Resurrection - Piero della Francesca
The Work
Piero della Francesca's Resurrection is a fresco measuring 225 × 200 centimeters painted in the Palazzo Comunale (now Museo Civico) of Sansepolcro, Tuscany, dated to approximately 1463-1465. It was made for the civic hall of the city in which Piero was born - Sansepolcro means 'Holy Sepulchre,' named for the relic its founders brought back from Jerusalem - making the Resurrection theme a civic identity statement as well as a theological one. Aldous Huxley, in his 1925 essay Along the Road, called it 'the greatest painting in the world,' a judgment that has shaped how it has been received by generations of visitors.
Biblical Source
The primary biblical reference is Matthew 28:1-7, which records the angel sitting on the rolled-away stone and the guards falling down as though dead, followed by the announcement that Christ has risen. The Johannine account (John 20:1-10) adds the detail of the burial cloths still lying in the tomb. Piero synthesizes these: the guards sleep in attitudes of collapse around the sarcophagus, while Christ stands upright with one foot on the tomb's rim, holding a white banner with a red cross, his gaze directed forward with a serene, impassive authority. Romans 6:4 ('just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life') provides the theological frame; John 19:34 gives the wound in the side that is visible on Piero's Christ.
Artist and Commission
Piero della Francesca (c. 1415-1492) was himself a native of Sansepolcro and painted the fresco for his hometown's civic chamber, probably under commission from the governing magistrates. The choice of a civic rather than ecclesiastical setting is significant: the Resurrection here becomes an image of civic virtue and communal identity as well as soteriological doctrine. Piero's mathematics background - he was also a theorist of perspective and geometry - shaped the composition's extraordinary formal precision: the figure of Christ is placed with absolute symmetry at the center of the canvas, and the landscape behind him is divided between wintry bare trees on the left and spring foliage on the right, encoding the before-and-after of the Resurrection in the natural world.
Iconography
The fresco's most distinctive iconographic feature is the character of Christ himself. This is not the triumphant, dynamic Christ of later Baroque resurrections: Piero's Christ is still, frontal, hieratic - more icon than narrative figure. His gaze meets the viewer's directly, without expression that can be easily categorized. The wound in his side is visible; the burial shroud is still wrapped partially around him. He is both dead and alive, both human and divine, both historical event and eternal reality. The four sleeping soldiers around the sarcophagus have been analyzed for possible portraits: the second from left, in red, is often identified as a self-portrait of Piero. The soldiers' sleep is an ironic inversion - they were posted to prevent the theft of the body, yet they slept through the most significant event in history.
Art Historical Significance
The fresco represents the full development of Piero's distinctive synthesis of geometric precision, pure color, and psychological stillness. It is the pinnacle of his achievement and a major influence on subsequent treatments of the Resurrection that value stillness and eternal presence over dramatic action. The Renaissance's general preference for dynamic compositions made Piero's frontal, hieratic style seem archaic to later critics; the rediscovery of his work in the twentieth century (Berenson, Longhi) recognized precisely this quality - the timelessness that Huxley identified - as a supreme artistic achievement.
Theological Interpretations
The fresco has been read as an image of what the scholastic tradition called the glorious body - the resurrected body that retains the wounds of the Passion as permanent marks of love but is otherwise transformed. The combination of wounds and serenity, of human body and divine impassibility, captures a central theological paradox of the Resurrection doctrine. The civic setting adds a political theology: the risen Christ presiding over Sansepolcro's governing chamber implicitly claims that all civic authority derives from and is judged by the Resurrection's reality.
Controversies
The famous story attached to the fresco concerns the Allied bombardment of Sansepolcro in 1944: a British officer, Antony Clarke, recalled Huxley's essay about the painting and ordered a halt to the shelling before the town was fully cleared of German troops - potentially saving the fresco at personal military risk. The story is complicated by the fact that the Germans had already withdrawn, but it has entered cultural memory as a parable about the value of art.
Legacy
Piero's Resurrection is among the most frequently cited works in discussions of the theology of the body, the aesthetics of sacred art, and the relationship between civic and religious authority in Renaissance Italy. Its influence on twentieth-century figurative painters - Lucian Freud admired it, as did Cy Twombly - testifies to its continuing power to transcend its historical moment.
Visiting the Work
The fresco is in the Museo Civico di Sansepolcro, in the town center of Sansepolcro, Tuscany - about a two-hour drive from Florence. The museum is small and manageable; the Resurrection occupies an entire wall of the main gallery and can be viewed in excellent light. Piero's birthplace and other works in the region (his Legend of the True Cross in Arezzo, his Baptism in London) reward a dedicated pilgrimage.
Further Reading
Kenneth Clark, Piero della Francesca (1951); Roberto Longhi, Piero della Francesca (1927); Carlo Ginzburg, The Enigma of Piero (1985); Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, Piero della Francesca: The Flagellation (1972); John Pope-Hennessy, The Portrait in the Renaissance (1966).