Piero della Francesca
Stories behind Works of Art
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Resurrection (ca. 1463). Piero della Francesca
This fresco is a perfect example of the Renascent painting of the Quattrocento, with the concern for the proportions of the hu body, the depth and the perspective (Piero della Francesca was a mathematician and knew a lot about Geometry). But the story behind the painting is much more interesting. It is miracle story, even if you do not believe in miracles.
Aldous Huxley, author of A Brave New World and The Doors of Perception, wrote in 1925 an essay on this work:
“And when at last one has arrived at San Sepolcro, what is there to be seen? A little town surrounded by walls, set in a broad, flat valley between hills; some fine Renaissance palaces with pretty balconies of wrought iron; a not very interesting church, and finally, the best picture in the world.
The best picture in the world is painted in fresco on the wall of a room in the town hall. Some unwittingly beneficent vandal had it covered, some time after it was painted, with a thick layer of plaster, under which it lay hidden for a century or two, to be revealed at last in a state of preservation remarkably perfect for a fresco of its date.”
But the miracle is not that of the beneficent vandals History tells that in 1944, a British company under the order of Lieutenant Anthony Clarke, was about to liberate the Italian town of Sansepolcro, taken by the German.
When the artillery deployed and the bombing started, Clarke remembers where he heard the name of Sansepolcro: the place where Huxley said that “the greatest picture in the world” was.
He “unwisely” ordered to stop the bombing, assuming the possible risk for the company and himself. Unbelievably, they later knew the Nazis had already gone to the hills and finally the English took the town without any kind of destruction.
Art was saved, old buildings, many lives were saved. Tony Clarke himself avoided a court-martial.
This is the history of The Resurrection or “the best painting in the world”. A work that shows Christ starting a new world (we can see the dead landscape and the splendid reborn one). And it also saved an old town and men from the barbarism and the stupidity of men.
Recommended links:
Piero della Francesca, the Master of Perspective.
Fra Angelico and the Early Renaissance.
The Stanze of Raphael and the High Renaissance.
Stories Behind Works of Art: T.he Birth of Venus, Sandro Botticelli.
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