James Watson Watsonworks

Masterpiece & Mystery

We know who painted it Approximately when More or less where

But The Flagellation by Piero della Francesca (1413/20c-1492) continues to mystify

Exhibited in the ducal palace in Urbino, central Italy, is a painting which has been the focus of more critical attention and conjecture than perhaps any other in the history of art.

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Painted by Piero della Francesca, The Flagellation is a masterpiece and a conundrum, domestically small in size, monumental in its spatial effect. There was no evidence of its existence before 1744 when it appears in the inventory of the sacristy of the cathedral of Urbino.

Its frame was lost; indeed so was the painting, in 1979, or rather stolen, then returned by the thieves once a ransom had been paid.

The painting has suffered damage: the wood surface is split in three places and has undergone restorations in 1951-2 and 1966-7. It has even been the subject of attack, the name ‘Maria’ scratched into the lower left corner. For all that, few works of art are so worth a pilgrimage as this one.

At least we have a signature, rare for Piero. On the base of Pilate’s throne is written OPUS PETRI DE BURGOS SCI SEPULCRI. The lost frame is said to have carried an inscription from the 2nd Psalm, ‘convenerunt in unum’ (the rulers take counsel together).

Getting thereVisitors to Urbino will probably already have seen Piero’s frescoes in the church of San Francesco in Arezzo, and they will still be in a

state of stunned awe after inspecting The Cycle of The True Cross.

Even today Urbino is not easy to get to: a car is a must; but the town is striking, clambering over two hills and down wooded valleys. It is dominated by the legacy of the legendary Montrefeltro family whose court was the model for Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier (1528).

Duke Federico, condottiere, patron of the arts, was probably a friend of Piero. He commissioned the artist to paint the

Triumphs diptych, portraits of Federico and his wife Battista (Uffizo, Florence), and the Montefeltro Altarpiece (Brera, Milan).

Two scenes in oneThe ducal palace, now the National Gallery of the Marches, houses a single example of Piero’s work. A mere 58 x 81 centimetres, The Flagellation was plainly intended to be hung in a domestic interior.

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It records record both a profoundly significant event in the history of Christianity and another, in the foreground, that is more personal; a situation relating to the times in which the picture was painted. The Flagellation has prompted differences of opinion over when Piero painted it, but this we do know: Piero was in Urbino in 1469. He was there to discuss the completion of an altar painting for the Corpus Domini brotherhood. This had been begun by Paolo Uccello (1196/7-1475) and seems not have pleased the brothers.

We also know that Duke Federico (left) visited Piero’s home town of San Sepolcro in 1470. It is likely they met on both occasions, though there is no actual evidence to suggest that The Flagellation was commissioned by, or for, the Duke.

Conjectures and cluesSo we are guessing, and will probably continue to

guess, who was the donor of the painting and for whom it was intended; though there have been plenty of theories.

We are obliged to fall back on the clues we can decipher in the picture, the main mystery of which is the connection (if there is a connection) between the event – the flagellation of Christ – taking place to our left and the three, seemingly unrelated and unidentified, figures to our right.

In Piero della Francesca (1) Alessandro Angelini puts the matter simply, though not too helpfully: ‘This painting contains subtle references to the situation of the time, which is very difficult for us to understand today.’

The figures to our right seem to exist in a separate dimension, but Piero’s miraculous use of perspective ties the two scenes into a common experience: while the time zones differ, the location is shared.

There is no controversy about the subtle complexities of the painting; indeed as Marilyn Aronberg Lavin says in her 2002 study of Piero (2), the spatial environment created by Piero is ‘so complex that it was not fully understood until the 1950s’.

Postural replications

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In addition to the unifying element of perspective, we soon note resemblances between the two sets of figures in terms of posture and positioning:

The central figure in the scene to the right rests on his right foot, his left a step forward (contrapposto). This echoes both the Christ figure and the bronze statue on the column behind Christ.

Also, the figure with his back to us in the Flagellation scene (see the full picture on page 1) not only stands in the same manner as the bearded figure wearing the mushroom-shaped goatskin hat in the right grouping but their hand gestures, with upturned palms, mirror each other.

It could be argued that the far right figure, in profile, bears a resemblance to the flagellator to Christ’s right. My own earliest theory of explanation was that the three figures to the right were, in the context of their own time, involved in a conspiracy paralleling Christ’s own betrayal. This interpretation, compared with others, is no longer convincing.

As Birgit Laskowski (3) points out, ‘No other work by Piero is surrounded by such a range of interpretations’, but she observes that in Renaissance art ‘figures in the foreground increasingly took on the roles of commentators, witnesses and mediators between the observer and the events in the picture’.

The Ginsburg takeCarlo Ginzburg is only one of many academic sleuths who have set out to unravel the mystery, and his exposition takes the form of a full-length book, The Enigma of Piero: Piero della Francesca (4). The Introduction by Peter Burke is actually subtitled, ‘Carlo Ginzburg, art detective’.

The author is referred to as a ‘plain’ historian rather than an art historian. The benefit, as Burke sees it, ‘shows the advantage of taking art history away from the art historians (or to be fairer and more exact,

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of sharing it with them)’; meaning that generalists such as Ginzburg might approach analysis from a broader field of knowledge.

Ginzberg’s particular focus is to examine context, specifically the nature and practice of art patronage. As he says in his Preface, his perspective is two-fold:

I am concerned with their [the pictures’] commissioning and with their iconography. I say nothing of the strictly formal aspects of the paintings, for, being a historian rather than an art historian, I lack the qualifications to do so.

Needless to say, Ginzburg’s speculations have provoked dissent, mainly because of his tendency to elide fact with conjecture. He even purports to tell the reader what one of the three figures to our right is saying to the other two! Again, to be fair, he does refer to his own ‘chain of conjectures’.

As one might expect, Burke says Ginzburg’s ‘hypotheses are at once ingenious, economical and plausible’. In contrast, John Pope-Henessy in The Piero della Francesca Trail (5) talks of ‘a mythomaniacal study, filled with imaginary history, by Carl Ginsberg’.

The identification of the figures on the right of the picture is what divides commentators. One claim has been that the central figure is

Duke Oddantonio, half-brother and predecessor of Federico, between two evil councillors.The explanation, coming from the 18th century, is no longer given credence.

Familiar facesGinsburg’s thesis does sound more plausible, at least in his identification of the figure on the far right, in profile; a figure that he argues also makes an appearance in

Piero’s Madonna of the Misericordia (Pinacoteca, Sansepolcro) and again in profile standing to the left of Chosroes in The Victory of Heraclius in The Legend of the True Cross (S. Francesco, Arezzo).

Left, The Misericordia; right, The Execution of Chosroes

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Ginsburg argues that we are seeing in The Flagellation three generations of the same

family, the Baccis, patrons first to the artist Bicci di Lorenzo, then to Piero; whose purse and desire for immortality through art, made the Arezzo frescoes possible.

He is most certain about naming Giovanni Bacci as the figure in profile, conforming as the painting does to the tradition of representing the donor in the picture he has paid for.

Ginsburg is of the view that The Flagellation could have been commissioned by Giovanni and presented as a gift to Duke Federico.

The enigma persistsThe figures are standing together, but they seem to be staring past each other rather than communicating; and isn’t the barefoot figure in

the centre rather more like an angel, or a ghost, than a living person – an Arcadian as Kenneth Clark (6) described him?

I have a reproduction of this picture in my bedroom and there is scarcely a day goes by without my spotting something I’d not noticed before. Usually it is an observation without explanation. My original interpretation, before reading Ginzburg’s conjectural identification of the Baccis, was that what is happening in the scene on the right, is a replication, symbolically related to the Flagellation scene.

This remains a probability, but the motivation is not betrayal but something much more affirmative.

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Economies of composition; echoes and resemblancesA dilemma Piero presents us with is whether we are considering style or content. One of the artist’s abiding characteristics is his re-use, often in the same work, of similar gestures, postures and positioning. James Beck (7) says, ‘Piero, like figural artists of every generation, reused his own inventions time and time again’.

A perfect example of this is to be found in The Madonna del Parto, of the birth (Museum, Monterchi), left, where the posture of the angels is replicated, though in reverse.

Even so, knowing as we do the thought that went into Piero’s creations, we can surmise that his echoed postures concerned meaning as well as compositional convenience.

Of course in searching for clues we can also be misled by resemblances. Across the canon of Piero’s work similar faces recur time and again.

The right hand figure in profile, dressed in the blue velvet gown, may look like Ginzburg’s Giovanni Bacci as represented in other works by Piero, but the identification does not explain the picture.

Indeed it has to be asked why a member of the Bacci family in faraway Arezzo should ommission a painting for the Montelfetro family in the first place.

Just the same, Philip Hendy (8) says it is ‘hard to believe that it was not painted either for Federico or for some member of his court’.

Further cluesFocus for a moment on the bearded figure in the right grouping. He is exotically dressed in the tradition of Christianity’s Byzantine empire.

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This demonstrates an abiding interest of Piero – his use of styles of dress and head gear which he had seen displayed in Florence when representatives of the Eastern and Western churches, faced with the prospect of a Turkish invasion of the East, met in counsel in 1439.

Piero was at the time assisting Domencio Veneziano (d. 1461) in painting frescoes in the church of St. Egidio. The event brought about little reconciliation and no solution but its splendour remained in the memories of all those present to witness it – most of all, the artists.

In the words of Marilyn Lavin:

The streets were full of crowds of pompous council members from both sides of the table. John Paleologus, the reigning Byzantine emperor, along with many Eastern church officials and their attendants, could be inspected at close range in all their grand regalia. Costume sketches made at meetings and processions left deep marks on the Italian sartorial imagination for many generations to come.

The mushroom hat of the bearded figure in The Flagellation has an exact predecessor in The Exultation of the True Cross in the Arezzo

frescoes; and there is more than a passing resemblance to the purple-gowned Bishop Zacharias.

Detail, Exultation of the True Cross,Arezzo frescoes

Lavin suggests that ‘Along with artists such as Pisanello, Piero must have made notes’ of the Greeks’ extraordinary appearance, for later in

his career some ‘of his most compelling figures wear the coloured coats, with extended sleeves, and exotic hats and scarves of the Eastern visitors’.

The style of Greek dress is visually arresting, but its longevity is of special significance. The Greeks had maintained the same style for centuries, suggesting a connection both with the Roman world and the days of Christ.

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Jane Bridgeman contributes a fascinating chapter on dress in Piero’s work, in the Cambridge Companion to Piero della Francesca (9), stating that ‘Piero’s manipulation of dress for iconographic purposes is exceptionally eloquent’ and this ‘is nowhere more apparently perplexing’ than in The Flagellation.

Piero’s use of Byzantine clothing is, believes Bridgeman, not about historical accuracy but ‘a means by which he could imbue his subject matter with an aura of antiquity and dignity’; the quest for a sense of timelessness.

Silks for statusBridgeman dismisses claims by some commentators that luxurious garments featured in Piero’s works are Flemish in origin; rather, silk-weaving thrived in Florence and Venice.

However, ‘In mercantile republics such as Florence and Venice the public use of splendid silks by wealthy private citizens was ideologically suspect, a stance reflected in public art, where male donors in particular are always dressed in garments of woollen cloth, and even saints are dressed modestly’.

Where costly silk flourishes is in paintings ‘from other areas of Italy and notably from princely courts: Mantegna’s portrayal of the Gonzaga

court is an obvious example’; and of course, silk features in Piero’s rendering of the encounter between the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon in the Arezzo frescoes (left).

In short, silk signifies aristocratic, courtly status; or that of high-ranking officials. The long gown, or vestito, ‘was worn in Italy for events of significance’; the wide

sleeves and open cuffs were ‘perceived as conferring dignity’.

The portraitistIt is useful to remind ourselves at this point what a great portraitist Piero was. The fact that so many faces in his work are familiar to us may suggest that what we are seeing are not merely archetypes, but real people.

We can hazard guesses that in several of the artist’s works he includes a self portrait: is the kneeling figure, full face upturned, beneath the

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Madonna’s sheltering cloak in the Misericordia altarpiece (below, left) a portrait of the artist; is it Piero we see in the Arezzo frescoes in the guise of a groom in Sheba Worships the Wood of the True Cross?

Is the sleeping soldier in The Resurrection (Pinacoteca, San Sepolcro) a self portrait?

Sleeping soldier,Resurrection (San Sepolcro)

If the probability is yes, then we are justified in seeking out other portraits of real people, their identities now forgotten.

Let us return, then, to the figures to the right of the Flagellation scene and focus on the barefoot, blond youth, his head framed in the deep green of laurel leaves.

He is not of this world, not any longer, but he seems to be the subject of the discourse

between the older men: they talk across him, but about him. Could this be a scene about loss and consolation?

Companions in sorrowMarian Lavin (10) makes a confident identification of the two men. She points us towards a bronze bust of Lodovico Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, attributed to Donatello and wrought between 1445 and 1447.

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There is definitely a resemblance between the Donatello profile (above left) and Piero’s figure to the right of the group. He is lavishly clad in silk, appropriately for an aristocrat and a member of a princely court.

A clue to the identity of the left figure is the black hair and forked beard. In Italian barba nera is the name for an astrologer. According to

Lavin, the man in discourse with Lodovico is Ottaviano Ubaldini, nephew and prime minister to Federico Montefeltro.

Her justification? – the connections between Mantua and Urbino in the 15th century, via marriages, business and friendships. Ludovico and Ottaviano met at school and throughout their lives

they corresponded with one another. A humanist, intellectual and well-known astrologer, Ottaviano was selected to cast the horoscope for the consummation of the union between the Gonzaga’s granddaughter and Federico’s son, Guidobaldo da Montefeltro.

Lavin next points out that the two men ‘were companions in sorrow’, for in 1458 Ottaviano’s teenage son and heir, Bernardino, died of the plague after a visit to Naples. In Ludovico’s case, there was another death of a young boy, Vangelista, his dead brother’s son and Ludovico’s favourite of all the children at his court.

Lavin quotes the court chronicler’s description of Vangelista. He was ‘blond and beautiful beyond belief, so beautiful that everyone spoke of it’. He was sixteen. Between 1458 and 1460 Vangelista contracted a disease from which he suffered for two years: ‘It left him monstrously crippled and incapacitated, and caused him to lose all his beauty.’

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Lavin affirms, ‘The painting shows the two men searching for consolation’. She refers to the ‘unearthly gaze’ of the blond youth in the painting:

He is an allegory of the beloved son who, they must believe, will overcome physical decay, as Christ overcame his physical torment. As Christ remains unblemished by his Flagellation, so the memorial of the worldly son is whole and beautiful. As Christ is surmounted by a triumphal column with a statue signifying glory, so the allegory of the beloved son is wreathed in laurel by the distant tree behind the wall.

Lavin concludes, ‘The subject of the painting is thus not a simple Flagellation but a message of consolation’. Philip Hendy had earlier confirmed his opinion of the allegorical nature of the painting, suggesting that a better title for it would be, An Allegory, with the Flagellation of Christ.

The church in perilA parallel narrative which does not exclude Lavin’s interpretation carries us out into the realm of politics and religion, allowing us to conjecture

about the quotation from the second psalm reported to have been on the missing picture frame – ‘convenerunt in unum’, ‘the rulers take counsel together’.

Birgit Laskowski writes:

Here the quotation could be interpreted with two meanings: in the rear part of the painting, Christ’s enemies are gathering, and in the foreground the princes of Italy are gathering in order to oppose the threat to Christianity presented by the Turks.

Laskowski refers to the policies of Federico Montefeltro in around 1470 which ‘were chiefly aimed at finally dissolving the estranged league of the various Italian royal houses and founding a new one during the following years.

‘By the spring of 1470, the prerequisites for a new Italian league had been fulfilled and the princes had “taken counsel together”.’ All these aspects suggest, writes Laskowski, ‘that The Flagellation dates from about or after 1470’.

This could be regarded as a viable secondary text, though the theme of ‘taking counsel together’ does not explain the existence of the

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ethereal blond youth, unless, of course, he, like Christ, is a symbol of the vulnerable Christian church.

Both these explanations relate to context, Lavin’s more specific, more personalised than Laskowski’s; more attuned to the spiritual. She writes of the laurel leaves that surround the youth’s head removing him ‘to a symbolic realm’ as the personification of the beloved son, ‘who, like Christ will rise to glory, helped by the love and remembrance of those who pray for him and for themselves’.

Lavin writes:

The enigmatic separation of the two groups of figures…serves a quite specific purpose. Piero lavished his considerable mathematic skills on the little panel to create a compelling pictorial space for a work of private devotion and remembrance, whose theme is consolation.

The Flagellation as artMay the conjecturing about identity and message continue, though we might usefully keep in mind Pope-Hennessy’s comment towards the end of The Piero della Francesca Trail. Referring to his ‘own heterodox view’ the author declares that ‘Piero’s paintings, great works as they are, represent no more than they appear to represent and mean no more than they appear to mean’.

Which suggests that we can return to The Flagellation and simply get on with delighting in factors that are no enigma, simply artistic pleasure: the creation of space, the light, the brilliance of the colour.

The masterly use of perspective turns a flat surface into an experience of depth in which we can move and breath. In the words of Lavin, the composition of The Flagellation is ‘one of the most complex

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architectural settings of the fifteenth century’. Pilate’s house is a palace, full of the classical detail that was to become characteristic of Renaissance architecture.

However, as Lavin points out, ‘at the time of the paintings this advanced form of classical style existed only in theory. Nothing of the sort had yet been built’.

If there is mystery concerning the painting’s narrative connection between the figures in The Flagellation there is also remarkable clarity.

Lavin writes:

What Piero did was quite astonishing. He made it possible to discover the totally rational constructionthat makes an unnatural phenomenon look real.

Anthony Bertram (11) concedes that explanation will always be conjecture, but admiringly concludes:

The mystery of the whole picture remains, a mystery within a form of absolute clarity; a form which we can only enter as into a crystal silence where all our speculations are inadequate: the picture exists in its own power and we must be content to accept it.

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This paper is selected and adapted from the author’s full work, Piero della Francesca: A Journey Through His Art, available as a text-disc.

REFERENCES

(1) Angelini, Alessandro, Piero della Francesca (Italy: Scala, 1985).

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(2) Lavin, Marilyn Aronberg, Piero della Francesca (UK: Thames and Hudson, 1992).

(3) Laskowski, Birgit, Piero della Francesca 1416/17-1492, translated from the German by Fiona Hulse (Germany: Konemann, 1998).

(4) Ginsburg, Carlo, The Enigma of Piero: Piero della Francesca (UK/US: Verso, 2000).

(5) Pope-Hennessy, John, The Piero della Francesca Trail (UK/US: Thames and Hudson, 1992; The Little Bookroom,2002).

(6) Clark, Kenneth, Piero della Francesca (UK: Monograph, 1951; Phaidon, 2nd edition, 1969).

(7) Beck, James H. Italian Renaissance Painting (US/UK: Harper and Row, 1981).

(8) Hendy, Philip, Piero della Francesca and the Early Renaissance (UK: Weidefeld and Nicolson, 1968).

(9) Wood, Jeryldene M, (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Piero della Francesca (US/UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

(10) Lavin,Marilyn Aronberg, Piero della Francesca (UK/US: Phaidon Press, 2002).

(11) Anthony Bertram, Supportive Notes, Master Painters 3: Piero della Francesca, Slidestrip History of Western Art, Visual Publications (UK: 1968 and 1997).

PIERO: A BRIEF CHRONOLOGY

*Dates that are documented.

Born in Sansepolcro (1415-20) Works with Domenico Veneziano in Florence (1439)*Paints Baptism of Christ (1440)* National Gallery, LondonSigns contract for Polyptych of the Misericordia (1445)* Municipal Art Gallery, SansepolcroSt. Jerome and Donor (1445-48), Accademia, Venice; and work on the MisericordiaLost frescoes in Ferrara (1449)Penance of St. Jerome (1450)* State Museum, BerlinSigismondo Malatesta and St. Sigismond (1451)* Malatestiano, Rimini; Portrait of Sigismondo, Louvre, ParisThe Flagellation (1552), National Gallery of the Marches, Urbino; further work on Polyptych

First frescoes of The Legend of The True Cross in San Francesco, Arezzo (1452-56); Madonna del Parto (1455), MonterchiFrescoes in the Vatican, Rome, now lost (1458-59)*Piero’s mother dies (6 November 1459)Completion of The Legend of The True Cross (1462-64) and of the St. Anthony Polyptych, (465-70), National Gallery of Umbria, PerugiaDiptych of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino (1465), Uffizi, FlorenceSt. Augustine Polyptych (1465-70)Madonna of Senigallia (1470-72), National Gallery of the Marches, Urbino

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The Pala Montefeltro: Madonna and Child, Angels, Saints and Federico Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino (1472-74), Brera Gallery, MilanMadonna and Child Enthroned with Four Angels (1475-82), Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, USAThe Adoration of the Child (1475), National Gallery, LondonPiero concentrates on his theories, Trattato del abaco (on arithmetic), Libellus de quinque corporibus regolaribus (on solid geometry), dedicated to Guidobaldo, son of Montefeltro, and De Perspectiva Pingendi (on the theory of perspective in painting)Piero dies in Sansepolcro, 12 October 1492.

Detail, Prophet, Arezzo frescoes

About the authorJames Watson has had a lifelong love of Italian Renaissance art. While working with the British Council in Milan he wrote on contemporary Italian artists for Studio magazine. Later, as a journalist, he wrote art reviews and profiles of artists. He became a teacher in further and higher education and has had several books published, fiction and academic. For further information, see his website: www.Watsonworks.co.uk. You can follow his blog on the arts, literature, film and media at Watsonworksblog.blogspot.com.

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