122 GOURMET TRAVELLER
T
he sun is rising and the sky is pale
blue, flecked with a few sparse clouds.
The land is empty save for a hilltop
village, a crenellated watchtower and
a scattering of trees, some leafy, some
bare – a reference to the advent of
spring and to the renewal of mankind, embodied
in the haloed figure of Christ in the foreground.
He stares fixedly at us as he steps from a
sarcophagus. His left foot is resting on the marble
balustrade, and in his right hand he’s holding a
Guelph banner, a red cross on a white background.
A pink cloak is draped over his left shoulder and the
right side of his torso is bare. The stigmata are visible
on his ribcage, left hand and foot. Four Roman
soldiers lie asleep beside the tomb. After guarding
it all night, they’ve dozed off in the early morning.
The soldier without a helmet is commonly believed
to be a self portrait of the artist who painted the
scene, Piero della Francesca.
I’m in the trim little Museo Civico in the town
of Sansepolcro, in the Upper Tiber Valley in south-east
Tuscany. This is where della Francesca was born in
about 1415, and in front of me is The Resurrection,
which he completed in the 1460s. The fresco has
undergone three years of restoration – partly funded
by a former manager at the Buitoni pasta factory,
another of the town’s claims to fame – and was
officially unveiled the day before I arrive, Palm Sunday.
Francesca, the girl at the ticket office, tells me it wasbedlam. “How many people came?” I ask. “Tutto il
mondo [the whole world],” she replies. Apart from the
attendants, there’s not a soul about today, so here I am
alone in a room with what Aldous Huxley described as
“the greatest picture in the world”.
The singularity of della Francesca’s work has only
come to be fully appreciated during the past century
or so. An unabashed provincial loner, he ploughed his
own furrow, keeping his distance from the prevailing
Florentine School. He anticipated Leonardo da Vinci
in applying mathematical principles to his art, yet his
vision is deeply spiritual; his landscapes are dreamlike,
yet you can still see them as you travel between regions.
Perhaps the deceptive simplicity with which della
Francesca achieves the apparently complex task of
reconciling unreality with reality is what captures
our imagination today.
There are other paintings by della Francesca in
Sansepolcro’s museum: fragments of frescoes with
figures of saints, and the Polyptych of the Misericordia,
very different from The Resurrection but, to my mind,
equally impressive. It has a gold-leaf background after
the manner of the Trecento Sienese primitives, but the
figures aren’t flat and two-dimensional; they’re painted
in perspective. The work is like a bridge between the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
Della Francesca travelled to cities as far-flung
as Florence and Rome, but he kept returning to his
birthplace, where he was a town councillor for much of
his life. His works are now scattered across the world, ➤Above, clockwise
from left: The
Resurrection;
a poster for
a Piero della
Francesca
exhibition in
Sansepolcro;
central piazza
in Sansepolcro;
house of della
Francesca.
Opposite:
Corso Matteotti,
the main street
in Anghiari.