No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Salvation in Perspective: A New Interpretation of Piero Della Francesca’s Flagellation of Christ
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 June 2021
Abstract
An absolute masterpiece of linear perspective as well as a true icon of the Renaissance, Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation of Christ (conserved at the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche in Urbino) is one of the greatest enigmas of the Italian Quattrocento. Uncertainty surrounds not only the date and the original intended location of the painting, but also the subject matter itself. Despite long-running disputes about the overall significance of the picture, and in particular about the identification of the three figures in the right foreground, the Flagellation remains an unsolved puzzle. Continuing in a rich and varied hermeneutic tradition, this article proposes a new interpretation of this famous painting, diverging both from a political reading (based on the supposed links with the Byzantine Empire) and from the other traditional solution which argues for the ordinary nature of Piero’s iconography. The analysis of the geometrical pictorial space and its potential theological significance leads to a reconsideration of the painting as a visual meditation on temporality inspired by Saint Augustine, as well as a singular spiritual exercise.
- Type
- Renaissance Painting
- Information
- Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales - English Edition , Volume 72 , Issue 3 , September 2017 , pp. 489 - 523
- Copyright
- © Éditions EHESS 2021
Footnotes
This article was translated from the French by Jessica Edwards and edited by Chloe Morgan and Stephen Sawyer.
References
1 William John Thomas Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 39.
2 A preliminary outline of this research was presented in 2014 at a seminar of the Groupe d’anthropologie scolastique led by Alain Boureau, Sylvain Piron, and Béatrice Delaurenti at the EHESS, Paris. I am particularly grateful to Étienne Anheim, Jean-Patrice Boudet, and Didier Méhu for their suggestions. Technical assistance was provided by Jean-Baptiste Barreau of the CNRS (Centre de recherche en archéologie, archeosciences, histoire, UMR 6566, Université de Rennes 1). For illustrations, see the color plates section.
3 Roberto Longhi dated the painting circa 1445, based on a local interpretative tradition that goes back to the eighteenth century; Kenneth Clark suggested it was painted between 1455 and 1460; Birgit Laskowski put the date at circa 1470. Longhi, Piero della Francesca [1927], trans. David Tabbat (New York: Sheep Meadow Press, 2002); Clark, Piero della Francesca (London: Phaidon, 1951; repr. 1969), 34; Laskowski, Piero della Francesca (Milan: Gribaudo, 2007), 72.
4 In his Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari ends the entry on Piero della Francesca by noting his “reputation [as] the greatest geometrician who lived in his times”: Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, trans. Julia Conway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 168. On Piero’s reputation as a mathematician and geometer, earned early on, see Alessandra Sorci, “La forza de le linee.” Prospettiva e stereometria in Piero della Francesca (Florence: Sismel-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2001), particularly 65–68.
5 Biblioteca universitaria di Urbino, MS 93, fols. 224r and 386r. The oldest reference can be dated only approximately to 1740–1750. See Enrico F. Londei, “La scena della Flagellazione di Piero della Francesca. La sua identificazione con un luogo di Urbino del Quattrocento,” Bollettino d’arte 65 (1991): 29–66, in particular p. 29, n. 3 and 4.
6 This phrase is usually translated, on the basis of the second psalm, as “they take counsel together” or “they conspire together.” See Johann David Passavant, Rafael von Urbino und sein Vater Giovanni Santi (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1839), 1:432–33. Apparently, the inscription had already disappeared when an English study mission visited in 1864: Joseph A. Crowe and Giovan B. Cavalcaselle, A New History of Painting in Italy: From the Second to the Sixteenth Century (London: J. Murray, 1864), 2:546. On the debate among specialists about the exact location of the inscription, see the analysis by Silvia Ronchey, L’enigma di Piero. L’ultimo bizantino e la crociata fantasma nella rivelazione di un grande quadro (2006; repr. Milan: Biblioteca universale Rizzoli, 2010), 57–59.
7 Psalm 2:2, “Adstiterunt reges terrae, et principes convenerunt in unum adversus Dominum et adversus Christum eius”; “The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and his anointed.” As Walter Bombe was the first to note, the passage serves as an antiphony for the first nocturn at Matins on Good Friday. Bombe, “Die Kunst am Hofe Federigos von Urbino,” Monatshefte für Kunstwissenshaft 5, no. 11 (1912): 456–74, here p. 470.
8 The various reconstructions of the initial location of the painting as a predella are highly speculative. For an attempt of this type, see Alessandro Parronchi, “Ricostruzione della Pala dei Montefeltro,” Storia dell’arte 28 (1976): 235–48.
9 Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera, inv. Nap. 695. See Tom Henry and Laurence B. Kanter, Luca Signorelli [2001], trans. Denis-Armand Canal (Paris: Hazan, 2001), 161–62; Marilyn A. Lavin, “Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation: The Triumph of Christian Glory,” Art Bulletin 50, no. 4 (1968): 321–42, particularly p. 323, n. 16.
10 David Carrier, Principles of Art History Writing (1974; repr. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 32–36.
11 Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (1939; repr. Routledge: New York, 2018), 3–31.
12 None of the attempts to fit the Flagellation of Christ into a coherent iconographic series has yielded conclusive results: Ludovico Borgo, “New Questions for Piero’s Flagellation,” Burlington Magazine 121, no. 918 (1979): 547–53; Jeanne Van Waadenoijen, “La Flagellazione di Piero della Francesca,” Arte Cristiana 81, no. 756 (1993): 183–98.
13 Creighton Gilbert, “On Subject and Not-Subject in Italian Renaissance Pictures,” Art Bulletin 34, no. 3 (1952): 202–16.
14 John Pope-Hennessy, “Whose Flagellation?” Apollo 124 (1986): 162–65.
15 Creighton Gilbert, “Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation: The Figures in the Foreground,” Art Bulletin 53, no. 1 (1971): 41–51.
16 While I do not share all its conclusions, Carlo Ginzburg’s study in several stages (1981 and 1994) is still, in my view, one of the subtlest analyses of the Flagellation: Ginzburg, Indagini su Piero. Il Battesimo, il ciclo di Arezzo, la Flagellazione di Urbino (Turin: Einaudi, 2001), 53–107 and 125–37. Also essential is the classic study by Marilyn A. Lavin, Piero della Francesca: The Flagellation (1972; repr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
17 Gilbert, “Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation”; Ernst H. Gombrich, review of Clark, Piero della Francesca, in Burlington Magazine 94, no. 591 (1952): 176–78; Gombrich, “The Repentance of Judas in Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation of Christ,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 22, no. 1/2 (1959): 172; Borgo, “New Questions for Piero’s Flagellation.”
18 Gombrich, “The Repentance of Judas”; the argument was renewed by Bernd Roeck, Mörder, Maler und Mäzene. Piero della Francescas “Geisselung.” Eine kunsthistorische Kriminalgeschichte (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2006), 63–80.
19 Roeck, Mörder, 75.
20 See Lavin’s pertinent objection to one of her contradictors (Gilbert, “Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation”): “The author … now views the painting as a biblical narrative with an ‘ordinary’ composition, and leaves unexplained all the extraordinary features of its form and organization.” Lavin, Piero della Francesca, 94, n. 8. On the iconographic singularity of the Urbino Flagellation in relation to the prior Italian pictorial tradition, see Grazia M. Fachechi, “Piero e la tradizione iconografica della flagellazione,” in Città e corte nell’Italia di Piero della Francesca, ed. Claudia Cieri Via (Venice: Marsilio, 1996), 59–68.
21 Charles Hope and Paul Taylor, “La Flagellazione di Piero e le consuetudini iconografiche della narrazione dipinta,” in Piero della Francesca. Incontri del Dizionario biografico degli italiani, ed. Alessandra Uguccioni (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1995), 48–102; Alessandro Angelini, Piero della Francesca [1985], trans. Anne Guglielmetti (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 2014), 134–45.
22 Michel de Montaigne, Journal de voyage [1774], ed. François Rigolot (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1992), 148.
23 Longhi, Piero della Francesca. The 1989 French edition has the advantage of incorporating all the variants and corrections of successive editions (1942, 1962) of a book first published in 1927. The English translation of 2002 is based on the third Italian edition.
24 Roeck, Mörder.
25 Clark, Piero della Francesca.
26 As demonstrated in the pages devoted to the Flagellation in the new edition of Anna Maria Maetzke’s monograph, Piero della Francesca. Les œuvres [1998], trans. Jérôme Nicolas (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2013).
27 Ginzburg, Indagini su Piero; Ginzburg, The Enigma of Piero: Piero della Francesca [1981], trans. Martin Ryle and Kate Soper (London: Verso, 2000); Ronchey, L’enigma di Piero.
28 Thalia Gouma-Peterson, “Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation: An Historical Interpretation,” Storia dell’arte 28 (1976): 217–33; Chiara Pertusi, La Flagellazione di Piero della Francesca e le fonti letterarie sulla caduta di Costantinopoli (Bologna: Lo Scarabeo, 1994); Pertusi, “L’apocalittica domenicana e la Flagellazione di Piero della Francesca,” Italia medioevale e umanistica 44 (2003): 115–60; Maurizio Calvesi, “La Flagellazione nel quadro storico del convegno di Mantova e dei progetti di Mattia Corvino,” in Piero della Francesca and His Legacy, ed. Marilyn Aronberg Lavin (Washington: University Press of New England, 1995), 115–25; Calvesi, “La Flagellazione di Piero nel contesto dell’alleanza contro il Turco fra la Chiesa di Roma e il Regno d’Ungheria,” in Cieri Via, Città e corte, 25–45.
29 Hubert Damisch, Un souvenir d’enfance par Piero della Francesca (Paris: Seuil, 1997), 16–17; here the author merely repeats the substance of a criticism that he had already expounded, more sharply still, in L’origine de la perspective (1987; repr. Paris: Flammarion, 1993), 204–5.
30 Hans Belting, “L’art moderne à l’épreuve du mythe du chef-d’œuvre,” in Qu’est-ce qu’un chef-d’œuvre ? ed. Jean Galard and Matthias Waschek (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 47–65.
31 Jean-Paul Marcheschi, Piero della Francesca. Lieu clair (Nantes: Art 3, 2001), 109.
32 As Carlo Ginzburg rightly pointed out in Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance [1998], trans. Martin Ryle and Kate Soper (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), particularly 137–38.
33 On the assumptions and consequences of this influential philosophical tradition, see Jean-Marie Schaeffer, L’art de l’âge moderne. L’esthétique et la philosophie de l’art du xviii e siècle à nos jours (Paris: Gallimard, 1992).
34 Roberto Longhi, Propositions pour une critique d’art [1949], trans. Patricia Falguières (Paris: Carré, 1996), 60 and 79.
35 This is a recurrent phrase in the author’s work. He uses it connection with the Urbino Flagellation in Damisch, Un souvenir d’enfance, 16.
36 Several reconstructions have been produced of the ground plan in the Flagellation: Rudolf Wittkower and B. A. R. Carter, “The Perspective of Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 16, no. 3/4 (1953): 292–302; completed (for the right-hand section of the picture, up to the back wall) by Lavin (with the collaboration of Thomas Czarnowski): Lavin, Piero della Francesca, 31–35.
37 The exact dimensions of the painting down to the millimeter are open to discussion: David A. King, Astrolabes and Angels, Epigrams and Enigmas: From Regiomontanus’ Acrostic for Cardinal Bessarion to Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation of Christ (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 2007), 100–1.
38 Piero della Francesca, De la perspective en peinture, trans. Jean-Pierre Le Goff (Paris: In Medias Res, 1998), book 3, pp. 145–46; see Damisch’s vocabulary analysis on p. 32 and his preface, “Le service de la peinture,” 3–17.
39 Philippe Cardinali, “Leon Battista Alberti : l’espace et l’art d’édifier,” in Espace et lieu dans la pensée occidentale. De Platon à Nietzsche, ed. Thierry Paquot and Chris Younès (Paris: La Découverte, 2012), 63–80.
40 This is, for instance, an essential contribution of Marilyn Lavin’s work: Lavin, “Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation”; Lavin, Piero della Francesca.
41 As Damisch had already pointed out in passing: Damisch, L’origine de la perspective, 313.
42 Wittkower and Carter, “The Perspective of Piero.” A more recent analysis of the work’s dimensions has for the most part confirmed their results: Laura Geatti and Luciano Fortunati, “The Flagellation of Christ by Piero della Francesca: A Study of Its Perspective,” Leonardo 25, no. 3/4 (1992): 361–67.
43 Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Judith V. Field, Piero della Francesca: A Mathematician’s Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).
44 Daniel Arasse, “De prospectiva pictoris : Piero della Francesca et la perspective du peintre,” postface to Piero della Francesca, De la perspective en peinture, 285–92.
45 Daniel Arasse, “Oltre le scienze dette di sopra : Piero della Francesca et la vision de l’histoire,” in Lavin, Piero della Francesca and His Legacy, 85–113.
46 Kemp, The Science of Art.
47 Cardinali, “Leon Battista Alberti,” 72, n. 31.
48 Piero della Francesca, De la perspective en peinture.
49 Ibid., 145. For an English translation of this passage, see Field, Piero della Francesca, 163.
50 Lavin, “Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation,” 330, n. 40.
51 Mitchell, Iconology, 39.
52 Psalm 118 (117):21–23.
53 Ginzburg, The Enigma of Piero, 66 ff.; Roeck, Mörder, 94–112.
54 Ronald W. Lightbown, Piero della Francesca [1992], trans. Paul Alexandre, Jeanne Bouniort, and Philippe Mikriammos (Paris: Citadelles et Mazenod, 1992), 56.
55 Clark, in particular, stressed the Albertian influence on the gallery’s architecture and used it to date the painting. For a detailed reconstruction of the possible “archaeological” references of several elements of the setting (the staircase visible through the door behind Pilate, the statue of the idol at the top of the column, the two doors at the back of the room, the pavement, etc.), see Ginzburg, The Enigma of Piero, 66 ff.; and Roeck, Mörder, 94–112. On the problematic issue of Alberti’s influence on this painted architecture, see Christine Smith, “Piero’s Painted Architecture: Analysis of His Vocabulary,” in Lavin, Piero della Francesca and His Legacy, 223–53.
56 Lavin, Piero della Francesca, 34–38.
57 Arnaldo Bruschi, “Osservazioni sulle architetture dipinte di Piero della Francesca,” Cultura e scuola 34 (1995): 102–25, particularly pp. 102–3.
58 Ibid., 103.
59 Luca Pacioli, Divina proportione. Opera a tutti glingegni perspicaci e curiosi necessaria ove ciascun studioso di philosophia : prospectiva pictura, sculptura, architectura, musica, e altre mathematice (1497; repr. Venice: Paganini, 1509); Arnaldo Bruschi et al., eds., Scritti rinascimentali di architettura (Milan: Il Polifilo, 1978), 140.
60 Londei, “La scena della Flagellazione.”
61 Lavin, Piero della Francesca, 38–45.
62 Borgo, “New Questions for Piero’s Flagellation,” 550.
63 In line with Ginzburg, The Enigma of Piero, 66.
64 André Chastel, L’Italie et Byzance, ed. Christiane Lorgues-Lapouge (Paris: Éd. de Fallois, 1999), 222–25; Ronchey, L’enigma di Piero, 79–87.
65 Jean Babelon, “Jean Paléologue et Ponce Pilate,” Gazette des beaux-arts 4 (1930): 365–75, particularly p. 372: “Notice that the figure of Pontius Pilate sitting on his throne, scepter in hand, is the exact portrait of John Palaeologus, interpreted not as a victor, as in the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, but true to the Pisanello medal—impassive and seemingly indifferent to the drama unfolding before his eyes, with the air of a fatalistic judge allowing injustice to be committed.”
66 Lionello Puppi, ed., Pisanello (Paris: Hazan, 1996), 144–46.
67 The distinctive profile of John VIII Palaeologus can be seen in the frescoes of the Chapel of Saint Jerome in the church of Santa Maria della Scala, Verona, completed by Giovanni Badile between 1443 and 1444.
68 Chastel, L’Italie et Byzance, 223–24.
69 Although Babelon was, to my knowledge, the first to make the connection with Pisanello’s portrait medal of John VIII Palaeologus, it was not until Clark’s monograph in the early 1950s that this Byzantine “touch” was interpreted in a political sense. Gouma-Peterson (“Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation,” 219) saw Pilate’s “crimson stockings” as a sartorial clue supporting his identification with the Byzantine emperor, which she presented as a “key to understanding the painting.” Ginzburg (The Enigma of Piero, 55) accepted the hypothesis and used it to substantiate his own reconstruction of the painting.
70 Chiara Pertusi, La Flagellazione di Piero della Francesca e le fonti letterarie sulla caduta di Costantinopoli (Bologna: Lo Scarabeo, 1994); Pertusi, “L’apocalittica domenicana.” Pertusi believes Piero’s Flagellation to be closely correlated with the fall of Constantinople; however, she suggests changing a detail within this general interpretive framework, arguing that although he is traditionally identified with John VIII Palaeologus, Pilate is in fact a reference to the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XII.
71 Ronchey, L’enigma di Piero, 194.
72 Jean-Yves Boriaud, “Mesurer Rome à la Renaissance ? La Descriptio Urbis Romae de Leon Battista Alberti,” in Humanisme et culture géographique à l’époque du concile de Constance. Autour de Guillaume Fillastre, ed. Didier Marcotte (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), 219–26.
73 Sabine Forero-Mendoza, Le temps des ruines. Le goût des ruines et les formes de la conscience historique à la Renaissance (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2002), 59.
74 Daniel Arasse, L’annonciation italienne. Une histoire de perspective (1999; repr. Paris: Hazan, 2010), 135–43.
75 Alain Boureau, L’événement sans fin. Récit et christianisme au Moyen Âge (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1993).
76 Judith V. Field, “A Mathematician’s Art,” in Lavin, Piero della Francesca and His Legacy, 177–97, here p. 190.
77 Excerpts from this treatise can be found in Œuvres choisies de Nicolas de Cues, trans. Maurice de Gandillac (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1942), 359–63.
78 As with the frescoes of the Legend of the True Cross in the Franciscan church of Arezzo, demonstrated by Arasse in “Oltre le scienze,” particularly pp. 102–6.
79 The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, ed. and trans. Edward MacCurdy (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1938), 1:82.
80 Among a large bibliography, see Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders [1992], trans. Thomas Dunlap (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Jean-Patrice Boudet, “L’apparition des horloges mécaniques en Occident,” Revue historique 122, no. 1 (1998): 145–54; Jacques Chiffoleau, “Quantifier l’inquantifiable. Temps purgatoire et désenchantement du monde (vers 1270–vers 1520),” in Le purgatoire. Fortune historique et historiographique d’un dogme, ed. Guillaume Cuchet (Paris: Éd. de l’Ehess, 2012), 37–71.
81 Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 80.
82 Ibid., 85.
83 Lavin, Piero della Francesca, 53–67; Ginzburg, The Enigma of Piero; Ronchey, L’enigma di Piero.
84 Gilbert, “On Subject”; Gombrich, “The Repentance of Judas”; Angelini, Piero della Francesca.
85 Clark, Piero della Francesca; Lavin, “Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation”; Gouma-Peterson, “Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation”; Roeck, Mörder ; Angelo Turchini, “Un’ipotesi per la Flagellazione di Piero della Francesca,” Quaderni medievali 14 (1982): 61–93. David King’s proposal is no doubt the most esoteric: King, Astrolabes and Angels.
86 Peter Murray, “A Note on the Iconography of Piero della Francesca,” in Festschrift Ulrich Middledorf, ed. Antje Kosegarten and Peter Tigler (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1968), 175–79, particularly p. 178, n. 33; Pope-Hennessy, “Whose Flagellation?”; Lightbown, Piero della Francesca.
87 Lavin, “Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation,” 339; Ginzburg, The Enigma of Piero, 103.
88 Antonio Paolucci, Piero della Francesca [1989], trans. Denis-Armand Canal (Paris: Herscher, 1992), 54; Lightbown, Piero della Francesca, 50.
89 Ginzburg, The Enigma of Piero, 64–65.
90 Longhi, Piero della Francesca, 27.
91 Fachechi, “Piero e la tradizione,” 68.
92 Longhi, Piero della Francesca, 27–28.
93 This is not the only case of this type of illusion in Piero’s painting. A similar device (but with different theological implications) appears in the scene of the Annunciation that stands above the polyptych of Saint Anthony in Perugia. See Thomas Martone, “Piero della Francesca e la prospettiva dell’intelletto,” in Piero teorico dell’arte, ed. Omar Calabrese (Rome: Gangemi, 1985), 173–86; Arasse, L’annonciation italienne, 39–42.
94 Augustine, Confessions, ed. and trans. Carolyn J. B. Hammond, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016).
95 Confessions 11.21.27. See Horst H. Günther, Le temps de l’histoire. Expérience du monde et catégories temporelles en philosophie de l’histoire, de saint Augustin à Pétrarque, de Dante à Rousseau [1993], trans. Olivier Mannoni (Paris: Éd. de la Msh, 1995), 14–70; Jean Guitton, Le temps et l’éternité chez Plotin et saint Augustin (1933; Paris: Vrin, 2004).
96 Confessions 11.21.27.
97 Confessions 11.14.17.
98 Confessions 11.15.20.
99 Confessions 11.16.21.
100 Confessions 11.28.37.
101 The parallel was suggested by Longhi, Piero della Francesca, 51, and underscored by Ginzburg, The Enigma of Piero, 87 and fig. 94.
102 Confessions 10.8.14: “in aula ingenti memoriae meae.”
103 Paul Ricœur, Time and Narrative [1983–1985], trans. Kathleen Mclaughlin and David Pellauer, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984–1988), 1:20.
104 On the difficulty of rendering the word distentio in its Augustinian sense in translation and on the term’s reception in medieval times, see Mary Carruthers, “Meditations on the ‘Historical Present’ and ‘Collective Memory’ in Chaucer and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” in Time in the Medieval World, ed. Chris Humphrey and W. M. Ormrod (York/Woodbridge: York Medieval Press/Boydell and Brewer, 2001) 137–55, here pp. 153–54.
105 Confessions 11.29.39. See Ricœur, Time and Narrative, 1:60; Isabelle Bochet, Saint Augustin et le désir de Dieu (Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1982), 131–42.
106 François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time [2003], trans. Saskia Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 55–63, here p. 59.
107 Paul, Epistle to the Philippians 3:12–14.
108 Didier Méhu, “Augustin, le sens et les sens. Réflexions sur le processus de spiritualisation du charnel dans l’Église médiévale,” Revue historique 674, no. 2 (2015): 271–302.
109 Passavant, Rafael von Urbino, 433.
110 Joseph Hoffman, “Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation: A Reading from Jewish History,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 44 (1981): 340–57, particularly pp. 356–57.
111 Based on Luke 23:6–12. See Paul D. Running, “Letters to the Editor,” Art Bulletin 35, no. 1 (1953): 85–86, who was followed by Gilbert, “Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation,” 42, and Calvesi, “La Flagellazione di Piero,” 25–26.
112 Jean-Pierre De Rycke, “Convenerunt in unum. La Flagellation du Christ d’Urbino et l’union des deux Églises,” Paragone. Arte 63 (2005): 21–50, particularly p. 26.
113 Clark, Piero della Francesca. The first connection between the turbaned man and the Ottoman world seems to date back to Felix Witting, Piero dei Franceschi, eine kunsthistorische Studie (Strasbourg: Heitz, 1898), 122.
114 Babelon, “Jean Paléologue et Ponce Pilate.”
115 Lightbown, Piero della Francesca, 60: “it is an Oriental dressed in a long robe and a pale grey turban.”
116 While the turbaned figure is sometimes simply referred to as such (Lavin, “Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation,” 338, n. 18), he is most often identified with a Turkish infidel (Frederick Hartt, History of Italian Renaissance Art [New York: Abrams, 1970], 244, n. 59; Gouma-Peterson, “Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation,” 219), if not an allegorical figure “of the Turkish threat to the Christian faith”: Eugenio Battisti, Piero della Francesca (Milan: Istituto editoriale italiano, 1971), 320, n. 14. More recently, Ronchey suggested identifying him with the Turkish sultan about to seize Constantinople (Ronchey, L’enigma di Piero, 241–43). One of the few authors to perceive him positively is Carlo Bertelli, Piero della Francesca. La forza divina della pittura (Milan: Silvana, 1991), 120.
117 Perhaps the best evidence of this is the famous scene of the discovery of Christ’s cross in the middle register of the left wall of the Franciscan chapel in Arezzo. Here too, a man seen from behind, slightly bent forward in effort, wears a skillfully tied white turban.
118 Jean Wirth, L’image à la fin du Moyen Âge (Paris: Éd. du Cerf, 2011), 220–36.
119 Field, Piero della Francesca, 177; Lightbown, Piero della Francesca, 60.
120 Longhi, Piero della Francesca, 28.
121 As Philippe Jockey brilliantly made clear: Jockey, Le mythe de la Grèce blanche. Histoire d’un rêve occidental (Paris: Belin, 2013).
122 On this fairly rare type of representation, which nonetheless developed significantly in devotional painting, see the evocative comments of Georges Banu, L’homme de dos. Peinture, théâtre (Paris: Adam Biro, 2001).
123 Psalm 118:19–20: “Open to me the gates of righteousness, that I may enter through them and give thanks to the Lord. This is the gate of the Lord; the righteous shall enter through it.”
124 John 10:9.
125 Matthew 7:13.
126 Petrarch, Letters of Old Age, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, Saul Levin, and Reta A. Barnard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 15.7, p. 581.
127 Petrarch, De Otio religioso 1.4.3–4. The translation is based on the French edition: Le repos religieux, trans. Christophe Carraud (Grenoble: J. Millon, 2000), 57–61.
128 Mariarosa Cortesi, “Lectures humanistes des Pères de l’Église. Philologie patristique et renouvellement de la culture au xve siècle,” in Humanistes, clercs et laïcs dans l’Italie du xiii e au début du xvi e siècle, ed. Cécile Caby and Rosa Maria Dessì (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), 175–98.
129 Pierre Courcelle, Les confessions de saint Augustin dans la tradition littéraire (Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1963), 329–51.
130 Marcella Peruzzi, Cultura potere immagine. La biblioteca di Federico di Montefeltro (Urbino: Accademia Raffaello, 2004), 44–48.
131 Pierre Caye, “Le silence ou le sens de l’ascèse chez Pétrarque,” in Vie active et vie contemplative au Moyen Âge et au seuil de la Renaissance, ed. Christian Trottmann (Rome: École française de Rome, 2009), 331–45, particularly pp. 334–37.
132 Petrarch, My Secret Book, ed. and trans. Nicholas Mann (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 3.18.6, p. 255: “Sparsa animae fragmenta recolligam!”; “I will gather together the scattered fragments of my soul.”
133 Leon Battista Alberti, Momus, ed. Virginia Brown and Sarah Knight, trans. Sarah Knight (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 3.63, p. 261.
134 Petrarch, Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul: A Modern English Translation of De remediis utriusque fortune, trans. Conrad H. Rawski, 5 vols. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 2.33 (preface), vol. 3, p. 12: “Nusquam totus, nusquam unus, secum ipse dissentiens, se discerpens.”
135 Petrarch, Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul 2.75, vol. 3, p. 171: “quasi seditiosi cives, in unam convenerint voluntatem.”
136 Field, Piero della Francesca, 177–78.
137 Charles-Olivier Carbonell, “L’idée de Renaissance dans l’historiographie du xixe siècle,” in L’idée de Renaissance dans l’Occident moderne, ed. Philippe Ménard (Paris: Presses de l’université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1987), 83–95.
138 Wirth, L’image à la fin du Moyen Âge, 414.
139 Indeed, X-ray photographs have revealed that the shape of his head was altered: Roeck, Mörder, 82–92.
140 Psalm 73:16 (or 72 according to the Vulgate): “Et existimabam cognoscere hoc labor est ante me”; “But when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task.”
141 Confessions 11.22.28.
142 On the moral and spiritual meaning of perspective, see Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 103–8.
143 2 Corinthians 4:16–18.
144 Piero della Francesca, De la perspective en peinture, book 1, p. 39, and book 3, p. 145.
145 Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, 168.
146 According to the famous Panofskian interpretation: Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form [1927], trans. Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1991), particularly 72.
Linked content
This is a translation of: Le salut en perspective: Un essai d'interprétation de la Flagellation du Christ de Piero della Francesca