Mariology in the paintings of Piero della Francesca (2nd part)

Life and Work

Piero was born around 1415-1420 in Borgo San Sepolcro. In the city of Alto Val Tiberina, Piero received his first artistic training alongside Antonio d’Anghiari; however, his early works demonstrate a deep understanding of Florentine art at the beginning of the 15th century, particularly the clear, luminous, and perspectival painting of Domenico Veneziano. Alongside this artist, Piero is documented in Florence in 1439 as an assistant in the execution of frescoes depicting the Stories of the Virgin for the choir of Sant’Egidio church. Works by Donatello and Masaccio left a profound and indelible mark on the young painter.

The most immediate reflections of this artistic education are found in one of Piero’s oldest surviving works, The Baptism of Christ, a scene bathed in zenital light at the abstract hour of noon, when shadows disappear, suspended in an enchantment of gestures and silences.

A few years later, Piero painted a Resurrection in Borgo Sansepolcro. In the painting, Christ, represented with rough and essential strokes, at the exact center of the composition in a symbolic position, marks the passage from winter, the bare trees on the left, to summer, the lush trees on the right, and from night, with the soldiers asleep in front of the sarcophagus, to dawn, rising above their shoulders. The risen Christ is the passage from death to life.

Starting in the mid-15th century, Piero’s career unfolded through alternating stays at the major courts of central and northern Italy, his hometown, and Ferrara, where he worked for Marquis Leonello d’Este, one of the most refined Renaissance patrons. It is likely that in Romagna, the painter maintained close relations with Alberti, who had to encourage him to pursue his passionate investigation into the laws of perspective and proportions.Meanwhile, in 1445, his fellow citizens commissioned him to create the great *Polyptych of Mercy*, for which he worked intermittently, only completing it after much persistence in 1462. The vigorous plastic structure of the figures, immersed in a golden background, stands out for its abstract rigor in composition and the luminous and atmospheric value attributed even to the archaic golden background.At the center of the polyptych, *Mater Misericordiae* protects a group of faithful, including Piero himself, depicted in an autorretrato as the first figure to the right of the Virgin, and a black-robed brother from the same company who buried the dead. Mary, dressed in a leather belt tied with a double cord, a reminder of her virginity, is described as a solid geometric volume, softened by a serene, thoughtful, inspiring, yet distant, transcendent, pale, and smooth face. Her long cloak serves as both a boundary and an apse that converges in prayer. Concessions to the antiquity of gold and the dimensions of the Virgin seem not to resist modernity in the faces. However, gold becomes light and background light that highlights volumes, while the play of dimensions turns into monumentalism. The colors are vibrant, the clothes sober, with rare concessions to detail, except for the diadem of the Virgin, in the stones of her crown and the arm of one of the kneeling women. It is pure spiritual invention that brings man closer to the divine in the perfection of form.Above Our Lady in the Polyptych, rises a *Crucifixion* that attains an extreme dramatic tension in the Mother’s gesture and John’s noble pose.Another *Crucifixion* by Piero is painted in the *Polyptych of Saint Augustine*. The scene is organized into two hemispheres: the upper one, with a golden background, is the celestial world where only the Cross is present. The lower hemisphere is terrestrial, composed of four groups of figures. Below are three seated soldiers playing on Christ’s mantle. To the left, the group of *Sorrowful Mothers* with John to the right as a counterpoint. At the two extremities there are almost symmetrical groups of Roman soldiers on horseback, with the horses resembling those in the frescoes of *The Legend of the True Cross* from Arezzo. The scene is characterized by a notable vivacity and a chromatic richness where red flags, shields, and some clothes stand out. The emphasis on dramatic movements, through which the intense pain of the Mother as well as John’s is manifested, appears exceptional in Piero’s art. Indeed, in Mary and the disciple’s open arms, one could read more solemn and liturgical messages, devoid of any painful swelling, in line with a composed Christ without violent body contortions.The moving *Our Lady of Childbirth* dates from the late 1450s, with frescoes in the chapel of the Monterchi (Arezzo) cemetery where she was buried. Enclosed in the precious mandarin blue of her simple tunic, Saint Mary is arranged according to a three-quarter posture to make her pregnant condition more evident. She holds her left arm to the side in an alert rest attitude but also one of proud awareness of her state. Her right hand touches her uterus in the protective caress that every pregnant woman knows. Mary is the young peasant mother, sister to women in labor who, generation after generation, recognized themselves, but at the same time she is the Blessed of the Lord (*benedicta tu in mulieribus*), the one who carries salvation for the world.Piero della Francesca’s ability to analyze truth while giving sacred subjects the evidence of a perfectly archetypal naturalism is characteristic of this painter.