Original subtitles

Good afternoon.

We have reserved the second lecture on Piero della Francesca, as we did with Masaccio, for

a great fresco cycle, The Legend of the True Cross, painted in 1453-54 in the Chancel of

San Francesco in Arezzo, the provincial capital of eastern Tuscany, about 40 miles from Florence.

Arezzo is not on the usual Italian tour itinerary, but for devotees of Piero it is essential.

The Church of San Francesco in this picturesque town is the site of his fresco cycle The Legend

of the True Cross, which occupies the chancel, that is to say the altar area from the crossing

to the apse.

Assuming a commission that had been begun by a very late Gothic artist, an artist still

working in the Gothic manor, whose name was Bici di Lorenzo, who died in 1452 after completing

only the vault decoration, Piero created one of the benchmarks of Italian Renaissance painting.

Masaccio's cycle in the Brancacci Chapel was the most significant model for Piero when his

opportunity came.

Unhappily like the Brancacci Chapel, the paintings at Arezzo have sustained considerable damage,

in this case mainly from water seepage, not from fire, but very severe damage in places.

The subject assigned to Piero, the legend of the True Cross, can be found in the 13th century

omnibus of stories and inventions of the lives of the saints known as the Golden Legend, compiled

by Jacobus de Voragine.

I mentioned the Golden Legend in the last lecture, and it is a very important source of stories

about the saints and other matters, one which was consulted all the time by artists and

today is consulted all the time by art historians of the Renaissance.

The history of the True Cross was a favorite theme of the Franciscan order.

The most important cycle on the theme before Piero's is that by Agnolo Gadi, painted in the 1380s

in the choir of Santa Croce in Florence, and Piero would have known it very well.

It's a major cycle in a great church, and he was studying in Florence.

It involves the legend of the True Cross, the supposed history of the cross upon which

Jesus was crucified, beginning with its origin in the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden,

through its disappearance and its rediscovery by St. Helena, mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine.

It was a fantastic and a complex tale and a fabrication, but it was seen as one of the principal foundation

stones of the Church's authority, and that was because of Constantine's toleration of, and then

his conversion to, Christianity, and his founding of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.

Thus, the story of the True Cross had often been painted before, but it had never been painted

with the clarity and forcefulness of Piero's frescoed history.

I show you a view into the chancel of San Francesco, and while it's there, I'll try to

point out various things while this image is there.

You see, for instance, a great suspended painted cross, suspended from the front arch, the opening

of the chancel, and suspended in front of the altar.

This huge cross is a painting probably from the middle of the 13th century, a very typical

image, a very typical kind of painted cross, which one found in church after church, and

this is a very dramatic one, suspended above, suspended in the space at the opening to the

chancel and the altar.

You can see the vault painted by Bici di Lorenzo in large, simple areas here, the blue vault

with figures.

And then the walls, which were subdivided into six large and four small fields on which to

paint the legend.

The six large fields are on the sides, three on each side.

They run across the wall to the window wall, the middle one, and then the top one is arched.

It goes up into the vault.

The same thing is true on the right-hand side, which we can't see in this slide.

Three with an arched top.

The smaller fields flank the window.

There are four scenes, two on each side, flanking the tall Gothic window at the end of

the apse.

Of these scenes, I will consider six of the fields, four of the large ones, two of the

small ones, which sometimes contain two parts of the story.

Some of the scenes have two storylines in them.

I'll try to give you some idea of where the scenes that I'm going to show you are located.

I'll try to do that now while we have the chapel opening in front of us.

It may help you then to visualize the space when we are looking at the separate stories.

The arched field on the right wall, as we face the windows, contains the death of Adam.

The adoration of the wood by the Queen of Sheba and the meeting of Solomon and Sheba is immediately

below that one, which is to say in the middle register of the right-hand wall, the long wall.

The dream of Constantine is in the bottom field to the right of the window, here.

The middle register of the left wall, at this point, has the discovery of the true cross and the proving of the true cross.

Piero painted two battle scenes, large battle scenes, opposite one another on the lowest registers on each side.

That on the right wall, which we can't see, is the battle of Constantine and Maxentius, very badly damaged.

But we will look at the battle of Heraclius against Cosroes on the lower left wall.

And the annunciation, which is the final work we'll look at, is in the bottom field to the left of the window,

balancing the dream of Constantine on the right.

The dream of Constantine here, the annunciation there.

Those are the scenes we'll now look at, one at a time.

I'm going to show you the death of Adam and the planting of the branch from the tree of knowledge.

This is the top of the right-hand wall.

Like several of the frescoes, it contains two related scenes.

At the right, the aged Adam, the first man, is dying.

Here he is at the bottom of the fresco on the right-hand side.

An old man with his family around him.

Eve stands behind him on the right, partly seeming almost to support him.

And his children are also gathered around.

They are remarkable figures, by the way.

Remarkable, not least, because he has imagined them in a kind of pre-civilized nudity,

in large part, not entirely, but some are, Adam included.

And also because the figure, the sun standing here to the left,

a nude male leaning on a staff, is derived directly from certain Roman images.

You can find it on vases.

You can find it in sculpture.

He simply has borrowed it for his own purposes here.

If I could just interject, it's an extraordinary idea, isn't it?

If one wants to use your imagination.

The first man is dying. Extraordinary.

At the left, Adam has died and is being prepared for burial.

And here he is, stretched on the ground, his head about here.

There's much damage on this side, as you can see, through the tree and even down toward the figure.

Although some versions of this legend say that his son, Seth,

planted a branch of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil on his grave,

a branch of the tree which he took from the Garden of Eden when expelled,

and had with him till his death.

Here, instead of planting it on his grave,

his son actually, if you will, plants it in his mouth.

Whether one can see that clearly enough, I don't know, but it is so.

It is placed in the mouth of Adam.

And the great tree which divides the painting may be regarded symbolically, of course,

as having grown from that branch.

So the branch of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,

planted with Adam at his death, grows into this great tree.

Subsequently, King Solomon admired this great tree,

and had it cut down to use as a pillar in the building of his temple.

But it didn't fit anywhere.

It was always too long or too short, and so it was put to use as a bridge.

The next scene, the adoration of the sacred wood and the meeting of Solomon and Sheba,

is the middle register, directly below the scene we just saw.

The Queen of Sheba comes to visit Solomon to hear his wisdom.

Again, we have a two-part scene quite clearly here.

At the left, the Queen and her entourage have reached the bridge,

the bridge which is that log from the tree.

And it's right here, a great beam, as it were, used as a bridge.

And the Queen of Sheba had prophetic powers.

And she, quote, the quote is from the Golden Legend,

saw in spirit that the savior of the world would one day hang upon this very same wood.

And in the adoration of the wood, she kneels and worships it.

Her ladies-in-waiting, standing behind her, wonderfully garbed, long robes,

great statuesque figures, stand behind.

And on the left, a marvelous little genre scene of the grooms holding the horses.

And this wonderful horse and very strong foreshortening

that would have pleased Paolo Iuccello very much, I'm sure.

And then the two trees in the painting itself, which helped to organize the painting.

Now, the painting is clearly divided into two parts.

One is a landscape part.

And the second part, the meeting of Solomon and Sheba,

takes place in the reception portico, if you will, on the right-hand side.

Sheba, in the process of their meeting and conversation, tells Solomon of her insight.

And she adds about the person that will die on this, on the cross made from this wood,

that by this man's death, the kingdom of the Jews will be destroyed.

This, having heard this, Solomon decides, in a scene we don't see here,

to take the wood away and to have it sunk deeply in a marsh,

to bury it, to get it out of sight completely.

This space on the right-hand side of this fresco is wonderful.

It reminds us a little of Andrea del Castagno in his Last Supper,

though we assume, assume because the monastery became a clausura,

that he wouldn't have seen the Last Supper.

Nonetheless, Piero's interior, both in that block of space cut into the wall

and in the marble panels behind, is very reminiscent of that.

Wonderful figures here of Solomon and Sheba in the middle,

as she bows slightly to him in greeting as they meet.

A strong contrast is made between these two figures here.

And then very elegant figures, very courtly figures, flanking them as well.

Let me continue with the dream of Constantine,

which is on the window, on the window wall, to the right of the window on the lower level,

as I pointed out to you.

Maxentius was Constantine's rival for the empire at this point

and was poised to invade Rome at the Milvian Bridge.

Now this is, of course, historical.

This is an historical fact and a battle of 312 A.D.

The legend lies in the miraculous intervention that is associated with the battle.

The night before the battle, Constantine had a dream, and that is what we see here,

in which he saw the sign of the cross blazing with fiery brilliance,

and angels standing by and saying to him,

Constantine, in this sign you will conquer.

Well, he adopted the cross for his standard, for his flag, and he won the battle.

The upper left corner of this fresco is damaged, and so the angelic presence is only partly visible,

but it doesn't matter that much because the miraculous light that engulfs this night scene,

a light that comes from the cross and from the angels, is representative of his vision.

Wonderful details here, for instance, of his associate, his assistant here,

who sits falling asleep while he sits up, and the two guards who flank the painting,

and the great conical tent.

Although there is no cross in the sky, a cross is strongly suggested by the tent pole

and the horizontal base of the conical tent top right here,

so that you've got the pole and this top very, very cruciform.

Another two-part fresco is the discovery of the true cross and the proving of the true cross.

This time, however, I have two separate images to show you,

one on the left-hand side of the fresco, one on the right, but they are a continuous left-to-right frescoed panel.

Before I show them, let me locate the fresco in your mind again.

It's on the middle register of the left wall, directly opposite the scenes of Sheba and Solomon,

which we just saw. Now, that's significant, and I'll point out why.

Because there are thematic and compositional parallels between the two scenes,

and they are opposite one another.

The left-hand part of the fresco depicts the discovery of the true cross.

Helena, the mother of Constantine, was determined to locate the true cross.

A Jew named Judas, obviously the name is an interpolation from the betrayal of Christ,

so that we can associate it with this figure, knew the location of the cross,

and Helena had him confined in a dry well until he revealed it.

And when he revealed it, they excavated and they found three crosses,

of course, because the two crosses for the two thieves in the crucifixion.

And they didn't know which of the three crosses was the true cross.

The identity of the true cross remained unknown.

And in this fresco, which is damaged on the left, we have St. Helena here on the left,

conical hat, black costume.

By the way, black and white, you may have noticed already,

black and white play a big role in the palette of these frescoes.

That's very unusual, very startling, to go from pure whites to pure blacks.

And it is clear in this one as well, in the left-hand side of this.

And here you see they have excavated it, and they're raising it out of the ground at this point,

the city behind, and the alignment of two of those three crosses.

This fresco corresponds visually and thematically to the scene of Sheba on the other side of the chapel,

where she's kneeling before the sacred wood of the bridge on the opposite wall.

You've got St. Helena here, and you've got Sheba on the other side,

both of them, one of them with the sacred wood, which had not yet become a cross,

and now the true cross, which has been discovered but not recognized.

Now, as it happened, fortunately, the body of a young man was being carried past,

and they stopped the procession, and the three crosses were held over him in succession,

and the third one brought him back to life, which confirmed it as the true cross.

And you can see that's what's happened here.

The young man has suddenly risen up, nude figure here, the half-nude figure,

has risen up as the cross is held over him, demonstrating that it is the true cross.

The wonderfully foreshortened figure enacting this miracle of the proving of the true cross,

is placed in front of a building of the purest Renaissance geometric abstraction,

although it has to be said that there's not a Renaissance building that looks quite like it.

It's really his invention here.

But those wonderful panels and circles and rectangles in that building behind the event,

the way they circle, for instance, in the lower center frames St. Helena's head,

just a great purity, the kind of thing that really appealed to 20th century tastes for abstraction.

Now, curiously, what is omitted by Piero or his advisers, and we know nothing about them as usual,

who advised him on theological matters and how the story might be told,

what is missing is what transpires between the Solomon and Sheba story and St. Helena's discovery of the cross.

In other words, it's the long story of how the wood was recovered from the marsh where Solomon had it sunk,

how it was transformed into a cross, and, of course, the event of the crucifixion itself.

In other words, this is my interpretation, this cycle is not about the passion of Christ,

but about the history of the true cross, not the story of Christ, but the story of the cross.

The contrasting, the parallel, the very contrasting parallel between Solomon,

who buried the sacred wood, and Constantine, who embraced it as a cross.

There's also a secondary parallel between the Queen of Sheba, who was a pagan woman who had the power of prophecy,

and St. Helena, a pagan woman who converted to Christianity.

They both adored the sacred wood in the case of Sheba, the sacred cross in the case of Helen.

It is elaborate, it is intellectual in a sense, but it is also very rich and suggestive.

As I remarked earlier, Piero painted two large battle scenes opposite one another in the bottom registers or tiers of the walls.

The battle of Maxentius and Constantine has lost much of its surface to water damage,

but the battle of Heraclius against Cosroes on the left side is mostly intact.

The event occurred several centuries later than the rest of the cycle seen thus far,

and in fact, it's even told in a different part of the Golden Legend.

You have to look elsewhere for this story.

The battle, as you see, a very large fresco taking up the whole of that left-hand wall,

is between Heraclius and Cosroes.

Now, Cosroes is the Persian king.

He had occupied Jerusalem, and while there had decided to take a piece of the Holy Cross that St. Helena had left there.

The Emperor Heraclius met him with an army, dethroned him, and decapitated him.

The scene you have here is as dense as an actual battle.

It's even more confused than Uccello's Battle of San Romano, but without foreshortening.

In fact, the packed figures here are disposed like a classical frieze.

It is the utter confusion of war.

It is packed with riveting and convincing details of character and costume alike.

I have some details of it to show you, but first just let your eyes scan over the whole image as we are looking at it,

realizing that the different forces are all intermingled, one with another here,

and that battle is going on continuously within this fresco.

First, I'll show you a detail from the left side.

There is a famous detail within this left side.

If you look to the left center background, this remarkable invention of a figure blowing a long trumpet

and wearing a hat, an inverted cone, huge white hat, just extraordinary, based on what archaeological models I do not know,

but certainly one which is meant here to suggest the Persian fighters within this.

When you look in the foreground, you see there is a great deal of hand-to-hand combat going on.

A figure here who kneels, pleading for his life, but to no avail, obviously, as the short sword is aimed at his side.

Mounted figures here, the horses disappear within the confusion.

And then we have the flags at the top of the picture, both Roman and Persian images.

On the right-hand side, there are several things.

The Roman banner and the banner of the cross are seen together.

The imminent beheading of the elderly Khosroes, the Persian king, is right here.

He kneels under the canopy in front of his throne, on the right-hand side, his blue robe on him, and he will soon be decapitated.

On the same side, I'll show you a detail, but it's right here, just to the left of the throne of Khosroes,

we have a really startling moment.

Even in these days of bloody movies and television shows and so forth,

it's still startling to see this stabbing in the neck of one soldier or another.

It is amazing. The blood spurts out.

And then there's something so echoic in this hat of the blood and then the design,

this rather elegant design of the hat.

This is something that the two of them played against each other,

that seems to me to enhance the act of killing.

He avoids no violence. This is no punches pulled here.

He paints this with his clear, rational style, his statuesque figures.

You could call it cold violence, if you will, but it is convincing.

It does have the ring of truth. It does feel like the story somehow of an eyewitness.

Well, he couldn't have seen this ancient battle.

But, not very many miles from Arezzo, and very close indeed to Piero's hometown of Sansepolcro,

is the town of Anghiari.

Anghiari was the site of a famous battle in 1440,

in which the Florentines defeated the Milanese troops.

Leonardo da Vinci painted the battle in the early 16th century,

but it is eye-opening to realize that Piero, about 20 years old when the battle occurred,

could very well have witnessed that battle,

and incorporated his memories of it into his battle paintings at Arezzo.

On the other side of the window, from the dream of Constantine,

is the most ambiguous subject in the cycle.

It is an Annunciation, certainly.

But, to whom?

It looks like a typical composition for the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary,

except that the dove of the Holy Spirit is missing.

God the Father is there in the upper left,

his hands parted, but the dove does not appear.

If it was ever there, it must have been painted secco.

You recall the term painted dry on top of the completed fresco,

and have been abraded and worn off since.

Also, the lily that is usually carried by Gabriel in the Annunciation is missing.

Some, because of these lacks, or things that aren't there,

have suggested that it's actually St. Helena, not Mary who stands here,

and that it is a kind of Annunciation to St. Helena.

I don't think that's the case.

I think, in fact, that the dove has been worn off, and that there are other reasons.

I think it is an Annunciation to the Virgin Mary.

And this is why I think so.

The striking absence from the cycle of the actual crucifixion of Christ,

which, after all, is the central event in the legend of the true cross,

leads us back to Mary, and to the Incarnation,

which heralds the salvation through the sacrifice on the cross.

And, as in the paired fresco of the Dream of Constantine,

there is an implicit cross in the starkly cruciform architecture of the painting.

Follow the column up, and then, of course, this cornice, which goes across.

It is a cruciform composition.

Follow it all the way up, because it's very much like the flags that we've been looking at,

both in the Dream of Constantine and in the battle scene,

which we saw the red cross on the white ground.

In this cycle, at Arezzo, as everywhere in Piero's work,

there is a serene majesty, a nobility of emotion and thought,

supported by a powerful, rational intellect.

Nowhere, nowhere does the science of the Renaissance

meet the art of the Renaissance with greater conviction.

And yet, and yet, his art remains deeply mysterious.

It is an art which is awe-inspiring to the viewer today.

There is much in the art of Piero which remains unexplained and perhaps inexplicable.

Thank you.