Panels of Perfection

No other Western artist is quite like Piero della Francesca, the Quattrocento Italian painter who disappeared from public awareness for centuries after his death in 1492 and was then dramatically rediscovered in the late 19th century. It’s not that he is the greatest of painters—although Aldous Huxley famously called his “Resurrection” “the best picture in the world,” and any museum holding one of his rare works will certainly rank it among its treasures.

It is not that Piero is sui generis. Vermeer’s young women by their windows share some of his luminous calm. Zurbarán’s stately saints suggest the dignity of his sculptural figures in their lucid landscapes or elegant architectural settings. The critics Roger Fry and Bernard Berenson thought Cézanne’s radical way with color and form echoed Piero. But no one else captures so ravishingly the assured serenity and timeless interiority of his figures, grounded firmly on this earth as they are but seeming always to see beyond it. The grave dignity and still solemnity of his work are incomparable.

The style reflects the man. Born about 1412 in the Tuscan town of Borgo San Sepolcro (now Sansepolcro), he remained steadfastly rooted there even while traveling extensively throughout Italy. A prosperous commercial center of about 5,000 citizens at the time, Borgo traced its founding to two 11th-century pilgrims with relics from the tomb of Christ and imagined itself as the New Jerusalem. Piero was the son of a successful tradesman and a woman from a noble family. His earliest surviving painting, “The Baptism of Christ,” was done in Borgo some time after 1437. (The consistency of his style has confounded attempts at accurate chronology.) In 1439 he is recorded as working with Domenico Veneziano in Florence, where he must have been influenced by artists like Masaccio, Donatello and Ucello, as well as the mathematician and architect Leon Battista Alberti. In the 1450s he was commissioned to paint “The Legend of the True Cross” for the Basilica of San Francesco in Arezzo, a series of frescoes generally considered his masterwork. Later, major patrons included Federico da Montefeltro, the Duke of Urbino, and Pope Pius II in Rome. In his last years, he retired to Borgo, devoting himself to writing treatises on mathematics and perspective and receiving visits from younger artists.

In the United States there are exactly six panels by the artist and one fresco. Five of the panels once belonged to an altarpiece commissioned in 1454 for Borgo’s Church of Sant’Agostino (now Santa Chiara), while the sixth was done for another church in the town. Almost miraculously, all six panels have been brought together at The Frick Collection in New York (through May 19), giving visitors a sense of what the grand original work must have been like. (The fresco, of Hercules, could not travel from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.)

In a persuasive reimagining of the once enormous altarpiece, Nathaniel Silver, who organized the exhibition, draws on the scholarship of Machtelt Israëls and suggests that the predella (the horizontal band of paintings below the main tier) included the three small paintings of Saints Apollonia, Monica and (perhaps) Leonard with a small crucifixion in the middle. The saints’ panels, each about 15 inches high and 11 inches wide, show them in three-quarter length, facing forward, against a gold ground. The naming of Apollonia is the most secure, as she holds with a pair of tongs one of the teeth she lost in her martyrdom. Monica, Augustine’s mother, is presented severely in an Augustinian habit, while the figure thought to be Leonard (once identified as Dominic) is similarly dressed and has a visible tonsure. Small as they are, the figures have a rounded physicality that would have been enhanced by light reflecting from their golden backgrounds.

About as high as the saints’ panels and a third again as wide (it was once wider still), “The Crucifixion” is a deceptively complex composition, rich in color contrasts and pictorial detail. Christ on his cross rises solemnly before a golden sky and a rocky landscape, surrounded by at least 20 figures. The Virgin faints among the three Marys to the viewer’s left, while St. John to the right looks longingly up toward his savior. Three soldiers at the foot of the cross play dice for Jesus’ robe, while others on foot and horseback look on from either side. Banners unfurl, spears ascend, and gradually the viewer becomes aware of an intricate pattern of vertical, horizontal and diagonal relationships that give the scene a silent, sacred dynamic.

Above the predella, in the main tier of the altarpiece, two saints on each side flank a large, central panel (now lost)—St. Augustine and St. Michael the Archangel to the viewer’s left and St. John the Evangelist and St. Nicholas of Tolentine to the right. While the other saints look out toward the viewer, the venerable John is lost in his reading of a handsome (unidentified) book. Beneath a halo his sunburnt face is framed by snow-white hair and a pointed white beard. A voluminous, vermilion cloak enfolds his almost life-size figure. Under it he wears a blue-green tunic with a border of pearls, rubies and aquamarines. Barefoot and abstracted though he is, his presence is as imposing as any king’s.

If the “St. John” is monumental, the “St. Augustine” is even more marvelous. Younger than John but with a resolute set to his eyes above a salt-and-pepper beard, this is fully the father of the church who served as bishop of Hippo for 34 years and enriched Christianity with some of its most profound theology. He wears a jeweled miter and a richly woven cope, carrying in his right hand a handsomely bound book and in his right a crystal crosier. In the pearl-encrusted center of his miter is a full-length figure of the risen Christ, his blood flowing into a chalice below him. His cope is painted as cloth of gold embroidered with navy-colored leaf patterns and its border bears an extraordinary series of twelve scenes from the life of Jesus, from the annunciation to the crucifixion (two further scenes are tantalizingly covered by the folds of the cope). A prominent clasp, this time with a half-length image of the risen Christ, holds the cope together above Augustine’s chest.

The now lost original central panel, probably a virgin and child enthroned (although the catalogue proposes that it may also have been a coronation of the Virgin), has a fine understudy at the Frick, the “Virgin and Child Enthroned With Four Angels” (1460-70). Although only about three and a half feet high, it too has monumental grandeur. Mary’s throne is raised on a pedestal, and the Christ Child on her left knee reaches for the rose in her right hand (a symbol of his passion). Rosettes on the upper step of her throne echo the symbolic theme, and among the four angels standing about the throne, the furthest right, dressed in an elegant rose-colored tunic, glances out to us and points to the child. The whole scene is set in a classical courtyard in which the Corinthian columns’ relationship to each other is a marvel of perspective with incredibly subtle effects of depth. It is “the most hieratic of all Piero’s pictures,” writes Walter Kaiser, quoting also the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert: “Once more geometry has absorbed passion.”

Masterful as each of its pieces are, this gem of an exhibition can scarcely convey the full mastery of its artist. But there is much to discover. We learn at the Frick that it was not only the traditionally ascribed Florentine and Netherlandish influences that shaped Piero’s art. Equally significant, it appears, were the polychrome devotional statues cherished by the Borghese, the landscape around them and their fervent sense of living on land newly made holy. Living in and from his native town, its most famous citizen came to a contemplative sense of an art interiorly ordered, confident that calm was constructive, cherishing the majesty that could shine from someone standing still. Even with just seven pieces in the Frick’s Oval Room, and four of them quite small, you can truly commune with this incomparable artist and share his feeling of time fulfilled, of eternity swelling in the now, of the divine dwelling with us and promising forever.

Take a virtual tour of "Piero della Francesca in America."