della Francesca (Milan, 2014), p. 344 (with attribution of the miniatures to Bartolomeo della Gatta); Piero, De prospectiva pingendi: testo latino, vol. i, p. 5. 22 James R. Banker, ‘The Mystery of Piero della Francesca’s Presumed Urbino Manuscript of De prospectiva pingendi’, 1492: rivista della Fondazione Piero della Francesca, iv–v (2011–12), pp. 7–13. For Leonardo’s presence, see also Peterson, Galileo’s Muse, p. 147. 23 Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven, ct, and London, 1985), pp. 111–13.

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24 See the contributions by Riccardo Migliari in Piero, De prospectiva pingendi: testo volgare and Piero, De prospectiva pingendi: testo latino. 25 Jill Burke, The Italian Renaissance Nude (New Haven, ct, and London, 2018), p. 27.

9 Patron 1 Giovanni Dominici, Humilis contemplatio in canticum canticorum Gloriose Virginis, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barb. lat. 732, fol. 12v: ‘Sic pictor quidam perfectus in arte sua qui in camera tua quandam pulcherrimam ymaginem pingit, si eum vis magnificare permittas ipsum qualecumque et quandoque quandocumque vult operari tu autem non ponas in eam manum, nec sinas aliquem ponere et non attribuas tibi vel alteri, sed soli magistro prefato aliquid illius picture. Sic enim magnificas eum quando laudatur ab omni intuente et nullus alius illius honorem usurpat, vides quod totum hoc fit ex humilitate magnificantis cum neque utatur suo velle neque falso ascribitur alteri alterius gloriam neque sibi et tamen nihil addit ad ipsum magnum magistrum. Sic per humilitatem Marie magnificatur Dominus qui est magnus et magnitudinis eius non est finis.’ I thank Agata Pincelli for the transcription. 2 On Piero’s house in Borgo, see Mario Salmi, ‘La casa di Piero della Francesca’, Commentari, xxvi (1975), pp. 276–96; Mario Salmi, La pittura di Piero della Francesca (Novara, 1979), pp. 187–90; James R. Banker, The Culture of San Sepolcro during the Youth of Piero della Francesca (Ann Arbor, mi, 2003), pp. 97–8, 121; James R. Banker, Documenti fondamentali per la conoscenza della vita e dell’arte di Piero della Francesca (Selci-Lama, 2013), p. 98 doc. cxviii; James R. Banker, Piero della Francesca: Artist and Man (Oxford, 2014), p. 156. 3 Eugenio Battisti, Piero della Francesca (Milan, 1971), vol. ii, pp. 242–3 doc. ccxvi and 240 doc. cciv (suggesting that the part along the via delle Giunte was the house’s later addition). 4 For Graziani’s restoration, see Antonio Maria Graziani (1537–1611), De scriptis invita Minerva . . . (Florence, 1745–6), vol. i, p. 42. 5 Battisti, Piero, vol. ii, p. 244 doc. ccxxviii. Also note 17 below.

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References

6 Banker, Piero, pp. 98–100, 209. For the Pichi chapel, see Andrea Di Lorenzo, ‘La cappella Pichi, la Fraternita di San Bartolomeo e Piero della Francesca’, in Andrea Di Lorenzo, Cecilia Martelli and Matteo Mazzalupi, La Badia di Sansepolcro nel Quattrocento (Selci-Lama, 2012), pp. 78–9. 7 Battisti, Piero, vol. ii, p. 228 doc. xcii; Banker, Documenti, pp. 108 doc. cxxx (‘palatio et turre Abbastie’), 187–90 doc. ccxliii; Banker, Piero, pp. 115, 117, 119, 123–4, 156, 209. 8 Nathaniel Silver, in Nathaniel Silver, Piero della Francesca in America: From Sansepolcro to the East Coast, exh. cat., Frick Collection, New York (2013), pp. 123–7. 9 Evelyn [Marini Franceschi], Piero della Francesca: ‘Monarca della Pittura ai suoi di’ (Città di Castello, 1912), p. 129; Roberto Longhi, Piero della Francesca [1927] (Florence, 1963), p. 57. 10 Leon Battista Alberti, De re aedificatoria, ed. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, ma, and London, 1988), p. 299. 11 Matthias Winner, ‘Der eherne Herkules Victor auf dem Kapitol’, in Hülle und Fülle: Festschrift für Tilmann Buddensieg, ed. Andreas Beyer, Gunter Schweikhart and Vittorio Lampugnani (Alfter, 1993), pp. 629–42. 12 Giovanni Agosti and Jacopo Stoppa, in Bramantino a Milano, ed. Giovanni Agosti, Jacopo Stoppa and Marco Tanzi, exh. cat., Castello Sforzesco, Milan (2012), pp. 110–21 cat. 3 (as Bramantino). 13 Roberto Bellucci et al., in From Filippo Lippi to Piero della Francesca: Fra Carnevale and the Making of a Renaissance Master, ed. Keith Christiansen, exh. cat., Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (New Haven, ct, 2005), pp. 271–7 cat. 47. 14 Frank Dabell, ‘Florence 1837: A Note on the Provenance of the Williamstown Madonna by Piero della Francesca’, 1492: rivista della Fondazione Piero della Francesca, ii (2009), pp. 67–71. 15 Battisti, Piero, vol. ii, p. 246 doc. ccxli. 16 Samuel Y. Edgerton and Thomas J. Loughman, ‘The Spiritual Space of Piero della Francesca’s Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Angels: A New Understanding of Its Mysterious Perspective’, I Tatti Studies, xviii (2015), pp. 33–60.

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17 Battisti, Piero, vol. ii, pp. 239–46 docs ccxxviii (for the Adoration and the painting of Marian scenes), ccxxx, ccxxxvii (for two unfinished paintings of the ‘Nun[p]tiata’) and ccxxxix (for the Nativity, a painting of the ‘Nuntiata’, an unfinished St Jerome, drawings and books; the date of the document given as 1515 by Battisti, corrected in 1514 by Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, Artists’ Art in the Renaissance (London, 2009), p. 54 note 13). 18 Lavin, Artists’ Art, pp. 49–83; Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, ‘Piero’s Meditation on the Nativity’, in Piero della Francesca and His Legacy, ed. Marilyn Aronberg Lavin (Washington, dc, 1995), pp. 126–41. 19 Evelyn, Piero, p. 135. 20 The National Gallery’s unpublished conservation report of 1950 mentions, for example, the highlights in the faces of the shepherds. Also Martin Davies, The Earlier Italian Schools (London, 1961), pp. 433–4. Nicholas Penny, ‘Piero della Francesca in the National Gallery’, in Piero interpretato: copie, giudizi e musealizzazione di Piero della Francesca, ed. Cecilia Prete and Ranieri Varese (Ancona, 1998), pp. 187, 190 suggests that following the expensive acquisition the gallery preferred to describe the painting as unfinished, rather than admit its condition was compromised. 21 On Piero’s Virgin and female dress in the 1480s, see Jane Bridgeman, ‘“Troppo belli e troppo eccellenti”: Observations on Dress in the Work of Piero della Francesca’, in The Cambridge Companion to Piero della Francesca, ed. Jeryldene M. Wood (Cambridge, 2002), p. 82. 22 Douglas Alton Smith, A History of the Lute from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Lexington, va, 2002), p. 40 (Tinctoris quote); Emanuela Vai, ‘La musica al tempo di Piero della Francesca: alcune riflessioni tra Arte e Scienza’, in Piero della Francesca: il disegno tra arte e scienza, ed. Filippo Camerota, Francesco P. Di Teodoro and Luigi Grasselli, exh. cat., Palazzo Magnani, Reggio Emilia (Milan, 2015), pp. 109–19. 23 Giovanni Agosti and Jacopo Stoppa, in Bramantino, ed. Agosti, Stoppa and Tanzi, pp. 90–99.

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References

10 Monarch 1 Antonio Paolucci, in Il Tempio Malatestiano a Rimini, ed. Antonio Paolucci (Modena, 2010), p. 224. 2 James R. Banker, Piero della Francesca: Artist and Man (Oxford, 2014), pp. 211–14. 3 Eugenio Battisti, Piero della Francesca (Milan, 1971), vol. ii, pp. 246 doc. ccxl, 251. 4 J. P. Richter, The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci (London, 1939), vol. ii, p. 354 no. 1417; Carmen Bambach Cappel, ‘On “La testa proportionalmente degradata”: Luca Signorelli, Leonardo, and Piero della Francesca’s De prospectiva pingendi’, in Florentine Drawing at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent, ed. Elizabeth Cropper (Bologna, 1994), pp. 17–43. 5 Giovanni Pagliarulo, ‘Un nuovo documento seicentesco sulla dispersione del polittico agostiniano di Piero della Francesca’, Renaissance Studies in Honor of Joseph Connors, ed. Machtelt Israëls and Louis A. Waldman (Florence, 2013), vol. i, pp. 187–95; Frank Dabell, ‘Sfortuna critica e fortuna “nascosta” del Polittico della Misericordia: vicende documentarie tra Cinquecento e Seicento’, in Ripensando Piero della Francesca e il Polittico della Misericordia di Sansepolcro, ed. Mariangela Betti, Cecilia Frosinini and Paola Refice (Florence, 2010), p. 32; Machtelt Brüggen Israëls, ‘The First Known Record of Piero della Francesca’s “Flagellation of Christ” and the Question of Its Inscription’, Burlington Magazine, clxi (2019), pp. 488–91. 6 Cristina Camaiti, ‘Vincenzo Chialli e il mito di Piero della Francesca: note su due inedite scene di genere storico-prospettico’, Commentari d’arte, xiii (2007), pp. 63–8. 7 Luciano Cheles, ‘La Rédecouverte de Piero della Francesca à travers le regard vasarien’, in La Réception des ‘vite’ de Giorgio Vasari dans l’Europe des xvie–xviiie siècles, ed. Corinne Lucas Fiorato and Pascale Dubus (Geneva, 2017), pp. 427–48; Antonio Paolucci et al., eds, Piero della Francesca: indagine su un mito, exh. cat., Musei San Domenico, Forlì (Cinisello Balsamo, 2016); Anne B. Barriault, ‘Piero’s Parnassus of Modern Painters and Poets’, in The Cambridge Companion to Piero della Francesca, ed. Jeryldene M.

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Wood (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 171–91; John Wilton-Ely, ‘The Fortunes of Piero della Francesca in Britain and the United States of America’, in Piero della Francesca tra arte e scienza, ed. Marisa Dalai Emiliani and Valter Curzi (Venice, 1996), pp. 555–67; Luciano Cheles, ‘Piero della Francesca in Nineteenth-century Britain’, Italianist, xiv (1994), pp. 218–60; Piero della Francesca e il novecento, ed. Maria Mimita Lamberti and Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, exh. cat., Museo Civico, Sansepolcro (Venice, 1991); Roberto Longhi, ‘Fortuna storica di Piero della Francesca’, in Roberto Longhi, Piero della Francesca [1927] (Florence, 1963), pp. 115–52. 8 See Caroline Elam’s Roger Fry and the Re-evaluation of Piero della Francesca (New York, 2004); ‘Roger Fry e l’amore per Piero della Francesca in Inghilterra: Cambridge, Bloomsbury e la Slade School’, in Piero, ed. Paolucci, pp. 315–23; and Roger Fry and Italian Art (London, 2019), pp. 213–38 (219 for the quote). 9 Maria Mimita Lamberti, ‘Le campagne di Piero: Longhi, Soffici, Morandi’, in Piero, ed. Mimita Lamberti and Fagiolo dell’Arco, pp. 21–33.

bibliography

Angelini, Alessandro, Piero della Francesca (Milan, 2014) Banker, James R., The Culture of San Sepolcro during the Youth of Piero della Francesca (Ann Arbor, mi, 2003) —, Piero della Francesca: Artist and Man (Oxford, 2014) —, Documenti fondamentali per la conoscenza della vita e dell’arte di Piero della Francesca (Selci-Lama, 2013) Battisti, Eugenio, Piero della Francesca (Milan, 1971) and ed. Marisa Dalai Emiliani (Milan, 1992) Betti, Mariangela, Cecilia Frosinini and Paola Refice, eds, Ripensando Piero della Francesca e il polittico della misericordia di Sansepolcro (Florence, 2010) Camerota, Filippo, Francesco P. Di Teodoro and Luigi Grasselli, eds, Piero della Francesca: il disegno tra arte e scienza, exh. cat., Palazzo Magnani, Reggio Emilia (Milan, 2015) Christiansen, Keith, et al., Piero della Francesca: Personal Encounters, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2014) Daffra, Emanuela, and Filippo Trevisani, eds, La pala di San Bernardino di Piero della Francesca: nuovi studi oltre il restauro (Florence, 1997) Dal Poggetto, Paolo, ed., Piero e Urbino, Piero e le corti rinascimentali, exh. cat., Palazzo Ducale, Urbino (Venice, 1992) Davis, Margaret Daly, Piero della Francesca’s Mathematical Treatises: The ‘Trattato d’abaco’ and ‘Libellus de quinque corporibus regularibus’ (Ravenna, 1977) Di Lorenzo, Andrea, ed., Il polittico agostiniano di Piero della Francesca (Turin, 1996) Field, Judith V., Piero della Francesca: A Mathematician’s Art

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(New Haven, ct, and London, 2005) Garibaldi, Vittoria, ed., Piero della Francesca: il polittico di Sant’Antonio (Perugia, 1993) Lavin, Marilyn Aronberg, Piero della Francesca (London, 2002) —, ed., Piero della Francesca and His Legacy (Washington, dc, 1995) Lightbown, Ronald, Piero della Francesca (London, 1992) Piero della Francesca, De prospectiva pingendi: testo latino (Rome, 2017) —, De prospectiva pingendi: testo volgare (Rome, 2016) —, Libellus de quinque corporibus regularibus (Prato, 1995) —, Trattato d’abaco (Rome, 2012) Piero della Francesca: la Madonna del Parto. Restauro e iconografia, exh. cat., Monterchi (Venice, 1993) Salmi, Mario, La pittura di Piero della Francesca (Novara, 1979) Silver, Nathaniel, Piero della Francesca in America: From Sansepolcro to the East Coast, exh. cat., Frick Collection, New York (2013) Wood, Jeryldene M., ed., The Cambridge Companion to Piero della Francesca (Cambridge, 2002)

acknowledgements

This book builds on two centuries of scholarship and on the inspiration of students, colleagues, friends and family. I am grateful to all four hundred students in the course on Piero at the University of Amsterdam in 2017, in particular Lena van Drie, Rosa Hoogenboom, Charley Ladee, Nora Felix-le Poole, Henriëtte Richters, Mélanie Struik and Nienke Valk, for the quickening of mind that ensued from their perceptions. James and Maureen Banker magnanimously shared their Piero. James Banker and Joseph Connors read the manuscript and enriched it with their comments. This book owes much treasured insight and support to them and to Alessandro Angelini, Rémy Baudet, Roberto Bellucci, Mariangela Betti, Rachel Billinge, Kees Boeke, Lina Bolzoni, Luciana Borri Cristelli, Eve Borsook, Luigi Bravi, Francesco Caglioti, Caroline Campbell, Ciro Castelli, Rossella Cavigli, Matteo Ceriana, Keith Christiansen, Donal Cooper, Frank Dabell, Emanuela Daffra, Andrea De Marchi, Charles Dempsey, Andrea Di Lorenzo, Francesco Di Teodoro, Samuel Edgerton, Sabine Eiche, Caroline Elam, Gabriele Fattorini, Jill Feldman, Cecilia Frosinini, Andrea Gori, monsignor Eugenio Gregoratto, Babette Hartwieg, Tom Henry, Fred Jacobs, Joost Keizer, Bram Kempers, Arjan de Koomen, Ada Labriola, Michael Lowe, Mauro Lucco, Serena Magnani, Federico Marcucci, Cecilia Martelli, Matteo Mazzalupi, Michela Meoni, Mauro Minardi, Scott Nethersole, Alessandro Nova, Henk van Os, Feliciano Paoli, Gianfranco Pocobene, Guido Rebecchini, Rien de Reede, Paola Refice, Bernhard Ridderbos, Michael Rocke, Neville Rowley, Patricia Rubin, Andrea Santacesaria, Umberto Senserini, Nathaniel Silver, Marco Spallanzani, Carl Strehlke, Federica Toniolo and Hugo van der Velden.

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I am beholden to the late George Labalme for the otherworldly way in which, in memory of a drink with his late wife Patricia Hochschild Labalme under the Sassetta at Villa I Tatti, he has supported my work. I owe debts beyond words to Pjotr and Gerke Israëls-Zandstra, for being the most ideal parents one could possibly imagine and for introducing me as a child to Piero. This book could only be written because of the love, esprit and genius of my daughters, Zephyr Brüggen and Eos Brüggen, and because of their discussions of life, classics and art.

list of illustrations

All dimensions are in centimetres 1 Piero della Francesca, Trumpet Player, detail of illus. 35. 2 Piero della Francesca, The Baptism of Christ, c. 1442–5, egg tempera and gold on poplar, 167 × 116. The National Gallery, London. Photo: © The National Gallery, London. 3 Hypothetical reconstruction of the high altarpiece of San Giovanni Battista in Val d’Afra in Borgo started by Piero della Francesca in about 1442–5 (see illus. 2) and finished by Matteo di Giovanni in the late 1450s, egg tempera and gold on poplar, width 352 (Museo Civico, Sansepolcro). Montage: author. 4 Workshop of Pisanello, drawing after Gentile da Fabriano’s nowlost Baptism of Christ in San Giovanni in Laterano in Rome, 1431–2, metal point and ink on parchment, 18.3 × 25.9. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: © rmn-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre). Jean-Gilles Berizzi. 5 Masolino, central panel of the back of the Santa Maria Maggiore Altarpiece: Miraculous Foundation of Santa Maria Maggiore, 1428–30, egg tempera and tooled gold on poplar, 144.5 × 76.0. Museo di Capodimonte, Naples. Photo: © Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali – Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte. Luciano Romano. 6 Reconstruction of the Resurrection Altarpiece for the abbey (now cathedral) of San Giovanni Evangelista in Borgo by Niccolò di Segna, after 1348, egg tempera and gold on poplar, width c. 375. Montage: author. 7 Reconstruction of the Borgo San Sepolcro Altarpiece (or Franciscan Altarpiece) by Sassetta, front and back, 1437–44, egg tempera and

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tooled gold and silver on poplar, c. 604 × 450. Reconstruction by Machtelt Brüggen Israëls et al. Three-dimensional drawing by Andrea Santacesaria, Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Florence. Rendering by Giacomo Tenti, Culturanuova, Arezzo. © Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. 8 Pisanello, portrait medal: Emperor John viii Palaeologus with on the reverse The Emperor and a Member of His Retinue on Horseback, c. 1438–43, cast bronze, Ø 10.3. The British Museum, London. Photo: © Trustees of the British Museum. 9 Pisanello, Figures from the Retinue of Emperor John viii Palaeologus, the Emperor on Horseback, Head of a Horse and an Arabic Inscription, 1438, pen and ink on paper, 20.0 × 28.9. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: © rmn-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre). Michel Urtado. 10 Domenico Veneziano, sinopia from Sant’Egidio in Florence: The Marriage of the Virgin, c. 1439–45, sinoper on plaster, 73 × 215. Museo del Cenacolo di Sant’Apollonia, Florence. 11 Paolo Uccello, Niccolò Mauruzi da Tolentino at the Battle of San Romano, c. 1436–40, egg tempera and oil on poplar, 182 × 320. The National Gallery, London. Photo: see illus. 2. 12 Michele da Firenze, Altarpiece of the Statuettes, 1440–41, polychrome terracotta, 590 × 403. Modena Cathedral. Photo: Modena, Archivio fotografico del Museo Civico d’Arte. Ghigo Roli. 13 Venetian artist working for Ferrara, after Piero della Francesca (?), Battle Scene, c. 1530–40, oil on panel, 85.2 × 72.6. The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. Photo: © The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. 14 Northern Italian artist, after Piero della Francesca (?), Battle Scene, c. 1530–40, oil on panel, 71.1 × 94.6. The National Gallery, London. Photo: see illus. 2. 15 Ancient Roman sculptor, front of a sarcophagus: The Fall of Phaeton, 2nd century ad, marble, width 179. The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. Photo: © The State Hermitage Museum. Leonard Kheifets. 16 Jan van Eyck, bas-de-page of fol. 93v of the Turin-Milan Hours: The Baptism of Christ, 1422–5 (?), egg tempera and gold on parchment, overall 28.4 × 20.3. Museo Civico d’Arte Antica, Turin.

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17 Central Italian artist, after Piero della Francesca (?), King Alfonso v of Aragon, called the Magnanimous, 1450s, egg tempera on panel, 90 × 71. Musée Jacquemart-André – Institut de France, Paris. Photo: © Studio Sébert Photographes. 18 Artist active in Ferrara at the design of Piero della Francesca, Polyhymnia, after 1447, egg tempera on panel, 116.6 × 70.5. Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. Photo: © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Gemäldegalerie. Christoph Schmidt. 19 Nicola di maestro Antonio, Ferretti Altarpiece: Virgin and Child Enthroned with Sts Leonard, Jerome, John the Baptist and Francis with in the lunette St Jerome in Penance before the Crucifix, 1472, egg tempera on panel. Respectively Pittsburgh, Carnegie Museum of Art and Turin, Galleria Sabauda. Montage: Matteo Mazzalupi. Photo: Andrea De Marchi and Matteo Mazzalupi, eds, Pittori ad Ancona nel Quattrocento (Milan: Federico Motta Editore, 2008), p. 228, reproduced by kind permission of Matteo Mazzalupi. 20 Piero della Francesca, St Jerome in the Wilderness, 1450, egg tempera on chestnut, 59.0 × 45.7. Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. Photo: see illus. 18. 21 Matteo de’ Pasti at the design of Piero della Francesca (?), portrait medal: Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta with on the reverse Castel Sismondo in Rimini, dated 1446, made c. 1449–51, cast bronze, Ø 8.0. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Photo: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 22 Piero della Francesca, Portrait of Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, c. 1451, egg tempera and oil on chestnut, 44.5 × 34.5. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: © Musée du Louvre, Dist. rmn-Grand Palais. Martine Beck-Coppola. 23 Piero della Francesca, Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta Kneeling before St Sigismund, 1451, fresco, egg tempera and oil on plaster (detached), 257 × 345. Tempio Malatestiano, Rimini. Photo: © Gilberto Urbinati. 24 The main chapel of the church of San Francesco in Arezzo with murals by Bicci di Lorenzo of 1447–52 and Piero della Francesca of c. 1452–7 and the Cross by the Master of St Francis of the 1270s. Photo: Su concessione del Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali – Soprintendenza Archeologia Belle Arti e Paesaggio per le province di Siena Grosseto e Arezzo. Alessandro Benci.

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25 Scheme of the decoration in the main chapel of San Francesco in Arezzo. Photo: Alessandro Angelini, Piero della Francesca (Milan: 24 ore cultura, 2014), pp. 156–7, reproduced by kind permission of Alessandro Angelini and the publisher, with adjusted dado. 26 Piero della Francesca with Giovanni da Piamonte, Enoch and Piero della Francesca, Elias, c. 1452–7, fresco, egg tempera and oil on wall, each c. 245 × 165. San Francesco, Arezzo. Photo: see illus. 24. 27 Piero della Francesca, The Death of Adam, c. 1452–7, fresco, egg tempera and oil on wall, c. 390 × 747. San Francesco, Arezzo. Photo: see illus. 24. 28 Piero della Francesca, The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba and Meeting of the Queen of Sheba with King Solomon, c. 1452–7, fresco, egg tempera and oil on wall, c. 356 × 747. San Francesco, Arezzo. Photo: see illus. 24. 29 Piero della Francesca with Giovanni da Piamonte, The Burial of the Wood, c. 1452–7, fresco, egg tempera and oil on wall, c. 356 × 190. San Francesco, Arezzo. Photo: see illus. 24. 30 Piero della Francesca, The Annunciation, c. 1452–7, fresco, egg tempera and oil on wall, c. 329 × 193. San Francesco, Arezzo. Photo: see illus. 24. 31 Piero della Francesca, The Vision of Constantine, c. 1452–7, fresco, egg tempera and oil on wall, c. 329 × 190. San Francesco, Arezzo. Photo: see illus. 24. 32 Piero della Francesca, The Encounter of Constantine and Maxentius, c. 1452–57, fresco, egg tempera and oil on wall, c. 329 × 764. San Francesco, Arezzo. Photo: see illus. 24. 33 Piero della Francesca with Giovanni da Piamonte, The Raising of Judas, c. 1452–7, fresco, egg tempera and oil on wall, c. 356 × 193. San Francesco, Arezzo. Photo: see illus. 24. 34 Piero della Francesca, The Discovery and Trial of the Crosses, c. 1452–7, fresco, egg tempera and oil on wall, c. 356 × 747. San Francesco, Arezzo. Photo: see illus. 24. 35 Piero della Francesca, The Battle of Heraclius and the Beheading of Chosroes, c. 1452–57, fresco, egg tempera and oil on wall, c. 329 × 747. San Francesco, Arezzo. Photo: see illus. 24. 36 Piero della Francesca, Heraclius Returns the Cross to Jerusalem, c. 1452–7, fresco, egg tempera and oil on wall, c. 390 × 747. San Francesco, Arezzo. Photo: see illus. 24.

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37 Piero della Francesca, The Flagellation of Christ, and Joseph of Arimathea Asking Pilate for the Body of Christ, c. 1456–7, egg tempera and oil on poplar, 67.5 × 91.0. Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino. Photo: Su concessione del Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali e del turismo – Galleria Nazionale delle Marche – Urbino, Archivio fotografico. 38 Simon Bening, detached leaf from the prayer book of the Enriquez de Ribera family: Joseph of Arimathea Asking Pilate for the Body of Christ, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, Deposition and Lamentation, c. 1508–9, egg tempera, gold paint and gold leaf on parchment, 12.9 × 8.5. Les Enluminures, Paris. Photo: Les Enluminures, Paris. 39 Taddeo di Bartolo, painted dado: Blocks, 1406–7, fresco. Cappella dei Signori, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena. Photo: Lensini, Siena. 40 Piero della Francesca with Giovanni da Piamonte, St Luke, c. 1459, mural painting. Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome. Photo: De Agostini Picture Library. G. Nimatallah/Bridgeman Images. 41 Piero della Francesca, Misericordia Altarpiece, 1460–62, gold, egg tempera and oil on poplar, c. 265 × 315. Museo Civico, Sansepolcro. Main tier, left to right: Sts Sebastian and John the Baptist, Virgin of Mercy, Sts John the Evangelist and Bernardino of Siena. Top tier, left to right: St Benedict, Annunciating Angel, Crucifixion, Virgin Annunciate, St Francis. Predella, left to right: Noli me Tangere, The Three Maries at the Tomb, The Deposition, The Flagellation, The Agony in the Garden. Left pier, top to bottom: St Jerome, St Anthony of Padua, St Arcano, monogram of the Misericordia. Right pier, top to bottom, St Augustine, St Dominic, St Egidio, monogram of the Misericordia. Montage: author. 42 Piero della Francesca, Central panel of the Misericordia Altarpiece: Virgin of Mercy, 1460–62, gold, egg tempera and oil on poplar, 168.0 × 91.0. Museo Civico, Sansepolcro. Photo: Museo Civico, Sansepolcro. Enzo Mattei. 43 Piero della Francesca, fur lining of the mantle of the Virgin overlapping the gold, detail of illus. 42. Photo: Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Florence. 44 Piero della Francesca with Lorentino d’Andrea, St Louis of Toulouse, 1460, fresco and egg tempera on plaster (detached from the Palazzo del Capitano in Borgo), 123 × 90. Museo Civico, Sansepolcro. Photo: see illus. 42.

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45 Remigio Cantagallina (1575–1656; attr.), View of the Square in front of the Badia in Borgo, technique, dimensions and present whereabouts unknown. Photo: Luciana Borri Cristelli, ‘Il Palazzo della Residenza e la Resurrezione di Piero della Francesca’, in Quaderno della cattedra di storia dell’arte: Ricerche su Piero (Arrezzo: Università degli studi di Siena, 1989), p. 13 fig. 6, reproduced by kind permission of Luciana Borri Cristelli. 46 Piero della Francesca, The Resurrection of Christ, c. 1462, fresco, egg tempera and oil on brick wall (detached and inserted in a new wall), c. 225 × 200. Palazzo della Residenza (Museo Civico), Sansepolcro. Photo: Museo Civico, Sansepolcro. 47 Piero della Francesca, St Jerome and a Supplicant, c. 1462–4, egg tempera and oil on poplar, 49.4 × 42.0. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice. Photo: Archivio Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Florence. 48 Piero della Francesca, St Julian, early 1450s, fresco, egg tempera and oil on plaster (detached from Sant’Agostino in Borgo), 135 × 105. Museo Civico, Sansepolcro. Photo: see illus. 42. 49 Piero della Francesca, Madonna del Parto, early 1460s, fresco, egg tempera and oil on plaster (detached from Santa Maria in Momentana in Monterchi), 260 × 203. Museo Madonna del Parto, Monterchi. Photo: see illus. 24. 50 Piero della Francesca, St Mary Magdalene, mid-1460s, fresco, egg tempera and oil on wall, 190 × 105. Arezzo Cathedral. Photo: see illus. 24. 51 Piero della Francesca (?), Fragment of St Donatus Enthroned (?): entablature and Corinthian capitals, early 1470s, mural, width of wall 474. Northern portico of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Arezzo. Photo: see illus. 39. 52 Piero della Francesca, Altarpiece for Sant’Antonio da Padova in Perugia, finished 1468, egg tempera, oil and gold on poplar, 352 × 212. Perugia, Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria. Main tier: Virgin and Child Enthroned with Sts Anthony of Padua, John the Baptist, Francis of Assisi and Elizabeth of Hungary. Lunette: Annunciation. Upper predella: Sts Clare and Agatha. Lower predella, left to right: A Miracle of St Anthony of Padua, The Stigmatization of St Francis and A Miracle of St Elizabeth. Photo: © Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria. 53 Reconstruction of the Augustinian Altarpiece for Sant’Agostino in Borgo by Piero della Francesca, 1468–9, gold, egg tempera and oil

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55

56

57

58

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on poplar, width c. 420. Main tier, left to right: St Augustine (Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon), St Michael Archangel (National Gallery, London), Coronation of the Virgin (?) (unidentified or lost), St John the Evangelist (Frick Collection, New York), St Nicholas of Tolentino (Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan). Predella: Crucifixion (Frick Collection, New York). Left pier, side (not visible in illus.): St Apollonia (National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc), front: St Monica (Frick Collection, New York). Right pier, front: Blessed Angelo Scarpetti (?) (Frick Collection, New York). Montage: Nathaniel Silver, with adjusted predella. Piero della Francesca, St Augustine, 1468–9, egg tempera and oil on poplar, 132.2 × 57.7 (excluding additions). Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon. Photo: © Direção-Geral do Património Cultural / Arquivo e Documentação Fotográfica. Luis Piorro. Piero della Francesca, St Michael Archangel, 1468–9, egg tempera and oil on poplar, 133.0 × 59.5. The National Gallery, London. Photo: see illus. 2. Giovanni Bellini, Altarpiece for San Francesco in Pesaro, c. 1472–5, oil on panel. Main tier: The Coronation of the Virgin, 262 × 240. Musei Civici, Pesaro. Top tier: Pietà, or the Embalming of the Body of Christ, 107 × 84. Musei Vaticani, Vatican City. Montage: Mauro Lucco. Montage by Mauro Lucco in Giovanni Bellini, ed. Mauro Lucco and Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa, exh. cat. Scuderie del Quirinale, Rome (Milan: Cinisello Balsamo, 2008), p. 191, reproduced by kind permission of Mauro Lucco. Baldassare Peruzzi, drawing: Interior of San Bernardino near Urbino, c. 1513, pen and brown ink, with brown wash, over black chalk on paper, 28.7 × 21.5. Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe, Florence. Photo: © Gabinetto Fotografico, Gallerie degli Uffizi. Thirteenth-century church of San Donato (left) and Luciano Laurana and Francesco di Giorgio Martini, San Bernardino (right), late 1460s–80s, near Urbino. Photo: Diego Baglieri. Hypothetical reconstruction of the interior of San Bernardino near Urbino with the coffins of Federico and Guidubaldo di Montefeltro flanking Piero della Francesca’s Montefeltro Altarpiece (illus. 60) reconstructed in a Renaissance frame based on illus. 56. Rendering: author.

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60 Piero della Francesca, Montefeltro Altarpiece: Virgin and Child with Four Angels, Federico di Montefeltro and Sts John the Baptist, Bernardino of Siena, Jerome, Francis, Peter Martyr and John the Evangelist, c. 1469–71, egg tempera and oil on poplar, c. 251 × 173. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. Photo: Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. Su concessione del Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali. 61 Piero della Francesca, cross in the hand of St Francis, detail of illus. 60. Photo: see illus. 60. 62 Piero della Francesca, sleeping Christ child, detail of illus. 60. Photo: see illus. 60. 63 Workshop of Rogier van der Weyden, Sforza Triptych, 1458, oil on panel. Central panel: Crucifixion with the Mourning Virgin and St John the Evangelist and the Kneeling Costanzo, Battista and Alessandro Sforza, 53.7 × 44.8. Wings: Annunciation and Sts Bavo and Francis and Sts John the Baptist, Catherine and Barbara, 53.7 × 19.0 (each). Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels. Photo: © rmfab, Brussels. J. Geleyns – Art Photography. 64 Piero della Francesca, the hands of Federico di Montefeltro, detail of illus. 60, in infrared reflectography and in photography. Photo: see illus. 60. 65 Piero della Francesca, Portrait of Battista Sforza, c. 1472, egg tempera and oil on panel, c. 47 × 33. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Photo: © Gabinetto Fotografico, Gallerie degli Uffizi. 66 Piero della Francesca, Portrait of Federico di Montefeltro, c. 1472, egg tempera and oil on panel, c. 47 × 33. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Photo: see illus. 65. 67 Piero della Francesca, The Triumph of Federico di Montefeltro and Fame (reverse of illus. 66), c. 1472, egg tempera and oil on panel, c. 47 × 33. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Photo: see illus. 65. 68 Piero della Francesca, The Triumph of Battista Sforza and Pudicitia (reverse of illus. 65), c. 1472, egg tempera and oil on panel, c. 47 × 33. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Photo: see illus. 65. 69 Piero della Francesca, Senigallia Madonna: Virgin and Child with Two Angels in a Domestic Interior, c. 1478, egg tempera and oil on walnut, 62.7 × 53.8. Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino. Photo: see illus. 37. 70 Piero della Francesca, handwriting and drawing, and an unidentified calligrapher, initial: S, late 1470s, pen and ink on paper, Works of

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72

73

74

75

76

77

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Archimedes, Biblioteca Riccardiana, Florence, Lat. 106, fol. 1r. Photo: © Biblioteca Riccardiana, Florence. Donato Pineider. Piero della Francesca, text and handwriting, mid-1460s, and a Ferrarese or Bolognese epigon of Taddeo Crivelli, miniatures, c. 1480, pen and ink and gold and egg tempera on paper, Trattato d’abaco, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, Ashburnham 359*, frontispiece. Photo: see illus. 70. Piero della Francesca, text, handwriting and drawing, mid-1460s, and unidentified calligrapher, initial: L, c. 1480, pen and ink on paper, Trattato d’abaco, mid-1460s, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, Ashburnham 359*, fol. 91v. Photo: see illus. 70. Stamped leather binding, c. 1480, of Piero della Francesca, Trattato d’abaco, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, Ashburnham 359*. Photo: see illus. 70. Piero della Francesca, text and drawing: Inclusion of an Icosahedron in a Cube, and unidentified scribe, handwriting, pen and ink on parchment, Libellus de quinque corporibus regolaribus, c. 1482, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Urb. lat. 632, fol. 40v. Photo: Per concessione della Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, ogni diritto riservato. © 2019 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. Bartolomeo della Gatta or an artist close to him, unfinished miniature: Frieze with a Candelabrum Surmounted by the Montefeltro Eagle, c. 1475–82, and unidentified scribe, handwriting, egg tempera and ink on paper, Piero della Francesca, De prospectiva pingendi, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, C307 inf., fol. 41v. Photo: © Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana/Mondadori Portfolio. Piero della Francesca, text, handwriting and drawing: The Foreshortening of a Cube Placed at an Angle, c. 1475–7, pen and ink on paper, De prospectiva pingendi, Biblioteca Palatina, Complesso monumentale della Pilotta, Parma, 1576, fol. 18r. Photo: Su concessione del Ministero per i Beni e le attività culturali. Piero della Francesca, A Human Head in Profile, Frontal and Sectional View, c. 1475–7, pen and ink on paper, De prospectiva pingendi, Biblioteca Palatina, Complesso monumentale della Pilotta, Parma, 1576, fol. 59v. Photo: see illus. 76. Piero della Francesca, A Human Head in Profile, Frontal and Sectional View with Coordinates of Significant Points, c. 1475–7, pen and ink on paper,

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De prospectiva pingendi, Biblioteca Palatina, Complesso monumentale della Pilotta, Parma, 1576, fol. 61r. Photo: see illus. 76. 79 Piero della Francesca, The Coordinates of Sectional Views of the Human Head as Seen from a Fixed Viewpoint and Projected on a Picture Plane, c. 1475–7, pen and ink on paper, De prospectiva pingendi, Biblioteca Palatina, Complesso monumentale della Pilotta, Parma, 1576, fol. 63v. Photo: see illus. 76. 80 Piero della Francesca, The Coordinates of a Profile View of the Human Head Seen from a Fixed Viewpoint and Projected on a Picture Plane, c. 1475–7, pen and ink on paper, De prospectiva pingendi, Biblioteca Palatina, Complesso monumentale della Pilotta, Parma, 1576, fol. 65r. Photo: see illus. 76. 81 Piero della Francesca, Foreshortened Image of the Human Head (illus. 77), c. 1475–7, pen and ink on paper, De prospectiva pingendi, Biblioteca Palatina, Complesso monumentale della Pilotta, Parma, 1576, fol. 66v. Photo: see illus. 76. 82 Piero della Francesca, A Perspectival Rendering of the Human Head (illus. 77), Rotated along Three Axes, c. 1475–7, pen and ink on paper, De prospectiva pingendi, Biblioteca Palatina, Complesso monumentale della Pilotta, Parma, 1576, fol. 76v. Photo: see illus. 76. 83 Piero della Francesca, text, handwriting and drawing, A Perspectival Rendering of a Palazzo, c. 1475–7, pen and ink on paper, De prospectiva pingendi, Biblioteca Palatina, Complesso monumentale della Pilotta, Parma, 1576, fol. 27r. Photo: see illus. 76. 84 At the design of Piero della Francesca, the front facade of Palazzo Della Francesca in Sansepolcro, late 1460s. Window frames first floor: 350 × 200; opening 240 × 130. Photo: see illus. 39. 85 At the design of Piero della Francesca, the rear façade of Palazzo Della Francesca, late 1460s. Photo: see illus. 39. 86 At the design of Piero della Francesca, the inner courtyard of the Palazzo Della Francesca, late 1460s. Photo: see illus. 39. 87 At the design of Piero della Francesca, portal, possibly originally the exterior main entrance, pietra serena, 335 × 202 (bottom); opening 248.5 × 130. Photo: see illus. 39. 88 Piero della Francesca, Hercules, late 1470s, fresco, egg tempera and oil on plaster (detached from Palazzo Della Francesca), 151 × 126.

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The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. Photo: © The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. 89 The ceiling with 15th-century detailing at the ground floor of Palazzo Della Francesca compared to the ceiling depicted in Piero’s Hercules (illus. 88). Montage: author. 90 Reconstruction of the Hercules (illus. 88) in the hall of Palazzo Della Francesca. Montage: author. 91 Pictorial decoration of the 15th-century ceiling at the ground floor of Palazzo Della Francesca. Photo: see illus. 39. 92 Justus of Ghent, finished by ‘Petrus Hispanus’, Euclid and Vittorino da Feltre, c. 1473–8, oil on poplar, respectively 94.6 × 58.4 and 94.3 × 63.2. Respectively Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino and Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Su concessione del Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali e del turismo – Galleria Nazionale delle Marche – Urbino, Archivio fotografico and © rmn-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre). Gérard Blot. 93 Roman sculptor, Hercules, 2nd century bc, gilt bronze, 241. Musei Capitolini, Rome. Photo: Sovrintendenza Capitolina – Foto in Comune. 94 Donato Bramante (attr.), Argus, c. 1490, fresco on wall, 560 × 400. Treasury of the Castello Sforzesco, Milan. Photo: © Comune di Milano – tutti i diritti riservati. 95 Piero della Francesca, Gherardi Madonna: Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Angels, late 1470s, egg tempera and oil transferred from poplar to fabric on panel, 107.8 × 78.4. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown. Photo: Image courtesy of the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, usa. Michael Agee. 96 Piero della Francesca, The Adoration of the Christ Child, mid-1480s, oil on poplar, 124.4 × 122.6. The National Gallery, London. Photo: © see illus. 2. 97 Bartolomeo Suardi, known as Bramantino, The Adoration of the Christ Child, c. 1485, egg tempera and oil on poplar, 86.5 × 85.0. Pinacoteca, Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan. Photo: © Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana/Mondadori Portfolio.

index

Illustration numbers are indicated by italics Acciaioli, Ludovico 139, 142 Alberti, Berto 289 Alberti, Leon Battista 231, 249 On Painting 8, 22, 34, 39–40, 57–8, 77, 99, 118, 197, 220–21, 230, 252–4, 257, 290, 335 On the Art of Building 283 On the Family 62, 150, 236 Palazzo Rucellai 110, 124 peep boxes 92, 162 Tempietto 130, 148, 198 Tempio Malatestiano 55, 102 Alhazen 16, 225 Amadi, Girolamo 149–50 Ambrogio Lorenzetti 85, 226 Amidei, Giuliano 138 Anastagi, Jacopo 13, 55 Ancona 48, 235 San Ciriaco 48 Andrea del Castagno Illustrious Men 282–3 Last Supper 126 Angelo di Giovanni 176–7 Anghiari 18 battle of 12, 21 Antonio Alberti 191

Antonio d’Anghiari 13, 14, 26–30, 176, 312 Aragon family 195 Alfonso v 45, 197 Arcano 11, 133, 289 Archimedes 129, 230–33, 237, 245–6, 249, 304 Arezzo 26–7, 65, 68, 98, 164, 305 cathedral 164 Compagnia of Nunziata 163 Fonte Tecta 68, 85, 98, 166 Pieve 86 Poggio al Sole 65–7 San Bernardo 166 San Francesco 65, 112–13 Santa Maria delle Grazie 166 Santissima Trinità 163 Aristotle 8, 108, 111, 120 Assisi 203 Atti, Isotta degli 54 Augustus 244 Bacci family 67–8, 74, 113, 117, 161–3 Agnolo 67, 107, 163 Andrea 67, 107, 112–13

359

Antonio 162 Baccio 67, 162 Francesco 67, 107, 112 Baglioni family 168, 277, 281 Braccio 168 Ilaria 168 Pantasilea 187 Baldi, Bernardino 195 Baldovinetti, Alesso 296 Barbaro, Daniele 242 Barozzi da Vignola, Giacomo 304 Bartolomeo della Gatta in Vatican 128 miniature 251, 75 Bartolomeo di Giovannino 26 Bartolomeo di Tommaso 75 Basinio da Parma 54 Bastia 163, 168, 277 Bellini, Giovanni 53, 289 Dead Christ with Four Angels 302 Pesaro Altarpiece 182, 56 St Francis in the Desert 149 San Giobbe Altarpiece 186, 297 Bellini, Jacopo 41 Benedetto del Cera 14 Bening, Simon, miniature 118, 38 Bentivoglio, Giovanni ii 45 Berenson, Bernard 308–10 Bernard of Clairvaux 225 Bernardino of Siena, St 68, 98, 111, 133, 162, 166, 190, 194, 203 Bianchi, Gaetano 306 Bicci di Lorenzo at Sant’Egidio 33 in Arezzo 65, 67, 69, 73–4, 24 Binoni brothers 306

Index

Biondo, Flavio 8, 284 Blanc, Charles 307 Boccaccio 96 Bologna 45 Borgia family Cesare 251 see also Calixtus iii Borgo (Borgo San Sepolcro) 7, 11–14, 18, 21, 26, 30, 42–3, 112, 130–31, 133, 138–9, 142, 144, 149, 153–4, 160–61, 182, 228–9, 235–6, 249, 252, 287, 289, 295, 301–03 Badia 26, 30, 130, 138, 142, 160–61, 274, 276, 289, 303 Canto dei Graziani 274, 277 Fraternità di San Bartolomeo 161 Observant Franciscans 127 Palazzo del Capitano 139–40, 142 Palazzo Della Francesca 271–8, 294, 84–7, 91–2 Palazzo della Residenza 142–4, 148, 276 Palazzo Monti 306 Pieve 177 San Giovanni Battista in Val d’Afra 13–14, 65 San Leonardo 287–8, 303 Sant’Agostino 154–5, 276 Santa Chiara 300 Santa Maria della Misericordia 43, 63, 131–3, 160 Santa Maria della Notte 26 schools 13, 230–31 Botticelli, Sandro 295

piero della francesca

Bramante, Donato 192, 246–7, 283, 303 Argus 287, 94 in Vatican 128 Philosophers 284 Prevedari engraving 192, 246 Santa Maria presso San Satiro 246 Bramantino Adoration 301, 97 in Vatican 128 Brancaleoni, Gentile 188 Bridget of Sweden, St 295, 297 Brunelleschi, Filippo crucifix 40 perspective 25, 34, 253 Buonarroti, Filippo 304 Burckhardt, Jacob 307 Calixtus iii 128 Campano, Giovanni Antonio On the Image of Sigismondo 60–61 Sforza oration 219–20 Canozi da Lendinara, Lorenzo 46, 303 Cantagallina, Remigio, View of Borgo 45 Capolona 163 Carnevale, Fra 123 Carsidoni family 161 Cassius Dio 216 Castiglione, Baldassare 62, 126, 174 Cattani, Malatesta 13, 29, 132 Cavalcaselle, G. B. 307 Cennini, Cennino 87 Cézanne, Paul 308 Chialli, Vincenzo 306

360

Chirico, Giorgio de 308 Cicero 110 Ciriaco d’Ancona 41 Citerna 30 Clark, Kenneth 309 Clarke, Anthony 149 Colonna family Caterina 190 see also Martin v Contes Fantinus 210 Contessina d’Urbano 161 Cresci, Giglio 155–7 Crivelli, Taddeo 237 Crowe, J. A. 307 Dalí, Salvador 309 Dante 16, 85, 270 Danti, Egnazio 304 Decembrio, Angelo 38–40 Della Francesca family 12, 168 Angelica di Benedetto 12 Antonio di Benedetto 12, 150, 241, 303 Benedetto di Pietro 12–13, 25–6, 30, 43, 154, 231, 236–7, 272 Francesca 12 Francesco di Benedetto 12, 160 Francesco di Marco 294 Marco di Benedetto 12, 127, 187, 294, 303 Piero di Benedetto see Piero della Francesca Romana di Antonio 241 Sebastiano di Marco 294 Vera di Benedetto 12 Desiderio da Settignano 122

361

Domenico Veneziano 43–4, 78 Adoration 32–3 at Sant’Egidio 32, 48, 295 in Rome 25 Marriage of the Virgin 32, 10 Dominici, Giovanni 271 Donatello St Louis of Toulouse 140 tabernacle 122 Dürer, Albrecht 242, 321 Dufay, Guillaume 109 Eastlake, Sir Charles 307 Egidio 11, 133, 289 Este family 34–6, 45, 117 Borso 37, 46, 237 Ginevra 37, 54 Leonello 36–8, 40–41, 46, 55 Niccolò iii 37, 54, 60 Euclid 92, 129, 230, 232, 245, 249, 298 Elements 231, 233–5, 244 Optics 231, 254–5 Eugenius iv 30, 122 Eyck, Jan van Baptism of Christ 94, 16 Bathing Women 166, 200, 211 Virgin and Child with Chancellor Rolin 59 Fazio, Bartolomeo 211 Ferabos, Giovanni Andrea 207 Fermo 235 Ferrara 31–2, 34, 41–2, 45–6, 55, 58, 60, 62, 90, 117, 137, 162, 182, 194, 231 Belfiore 35, 46

Index

Palazzo di Piazza 35, 37 Sant’Agostino 41–2 Ferretti family Francesco 53 Giovanni 48 Girolamo 48–9, 53 Fibonacci, Leonardo 233–4 Filarete 99, 112, 152, 286 Filelfo, Francesco 53 Florence 12, 21, 31–2, 34, 42, 53, 55, 90, 133, 137, 139, 142, 182, 231, 281 baptistery 198, 253, 299 Palazzo Davanzati 158 Palazzo della Signoria 253 Palazzo Medici 294 Palazzo Rucellai 124 San Miniato 225 Sant’Ambrogio 42 Santa Croce 68 Francesca family see Della Francesca family Franceschi Marini, Giuseppe 241, 306 Francesco dal Borgo 13–14, 127, 128, 231 Francesco di Giorgio Martini 192, 230, 247, 276 Deposition 118, 121 palace, Gubbio 198 palace, Urbino 192 San Bernardino 192, 194, 58 Frescobaldi, Caterina 241 Fry, Roger 308 Gabriele di Stefano 302 Gaddi, Agnolo 68, 77

piero della francesca

Gaffurio, Franchino 298 Gentile da Fabriano 22–5, 64 Baptism of Christ 19, 22–3, 4 double portrait 56, 220, 317 Strozzi Altarpiece 162–3 Gherardi Dragomanni, Francesco 241 Gherardi family 289 Gherardo di Cristoforo 287 Cristoforo di Gherardo 287 Ghiberti, Lorenzo Commentaries 253, 261, 284–6 Orsanmichele niche 140 Giorgione 149 Giovanni da Capestrano 194 Giovanni da Piamonte at Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome 130, 40 Legend of True Cross 72–4, 83, 98, 306, 26, 29, 33 Giovanni da Pistoia, Fra 112 Giovio, Paolo 128 Goes, Hugo van der 295 Gonzaga family 193 Margherita 37 Gozzoli, Benozzo 130 Graziani family Luigi 276 Nicoluccio 14, 20, 30 Gricignano 277 Guarini, Guarino 46 Gubbio 219 arca of St Ubaldo 195–7 Montefeltro Palace 198 studiolo 245 Guillaume d’Estouteville 130

362

Herbert, Zbigniew 7 Horace 111, 217 Huxley, Aldous 149, 270, 309 Jacopo da San Cassiano 231 Jacopo da Varazze, Golden Legend 67–8, 96 John viii Palaeologus 31, 92 Julius Caesar 197, 216, 244 Justus of Ghent 221 Communion of the Apostles 121, 187 Famous Men 198, 205, 281, 92 Lactantius 270 Lanzi, Luigi 306 Laudomia 294 Laurana, Luciano 192, 242, 276 palace, Gubbio 198 palace, Urbino 192–3, 198–9, 290 Rocca Malatestiana 221 San Bernardino, Urbino 192–3, 58 San Francesco, Mantua 193 San Giovanni Battista, Pesaro 193 Layard, Austen Henry 307 Leo x 247 Leonardo da Vinci 102, 199, 211, 225, 230, 241, 251, 303–4 Lippi, Filippo 42 Adoration 294 Coronation of the Virgin 42 Martelli Altarpiece 116 Livy 37, 216, 218, 284 Longhi, Roberto 308–10

363

Lorentino d’Andrea Carbonati Chapel 68 Legend of True Cross 72–3 Misericordia Altarpiece 139 St Louis of Toulouse 142, 44 Loreto 43–5, 60, 226 Loyeux, Charles Antoine 307 Luca di Meo Manaria 272 Lucca 149, 152 Lucretius 225 Malatesta family 12 Rengarda 190–91 Roberto 59 Roberto il Magnifico 302 Sigismondo Pandolfo 53–64, 217, 302, 21–3 Mancini, Girolamo 242 Mantua 130, 193 Marco da Bologna, Fra 191 Marco di Longaro 7, 303 Martial 299 Martin v 23 Masaccio 25 Tribute Money 77 Trinity 34 Maso di Bartolomeo chandeliers 216 San Domenico, Urbino 123, 291 Masolino 25 Miraculous Foundation 25, 5 Master of St Francis, Arezzo Cross 67, 89, 24 Matteo de’ Pasti 54, 56 medal of Sigismondo Malatesta 55–6, 59, 21

Index

Matteo di Giovanni 20 San Giovanni d’Afra Altarpiece 20, 65, 3 Matteo di Ser Paolo d’Anghiari 230, 241, 249, 252 Medici family 122, 281 Giovanni di Cosimo 55 Piero di Cosimo 32 see also Leo x Mehmed ii 114, 319 Memling, Hans 211 Mercatello 197 Merula, Giorgio 299 Michele da Firenze 35 Altarpiece of the Statuettes 35, 12 Belfiore Altarpiece 35 Stigmatization 162 Migliorati, Raniero 302 Milan 12, 99, 187 Castello Sforzesco 287 cathedral 195 Santa Maria presso San Satiro 246 Modena 35–6 Montefeltro family 114, 190 Aura 188 Federico 43, 118, 121–2, 186–98, 200–210, 212–13, 216–21, 228, 230, 242–6, 249, 251, 281, 298, 59, 60, 64, 66, 67 Francesco Maria 222 Giovanna 188, 221–2, 226 Guidantonio 121, 188–91 Guidubaldo 43, 126, 187, 192, 195, 228–9, 243–4, 246, 59 Oddantonio 188

piero della francesca

Monterchi 12, 157 Santa Maria in Momentana 157, 160 Morandi, Giorgio 308 Nanni di Banco 284 Naples 45 San Domenico Maggiore 195 Nelli, Ottaviano 13 Niccolò di Segna Augustinian Altarpiece 177 Resurrection Altarpiece 26, 142, 177, 179, 181, 6 Nicholas of Cusa 99, 127, 129 Nicholas v 127–9, 231 Nicola di maestro Antonio, Ferretti Altarpiece 48–53, 19 Orsini family 281 Pacioli, Luca 287 On the Divine Proportion 45–6, 234, 241–3, 245–7, 251, 267, 298, 304 Summary of Arithmetic 186, 237, 246, 249, 251 Paltroni, Pierantonio 218 Panetta, Battista 210 Pappus of Alexandria 245 Parri Spinelli 161–2 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 309–10 Pecham, John 16 Pélerin, Jean 299 Perugia, Sant’Antonio da Padova 167–8, 187, 277 Peruzzi, Angelo 162

364

Peruzzi, Baldassare, Interior of San Bernardino 187, 57 Pesaro 43, 211, 235 San Giovanni Battista 193 Peter of Limoges 145 Petrarch 37 On Illustrious Men 281, 287 Triumphs 213–16 Petrus Hispanus 205 Famous Men 205, 92 Pichi family 43, 240–41, 276 Luca di Guido 14 Paolo di Meo 241 Piero della Francesca, attr. to, Alana Madonna 312 Piero della Francesca, buildings by Palazzo Della Francesca 271–8, 294, 84–7, 91–2 Piero della Francesca, designed by medal of Sigismondo Malatesta 59, 21 Polyhymnia 46, 18 Piero della Francesca, family see Della Francesca family Piero della Francesca, inscriptions by 59, 139–40, 144, 149, 179, 217, 220, 231, 320 Piero della Francesca, lost works Agony in the Garden 161–3 Annunciation for Antonio da Marcena 30 Annunciation on fabric 294 Annunciation on panel 294, 300–301 at Sant’Agostino, Ferrara 41–2 banner of Annunciation 163–4 banner of Trinity 163

365

banners and shields 30 battle scenes, Ferrara 35–9, 93, 13–14 candlesticks 26 Federico di Montefeltro drawing and portrait 207 Marriage of the Virgin, Ancona 48 mural in Santa Maria della Misericordia, Borgo 160 murals, chapel of Madonna della Badia, Borgo 160–61 murals, chapel of San Lorenzo, Badia, Borgo 30 murals, Vatican 127–30 panel, Sant’Angelo, Citerna 30 pole and banner 26 St Jerome 294 St Vincent 166 Sts Cosmas and Damian 161 window of main chapel, San Francesco, Arezzo 67, 69, 112 Piero della Francesca, manuscripts by Abaco 229, 231, 233–42, 244–5, 247, 249, 251–2, 71–3 De prospectiva pingendi 102, 125, 229, 237, 243–4, 247, 249–70, 291, 298, 304, 75–83 Libellus 228–9, 231, 234–7, 241–52, 74 Works of Archimedes 230–32, 237, 304, 70 Piero della Francesca, paintings by Adoration 289, 294–302, 96 Annunciation 85–9, 106, 109– 10, 124, 24–5, 30

Index

Arrival of the Queen of Sheba 45, 78–83, 87, 98–9, 109, 115–16, 290, 24–5, 28 Augustinian Altarpiece 166, 176–86, 276, 293, 306, 53 Baptism 13–31, 40–42, 50, 65, 152, 182, 306–07, 2, 3 Battista Sforza see Double Portrait Battle of Heraclius 37, 102–7, 109, 112, 117, 269, 1, 24–5, 35 Blessed Angelo Scarpetti (?) 181, 53 Burial of the Wood 83–5, 96–9, 110–11, 24–5, 29 Crucifixion 181, 53 Death of Adam 75–8, 109, 307, 24–5, 27 Discovery and Trial of the Crosses 98–102, 109–10, 116, 118, 269, 276, 24–5, 34 Double Portrait 40, 205, 207– 21, 225, 65–8 Elias 74–5, 130, 156, 24–6 Encounter of Constantine and Maxentius 92–6, 105–6, 109, 24–5, 32 Enoch 74–5, 24–6 Federico di Montefeltro see Double Portrait Flagellation 43, 82, 114–27, 187, 276, 290, 306–07, 37 Franciscan Altarpiece 26–30, 176–7 see also Augustinian Altarpiece Gherardi Madonna 279, 287– 94, 306–7, 95 Heraclius Returns the Cross to Jerusalem 107–9, 116, 24–5, 36

piero della francesca

Hercules 277–87, 289, 292–3, 306, 88–90 Legend of True Cross 65–115, 124, 127, 154, 161–2, 176, 203, 305–7, 24–5 Madonna del Parto 29, 157–60, 166, 49 Misericordia Altarpiece 40, 43, 65, 131–9, 143, 149, 153–4, 159, 166, 171, 175–6, 182, 185, 227, 293, 306, 41–3 Montefeltro Altarpiece 186–9, 191–2, 194–207, 221–2, 226, 246, 269, 276, 279, 292, 309, 57, 59, 60–62, 64 Perugia Altarpiece 162, 167– 76, 182, 185, 187, 277, 52 Raising of Judas 96–8, 110–11, 24–5, 33 Resurrection 142–9, 152–3, 162–3, 210, 269–70, 281, 299, 309, 46 St Apollonia 181, 53 St Augustine 177–8, 181, 185, 298, 53–4 St Donatus Enthroned 166–7, 51 St Jerome and a Supplicant 52, 59, 149–53, 47 St Jerome in the Wilderness 48–53, 121, 149, 20 St John the Evangelist 179, 185, 53 St Julian 154–7, 48 St Louis of Toulouse 139–42, 44 St Luke 130, 40 St Mary Magdalene 164–6, 185, 50 St Michael 178–9, 182, 185, 307, 53, 55

366

St Monica 181, 53 St Nicholas of Tolentino 178, 185, 53 San Giovanni d’Afra Altarpiece 20, 30, 42, 65, 154, 293, 3 see also Baptism Senigallia Madonna 40, 221–8, 289, 69 Sigismondo Malatesta 45, 56–8, 63, 156, 207, 22 Sigismondo Malatesta Kneeling 58–64, 81, 151, 156, 167, 207, 290, 302, 23 Vision of Constantine 89–92, 108–10, 162, 269, 24–5, 31 Piero della Francesca, signatures 52, 64, 126, 150, 252 Piero della Francesca, works after Alfonso v 45, 56, 210, 17 battle scenes 36–7, 93, 13–14 Pietro Lorenzetti 86 Pisanello 33, 35, 38, 41, 45, 56, 61, 78 Baptism drawing 23–5, 4 drawing of Retinue of John viii 31, 37–9, 41, 9 medal of John viii 31, 55, 92, 8 perspectival drawing 34 Pius ii 54, 58, 111, 113, 127–9, 204 Plato 235 Pliny the Elder 35, 58, 76, 205–6, 217, 252–3, 267, 284 Plutarch 216 Pomposa 299 Pontelli, Baccio 221 Pope-Hennessy, John 309 Portinari, Tommaso 32 Ptolemy 92 Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre 307

367

Quintillian 110 Ragazzoni, Girolamo 122 Rama, Francesco della 193 Ramboux, Johann Anton 92, 307 Raphael 187, 247 Stanza di Eliodoro 127–8 Ravenna 55 Recanati 235 Rimini 12, 53–64, 302 Castel Sismondo 54, 56, 59, 63 Tempio Malatestiano 54–5, 58–9, 62, 102 Robbia, Andrea della 300 Robbia, Luca della 297 Romana di Renzo di Carlo 12, 130, 157 Rome 23, 32, 38, 54, 76, 90, 92, 127, 130, 221, 231, 247 Capitol 38, 284, 297 Colosseum 110, 127 Forum Boarium 284 Pantheon 81, 123–4, 198, 246 San Lorenzo fuori le mura 291 Santa Maria Maggiore 130 triumphal arches 77, 199 Rosini, Giovanni 306 Rovere family Francesco Maria 222 Giovanni 188, 221–2, 226 see also Sixtus iv Sabba da Castiglione, Fra 246 San Leo della Strada 277 Sandrart, Joachim von 304 Sansepolcro see Borgo Santi, Giovanni 187, 191

Index

Sargiano 161–3 Sassetta Assumption 29–30 Franciscan Altarpiece 27–9, 90–91, 132, 162, 176, 179, 181, 7 Virgin of the Snow 29 Savelli, Sperandio 197 Scarpetti, Angelo 181 sculpture, classical 64, 103, 123, 137, 220 Capitoline Hercules 284, 93 Marcus Aurelius reliefs 77 Phaeton sarcophagus 38, 15 Pothos 76 Thorn-puller 284, 297 Trajan’s column 104 Wounded Amazon 15 sculpture, medieval Virgins of Mercy 135 St Sebastians 137 Sedes Sapientiae by Martino 160 Senigallia 221–2 Rocca 221–2, 224 Santa Maria delle Grazie 222 Senserini, Umberto 306 Serre Partucci 322 Seurat 308 Severini, Gino 308 Sforza family 212–13, 218 Alessandro 43, 60, 193, 203, 211–12, 63 Battista 187–91, 194, 197, 212, 218–21, 63, 65, 68 Francesco 54, 195, 212 Ludovico 287 Polissena 54 Siena 29, 142, 144

piero della francesca

Sigismund of Luxembourg 54, 61 Signorelli, Luca 44–5, 128, 303 Simona del fu Feliciano 48, 53 Simone Martini 142–3 Sinigardi, Benedetto Blessed 65–7, 75, 86, 112 Sixtus iv 188, 221, 284, 297 Spadari, Benedetto 306 Stendhal 304 Suetonius 283 Taddeo di Bartolo Blocks 87, 125, 39 in San Gimignano 75 Tarlati, Guido 18, 164 Tavanti, Umberto 306 Testa Cillenio, Giovanni 45 Tinctoris, Johannes 298 Tintori, Leonetto 306 Trevelyan, Sir Walter Calverley 307 Tricca, Angiolo 306 Trinci, Paoluccio 168 Ubaldini family Bernardino 188 Ottaviano 192, 194–7, 200, 211, 243 Uccello, Paolo 33 Battle of San Romano 34, 37, 11 John Hawkwood 33–4, 145 Urbino 43, 186–8, 192 cathedral 114, 121–2, 190 confraternity of Corpus Domini 121, 187 library 197, 213, 229, 230, 237, 242–3, 246–9, 251

368

Montefeltro palace 121, 190–92, 198–9, 201, 203, 242, 290, 298, 330 San Bernardino 187–200, 203, 207, 58, 59 San Domenico 123, 291 San Donato 190–95, 199, 58 San Francesco 219 Santa Chiara 190 studiolo 198, 205, 245, 281, 298 Valturio, Roberto 54, 217 Varano, Costanza da 212 Vasari, Giorgio 286, 305, 306, 310 Lives 7–8, 35, 42–5, 48, 96, 128, 137, 161–2, 166–7, 242, 261, 275, 304 Vatican 122, 127–30, 230–31, 319, 323 Venice 90, 149–50 Redentore 331 San Giobbe 186 San Marco 112 San Zaccaria 322 Vespasiano da Bisticci 31, 191 Veterani, Federico 195, 197 Virgil 217, 244, 301 Vitruvius 106, 110, 244, 247, 249, 253, 267, 290 Warhol, Andy 309 Weyden, Rogier van der 94 Ferrara Triptych 41, 117 Francesco d’Este 41 Sforza Triptych 204, 211, 63 Zoppo, Marco 193