Piero della Francesca

I'm here with Laura, as always, and we have one of our special episodes today, and it's the, the type of episode that I always enjoy very much, where we have a, an esteemed guest who is going to help us understand a little bit better one particular painting.

And that painting is The Flagellation of Christ by Piero della Francesca.

And as always, if you go to seventh-art.com, uh, you go to the website and press on the podcast button, or indeed our YouTube channel, then the painting will, I was going to say miraculously appear, maybe that's appropriate.

But anyway, you'll be able to see the painting as we talk about it.

And my guest, uh, and I'm very pleased and honored to have him with us, is Michael Harrison, who for the next three years, it's a five-year tenure, is the president of the Royal Society of British Artists, but is also, um, has been for the last 30 years looking into this particular painting, um, author, lecturer and much more besides.

And I'll just say, um, that he has two books underway, which we're going to talk about, both relevant to this particular painting.

I'll also say before we start that a few years, well, it was quite some years ago now, uh, as part of our Great Artists series, uh, I directed a film about Piero della Francesca, and it's one of my absolute favorites.

And I think clearly that is partly to do with the, the landscape of Tuscany and the Marche and, and the food, uh, of course.

In ancient Egypt, the gates of temple incorporate Phi and the square root of three constant.

Renaissance artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Piero della Francesca used the Golden Ratio in their compositions, such as The Baptism of Christ.

Even Dürer's famous Melancholia and later works by Poussin shows an underlying pentagonal geometry based on Phi.

Facturals and self-similarity.

Yeah.

quite a lot i think i think what all i mean there is an interesting discussion here which is that all galleries face the same issue where people are coming and heading to certain paintings because that's what people know national gallery most people will come and where's where's van gogh's sunflowers where the impressionist works because what a gallery is wanting to do is to encourage you to go and look at the works of Piero della Francesca or the works of somebody else, Zurbaran or somebody even less well-known.

So galleries are trying to get, you know, want you to come to see the big hitters, but also partly for just flow of humanity through the gallery corridors and rooms, but also because they want you to experience and enjoy other paintings as well.

So you'll often see, you know, when the directors ask, what's your favourite painting? It's never going to be one of the big hitters.

So the Uffizi Gallery is a very famous museum.

So I go up there, and I come across a painting by Piero della Francesca.

It's called The Duke and Duchess of Urbino.

Oh, that's right.

That finish and that certain something that they lacked, they could not achieve so readily, seeing that study, when it is used in that way to obtain finish, gives dryness to the manner.

After them indeed their successors were enabled to attain it through seeing excavated out of the earth certain antiquities cited by Pliny as amongst the most famous, such as the Laocoon, the Hercules, the great torso of the Belvedere, and likewise the Venus, the Cleopatra, the Apollo, and an endless number of others, which both with their sweetness and their severity, with their fleshy roundness copied from the greatest beauties of nature, and with certain attitudes which involve no distortion of the whole figure, but only a movement of certain parts, and are revealed with a most perfect grace, brought about the disappearance of a certain dryness, hardness, and sharpness of manner which had been left to our art by the excessive study of Piero della Francesca, Lazaro Vasari, Alesso Baldovinetti, Andrea dal Castagno, Pesello, Ercole Ferrarese, Giovanni Bellini, Casimo Rosselli, the Abbot of San Clemente, Domenico del Ghirlandaggio, Sandro Botticelli, Andrea Mantegna, Filippo and Luca Signorelli.

These masters sought with great efforts to do the impossible in art by means of labor, particularly in foreshortenings and in things unpleasant to the eye, which were as painful to see as they were difficult for them to execute, and although their works were for the most part well drawn and free from errors, yet there was wanting a certain resolute spirit which was never seen in them, and that sweet harmony of coloring which the Bolognese Francia and Pietro Perugino first began to show in their works, at the sight of which people ran like madmen to this new and more lifelike beauty, for it seemed to them quite certain that nothing better could ever be done.

But their error was afterwards clearly proved by the works of Leonardo da Vinci, who, giving a beginning to that third manner which we propose to call the modern, besides the force and boldness of his drawing and the extreme subtlety wherewith he counterfeited all the minutenesses of nature exactly as they are, with good rule, better order, right proportion, perfect drawing, and divine grace, abounding in resources and having a most profound knowledge of art, may be truly said to have endowed his figures with motion and breath.

This proposal pleased Raffaello, wherefore abandoning his works in Florence and leaving the panel for the day unfinished in the state in which Messer Baldassare da Pesa had it placed in the Pieve of his native city after the death of Raffaello, he betook himself to Rome.

Having arrived there, he found that most of the rooms in the palace had been painted or were still being painted by a number of masters.

To be precise, he saw that there was one room in which a scene had been finished by Piero della Francesca.

Luca da Cortona had brought one wall already to completion, and Don Pietro della Gatta, Abbot of San Clemente at Arezzo, had begun some works there.

Franz Marc was an expressionist painter.

Piero della Francesca is discovered in the age of Cezanne because he's got that similar interest in geometrical shapes.

Probably lots of cases I don't know about, but these things are really very interesting.

That will be enough on that topic.

This is where Urbino becomes especially interesting for anyone who loves art.

Among the collection's greatest treasures is one of the most mysterious paintings of the Italian Renaissance, Piero della Francesca's The Flagellation of Christ.

Piero della Francesca is one of the artists I closely associate with Federico's Urbino.

He was fascinated by mathematics, perspective, geometry, and proportion, all subjects that were important to the intellectual world Federico created in his court.

This flagellation of price is one of the most intriguing paintings in the Palazzo Ducale.

The architecture, the tiled floor, the columns, and carefully constructed perspective give the entire scene a remarkable sense of order and stillness.

In many ways, this painting feels like a perfect painting for Urbino, a court where art, mathematics, architecture, and curiosity were all closely connected.

Nearby is another masterpiece by Piero della Francesca, the Madonna di Sanigallia, and it has a very different feeling.

He was a man in love with geometry, as many artists have been.

Among them, some of the painters Huglot most admired, such as Poussin and Piero della Francesca.

But Huglot was also dedicated to working from life, so his subjects were asked to take up the guise of regular geometric solids.

Her recent work had involved the model adopting, as far as was possible for a softly rounded human body, the form of the pyramids at Giza.

You can't generate passion.

It's got to be there.

He quoted something else, the title of a book by the critic Bernard Berenson about Piero della Francesca, The Ineloquence of Art.

There's something about that title, Hugo told me.