Piero’s Faces: Artist and Image Making in Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection of Christ

Full text

PIERO’S FACES: ARTIST AND IMAGE
MAKING IN PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA’S
RESURRECTION OF CHRIST
RENANA BARTAL
A monumental Christ steps out of a large marble sarcophagus in Piero
della Francesca’sResurrection of Christ (fig. 1). His body is white as
stone, and his frontal gaze captures and holds the viewer’s attention.
Completely awake and clasping a banner of victory, he stands above
four sleeping soldiers before a hilly landscape. Piero’s painting, now
in the Museo Civico Piero della Francesca of Sansepolcro, was likely in-
tended for the largest room of the communal palace of the Tuscan town,
where the council of sixty would congregate and vote on legislative pro-
posals.
1
Probably executed in the 1460s, it served as an expression of
source: notes in the history of art. fall 2019. © 2019 by bard graduate
center. all rights reserved. 0737-4453/2019/3901-0004 $10.00

Borgo Sansepolcro’s legislative authority and appropriately featured
what by that time had become the town’s emblem—the image of the
resurrected Christ.
2
Piero’s monumental Christ has attracted a considerable amount of
attention. Michael Baxandall suggested that it combined the figure of
a triumphant Christ with the seated, judging Christ, who, with his pow-
erful and direct gaze, could remind Borgo’s legislators of their moral du-
ties.
3
Roberto Longhi described Christ as a “nearly bovine woodland
creature”of the Tiber valley,
4
while others have viewed him as a sun
god who brings on the regeneration of nature, noting the barren land-
scape on the left of the painting and the leafy vegetation on the right.
5
More often scholars have commented on how Piero’s Christ seems to
Fig. 1. Piero della Francesca, Resurrection of Christ,ca.1460.Wallpainting;88⅝
78¾ in. (225 200 cm). Museo Civico Piero della Francesca. Photo: public domain.
Source: Notes in the History of Art / Fall 201926

possess an archaic nature that transcends the place and temporality of
the gospel narratives. The frontal and direct gaze is typical of Byzantine
icons, which were revitalized by fifteenth-century painters in the devo-
tional image of the Salvator mundi.
6
Part of the fascination with Christ’s face may be due to its resem-
blance to an actual cult image that was very familiar to Piero and his
contemporaries. Christa Gardner von Teuffel first suggested that Piero
may have been influenced by the wooden sculpture known as the Volto
Santo (the Holy Face), which was housed in Borgo’s baptismal church,
the Pieve di Santa Maria (fig. 2).
7
The large crucifix, carved out of wal-
nut wood, was perhaps sculpted in central Italy in the seventh or eighth
century but was widely believed to have originated in the Holy Land in
the decades after Christ’s death. It follows the Christus triumphans
iconographic type that isalso evident in the famous Volto Santo of Lucca,
traditionally believed to have been imported from the Holy Land in 742
but probably dated not before the late eleventh century.
8
The relation-
ship between the two wooden sculptures is not entirely clear, nor is the
origin of the Sansepolcro crucifix. Its first textual mention occurs in the
1340s, when it is said to hang behind an altar in a special chapel in
the parish church of Santa Maria, and devotion to it was regulated by
the confraternity of the Laudesi.
9
With a height of more than eight feet and an arm span of nearly ten
feet, the wooden Christ of Sansepolcro is monumental. He appears alive
and regally dressed, gazing placidly down from the cross with wide eyes.
Much like Piero’sChristintheResurrection,hemakesapowerfulimpres-
sion on the viewer. To a citizen of Sansepolcro, the painted depiction of
the monumental Christ, stepping out of his altar-shaped tomb in the wall
painting, may have evoked the monumental wooden Christ that hung tri-
umphant behind an altar, eyes wide open. The large eyes of Piero’sChrist,
with their black,round pupils, recall those ofthe wooden statue, as do the
prominent nose, dark locks, and bifurcated beard, suggesting the influ-
ence of the wooden sculpture on the painted image (cf. figs. 1 and 2).
Some have read Piero’s reference as an expression of civic pride, evoking
Piero’s Faces 27

the cult image in the communal palace.
10
In the Quattrocento the com-
mune repeatedly asserted its jurisdiction over the Volto Santo, which by
that time had become the center of a flourishing public cult and a source
of income for the town’s baptismal church.
11
In this essay I shall focus
on other interpretations of Piero’s reference to the wooden crucifix
and suggest that he may have also been making a statement about himself
as an artist and his own ideas about precise, mathematical image making.
Fig. 2. Volto Santo, seventh or eighth century. Walnut wood; height 110¼ in.
(280 cm). Cathedral church of Sansepolcro. Photo: author.
Source: Notes in the History of Art / Fall 201928

I will begin by first drawing attention to another prominent face in
Piero’s painting: that of the second soldier from the left, whose head
tilts in slumber. In certain respects, the soldier’s visage is comparable
with Christ’s: They are the only frontal faces fully visible to the viewer,
and they are paler than the other figures, as is particularly evident after
the painting’s recent restoration. The two figures are further linked
since Christ’s bare and accentuated upper torso is echoed in the sol-
dier’s torso, covered in brown armor that fully reveals his anatomy.
The two men also appear connected by Christ’s long banner, the pole
of which supports the soldier’s leaning head.
While the face of the sleeping soldier is seen from below, however,
Christ’s head is seen en face. Some have surmised that the hypnotic
power of Piero’s Christ derives from the disjuncture of these two per-
spectives.
12
Scholars have linked the two different angles of the heads
to Piero’s treatise on perspective in painting, De prospectiva pingendi,
in which he instructs aspiring artists to practice the drawing of heads
in multiple positions.
13
The third book of the treatise handles the fore-
shortening of difficult and irregularly shaped forms, such as the human
head. Piero instructs his reader to calculate the foreshortening of the
head using a nail placed in a fixed point to represent the placement
of the eye and tracing the distance of the head from it by using a silk
thread or strand of horsetail and a set of drawn lines with given mea-
surements. One of the accompanying drawings used to demonstrate
this practice shows a raised head angled to the left that bears a striking
resemblance to the tilted head of the sleeping soldier in the Resurrection
(fig. 3).
14
According to the findings of the most recent conservation campaign,
Piero devoted a whole giornata (day’s work) to the masterful illusionistic
face of the sleeping soldier in the Resurrection. Moreover, some scholars,
although certainly not all, have also considered this carefully rendered
head as Piero’s self-portrait. Eugenio Battisti identified Piero’s likeness
in the Roman soldier as well as in a number of his other paintings, in-
cluding the third figure from the left huddled under the Virgin’sprotec-
Piero’s Faces 29

Fig. 3. Piero della Francesca, De prospectiva pingendi. Milan, Biblioteca
Ambrosiana, C 307 inf., datable 1470–92, fol. 103v. © Veneranda Biblioteca
Ambrosiana.

tive robe in the Misericordia altarpiece in Sansepolcro. His claim is
based on comparisons to the self-portrait used by Vasari as the frontis-
piece for his book on the artist, which likely derived from the Sant’Egidio
frescoes.
15
Whether we accept the identification of the Roman soldier’s head as
Piero’s self-portrait or not, the head’s tricky, angled pose definitively de-
clares Piero’s status as a master of perspective, capable of producing the
illusion of three-dimensionality on the painted plane. In the prologue to
the third book of his treatise on perspective, Piero states that the
greatest achievement of painting is the illusionistic representation of
three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional picture plane, so that
objects appear in perspective and diminish in size the greater the dis-
tance from the viewer.
16
The soldier’s tilted head, recalling Piero’s draw-
ing exercises so precisely, showcases this accomplishment. The painted
head of Christ, as a rendering of the wooden Volto Santo sculpture, is
another demonstration of this skill. In fact, Piero was accustomed to us-
ing sculpture to exercise foreshortening and methods of translating
three-dimensional figures to the flat surface; as Vasari notes, “Piero
was much given to making models in clay, on which he spread wet
draperies with an infinity of folds, in order to make use of them for
drawing.”
17
The soldier’s head, which showcases Piero’s method of image mak-
ing and possibly bears his facial features, together with his painting
of the Volto Santo’s face, may be read as a further statement by Piero
about himself as an artist by evoking the well-known maker of the Volto
Santo, Nicodemus. According to various legends inspired by the Gospel
of John and related to the wooden sculptures in Lucca, Sansepolcro,
and elsewhere, Nicodemus helped take Christ down from the cross
and bury him. Later, inspired by his love for Christ and intimate knowl-
edge of his body, he sculpted the sacred crucifix.
18
In painting the mirac-
ulous sculpture, Piero evokes the skill of Nicodemus, who, as an eye-
witness of salvation history and maker of devout art, could provide
late medieval and Renaissance artists with a lofty role model for their
Piero’s Faces 31

profession. Although there is no written documentation for such an ex-
alted identification, past interpreters have seen the portrayals of artists
as the character of Nicodemus in various Passion scenes, suggesting the
conscious association between Renaissance artists with the prototypi-
cal Christian sculptor.
19
To name two contemporary examples, Vasari
identified Fra Angelico’s portrait of the contemporary sculptor and ar-
chitect Michelozzo as the face of Nicodemus in the Deposition on the
Pala di Santa Trinità altarpiece of 1430 to 1440, and Nicolo dell’Arca
possibly represented himself as Nicodemus in his terracotta group of
the Lamentation in Santa Maria della Vita in Bologna from the 1480s.
The various versions of the Volto Santo legend emphasize that Nico-
demus carved the work not merely from memory but as a result of his
deep, mystical bond with Christ and with supernatural help. While he
noted the proportions and features of the form of the body of Christ
with utmost diligence, he sculpted the holy figure with the aid of divine
artistry.
20
According to a variant of the legend well known in Sanse-
polcro, after Nicodemus carved the body of Christ, he fell asleep, and
the sculpture’s face was completed by angels.
21
A contemporary viewer
could relate this version of the legend to Piero’sResurrection since the
painting combines Christ, with the frontal face and striking features
of the Volto Santo, with the dreaming soldier directly beneath him,
whose visage may even evoke the artist’s own.
According to the stories about its origins, the Volto Santo belongs to
the category of acheiropoietoi, images that portrayed the authentic phys-
ical appearance of Christ without the intervention of human hands. The
Volto Santo’s cult echoes similarlegends about the portrait Lukepainted
of the Virgin and the imprints of Christ’s face on the Mandylion and the
Veraicon. The idea of an authorless art—an art that was created without
the subjective, personal, and individualistic contribution of the artist—
resonates in Piero’s writing about perspective. In his De prospectiva
pingendi, Piero describes his method of rendering three dimensions
on flat surfaces not through optical theories but predominantly through
mathematics, introducing rules to the art of painting that are based on
Source: Notes in the History of Art / Fall 201932

calculation rather than on impression. He offers painters a method that
allows for a consistent and measurable imitation of the visible world,
which, if followed consistently, would leave no room for stylistic differ-
ences between artists and thus lead to works of art that could not be
traced back to particular authors.
22
As Kenneth Clark eloquently put it, in Piero’sResurrection the artist
“has used his mathematical science to create a sacred image which will
command our belief in mystery.”
23
Although Piero left no written evi-
dence of his theological views on mathematics, geometry, and perspec-
tive, given his religious background, subject matter, and the era’s Chris-
tianizing of Greek science and Platonic ideas, it is likely that he viewed
his craft as tapping into a metaphysical reality. His painting, rather than
his writings, may suggest that he saw mathematics as a tool invented by
humans that might also reveal eternal verities. By painting the Volto
Santo’s divinely formed face on his resurrected Christ and by possibly
giving the carefully foreshortened sleeping soldier his own face, Piero
presents himself as master of perspective, able to produce the appear-
ance of three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional picture plane
with an analytical precision that went beyond craftsmanship or artistic
idiosyncrasy. The Christ that rises from his tomb in the communal pal-
ace of Borgo Sansepolcro manifests Piero’s vision of a new art, gov-
erned by abstract and consistent rules, which, like Nicodemus’s art, ap-
proached the sublime.
NOTES
1. After the recent preservation campaign, there is conclusive evidence that
the Resurrection was moved to its present location. It was likely situated in
the legislative hall in the fifteenth century.
2. Michael Baxandall, Words for Pictures: Seven Papers on Renaissance Art and
Criticism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 117–61, with a
complete anterior bibliography; James R. Banker, Piero della Francesca: Artist
and Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 107–13.
3. Baxandall, Words for Pictures, 134–35.
Piero’s Faces 33

4. Roberto Longhi, Piero della Francesca, trans. David Tabbat (New York: Stan-
ley Moss, 2002), 58.
5. Charles De Tolnay, “La ‘Résurrection du Christ par Piero della Francesca’:
Essai d’interprétation,”Gazette des beaux-arts 43 (1954): 35–40.
6. For this point, see most recently Cyril Gerbron, “The Stone and the Dream:
On Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection,”Studies in Iconography 38 (2017):
142–73, at 164.
7. Christa Gardner von Teuffel, “Niccolò di Segna, Sassetta, Piero della
Francesca, and Perugino,”Stadel-Jahrbuch 17 (1999): 163–208. See also
Nathaniel E. Silver, James R. Banker, Machtelt Israëls, Giacomo Guazzini,
and Elena Squillantini, Piero Della Francesca in America: From Sansepolcro to
the East Coast (New York: Frick Collection, 2013); Banker, Piero della Fran-
cesca, 107–13.
8. A. M. Maetzke, “Il Volto Santo di Sansepolcro,”in Il Volto Santo in Europa:
Culto e immagini del Crocifisso nel Medioevo, Atti del Convengo internazionale
di 24 Engleberg (13–16 settembre 2000), ed. Michele Camillo Ferrari and
Andreas Meyer (Lucca: Istituto Storico Lucchese, 2005), 193–207; Barbara
Schleicher, “Il restauro: Interventi, osservazioni techniche, indagini
scientifiche,”in Il Volto Santo di Sansepolcro, ed. Anna Maria Maetzke
(Milan: Electa, 1994), 60–66.
9. Andrea Czortek, “La devozione al Volto Santo a Sansepolcro nel XIV secolo:
Nuove acquisizioni documentarie,”Pagine altotiberine 18, no. 54 (2014): 77–102.
10. Nathaniel Silver, “Piero ‘in terra nostra’: Image-Making for Borgo San
Sepolcro,”in Silver et al., Piero Della Francesca in America, 33.
11. Czortek, “Devozione al Volto Santo a Sansepolcro.”
12. Kenneth Clark, Piero della Francesca: Completed Edition, 2nd ed. (1951; repr.,
London: Phaidon, 1969), 57.
13. Massimo Mussini and Luigi Grasselli, Piero della Francesca, De Prospectiva
Pingendi: Critical Essay (Sansepolcro: Abaca Museum Edizioni, 2008).
14. J. V. Field, Piero della Francesca: A Mathematician’s Art (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2005), 225–30; Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, Piero della
Francesca (London: Phaidon, 2002), 220–26.
15. For a full list of the paintings recognized as self-portraits and the analysis be-
hind the identification, see Eugenio Battisti, Piero della Francesca, vols. 1–2
(Milan: Instituto Editoriale Italiano, 1971), 1:34, 460–61; 2:88–89, 104–5,
figs. 1–5. The insertion of Piero’s self-portrait into his paintings was accepted
without doubt by Joost Keizer in The Realism of Piero della Francesca (Oxford:
Routledge, 2018), 106–7, and, more hesitantly, by Clark, Piero della Francesca,
Source: Notes in the History of Art / Fall 201934

57. Notable commentators on Piero’sResurrection, such as Baxandall,
Banker, and Lavin, do not mention the identification of the soldier as
Piero’s self-portrait.
16. Banker, Piero della Francesca, 171–80.
17. Giorgio Vasari, Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, ed. and trans. Julia Conaway
Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991),
167.
18. Michele Bacci, “Nicodemo e il Volto Santo,”in Camillo Ferrari and Meyer,
Volto Santo in Europa,15–40.
19. The link between modern artists and Nicodemus has been most notably ex-
plored by Corine Schleif in “Nicodemus and Sculptors: Self-Reflexivity in
Works by Adam Kraft and Tilman Riemenschneider,”Art Bulletin 75, no. 4
(1993): 599–626.
20. Bacci, “Nicodemo e il Volto Santo,”15–40.
21. M. Sensi, “Arcano e Gilio, santi pellegrini fondatori di Sansepolcro,”in Vie
di pellegrinaggio medievale attraverso l’Alta Valle del Tevere, Atti del convegno
(Sansepolcro, 1996), ed. E. Mattesini (Città di Castello: Petruzzi Editore,
1998), 17–58, appendix 5, 56.
22. Keizer, Realism of Piero della Francesca,30–38.
23. Clark, Piero della Francesca, 57.
Piero’s Faces 35