Original subtitles

Piero de la Francesca has been seen as one of the mystery men of Western art, a painter

of enigmatic images rendered with mathematical precision and monumental vision, but which

are often strange and elusive, haunting even. He was overlooked for centuries and subsequently

was seen as a precursor to the achievements of Leonardo Michelangelo and Raphael. But

he's now recognized as their equal.

Piero de la Francesca was born around 1413. Here, in the town of what was then called

Borgo Santa Polcro, now just Santa Polcro, then is now a thriving commercial centre

on the Umrian Tuscan borders. His father was a tanner, but also a successful wall

dealer. And the young Piero went to Abarca's school and studied mathematics effectively

training for a career as a merchant.

We know very little about his life. We do know of 26 surviving paintings, most still

in situ. Nevertheless, some kind of life story can be pieced together, and by his late

teens, the evidence that he chosen the path of an artist. But Santa Polcro must have

seemed too small for a young man with ambition, unlike many, he decided to travel.

Piero went first to Perugia, where he met a celebrated regional painter, Domenico

Veneziano, and the two of them came here to Florence in 1439 and worked together on

the decorations of the walls of a church, which is now being destroyed.

Now Florence was this extraordinary cradle of culture. They've been a rebirth of

classicism 50 years or so before. And by this time, by the time Piero was here,

there was an extraordinary flourishing of scholarship and arts, which no doubt fueled

the young artist. The next few years remained something of a blank, but we know that around

the age of 30, Piero returned to his hometown of Santa Polcro.

Piero's first major work as an independent artist was this one, and we know that he signed

contract in 1445 to an organisation, a company, who had dedicated to Santa Maria,

Del Amizera Cordia, or the Blessed Virgin Mary of Pity and Charity, which had an

oratory building on the edge of Santa Polcro, which he used to minister to the sick

and the poor. And this was an altar piece commissioned for the little chapel there. Now the

structure of it is quite complicated, but it follows an existing altar piece that Piero had to paint

over, and the frame, which would have been wonderfully elaborate, is lost. And this reconstruction

has all of Piero's work, all the panels, but the innate frame that binds it together,

is lost. Nonetheless, this work, called the Missera Cordia Altarpiece, is unified,

not because of Piero's style, which actually is very varied in this work. But because of the

way, he has a gold background that gives an hysterical glow to the work, which binds all pieces

together, and because the five major figures in the work, four saints and the Virgin

herself at the centre, are standing on the same stone step, which seems to cut through space

and time. Now the work began in 1445, with the two figures on the left hand side. On the

extreme left, since the Bastion, a saint who was deemed to protect people from the plague,

and now if I had a great relevance to the companion. And then, since John the Baptist,

and the Baptist is painted in a radical way. First of all, his halo signifies his saintliness,

but look, it's painted with real perspective, even though it's faded over the ages. Secondly,

he clutches himself like so, and his eyes are lowered as if he's focusing inwards on himself. In fact,

some artist historians have described it as a rather fanatical image. I think it's more mystical

and fanatical. And then the crowning glory of Pierre's first faith in painting this work,

the crucifixion, which is above the Virgin Mary, and the Virgin Mary herself is canon black,

and reaches out in a very dramatic gesture to her son, with John the Evangelist on the right hand side

seemingly running towards an opening himself up to his Lord and Master and Savior. Now a few years

later, Pierreo paints in a style that's more relaxed, more calm, some people think the emotion is deeper,

I certainly do. And he completes the picture with two saints here on the right hand side. On the

extreme right, he's San Bernardino, a local saint from Siener, who died in 1444 and was canonized

in 1450, and the fact that Pierreo has a halo above him means that he must have painted this image

sometime soon after 1450. Now Bernardino was part of a Franciscan order. He was a celebrated

preacher who was part of a kind of religious revival or renewal that was going on through

Tuscanian umbre at this time. And then to his left, sit John the Evangelist, author of the fourth

gospel holding the book, leading into the central image. Mary, who actually is much smaller than

life-size, but when you look at the picture, she seems a colossal figure because of the way she

towers over her devotees who are kneeling as her feet, women on the right, men on the left,

they're the figures with which we and certainly the faithful who came to this in the 15th and 16th

centuries would identify with. And also it reminds us that the cult of Mary or Mary-Ollertree

was rife during the 14th and 15th centuries. In fact, it's been estimated that of all churches built

in the 14th of the 15th centuries, more than a third of them were dedicated in various forms

to the Virgin Mary. Pierre's reputation was clearly spreading because around 1450,

he received a commission from the Lord of Rimini, Sigizmondo Pandolfo Malatester.

Pierre, a painting-life size and tries to show the world that Sigizmondo wasn't just a successful

soldier nor the despot he was portrayed as by his various enemies. He kneels at the feet of his

saintly namesake whose bones are actually buried in the chapel in which the painting was made,

and Pierre's job as an artist is to try and bring everything back to life.

But the majority of Pierre's work remained in the town of his birth.

This work was painted around 1455 when Pierre was living in Santa Polcro,

and was part of a much larger altar piece for the church in Santa Polcro, Santa Maria de la Piavi,

where all the local baptisms took place with the central panel as we can see here,

depicting the baptism of Christ. All the traditional elements are there.

The old believers of the city of Jerusalem in the background, the new believers stripping off

with Christ and John the Baptist and the three angels. He makes it local, though. The landscape,

which he pays a good deal of attention to, is that of Santa Polcro and the valley of the war

nuts, as it was known, with a war that tree here in the foreground over Christ's head.

There are two curious aspects to this painting, though. One is the fact that Christ and St John

look as if they're standing in a dry riverbed, but in fact, Pierre was very acutely observed

the optical phenomenon of reflection and the angle of sunlight. Also, he's reflecting the

biblical myth that there's a miracle that takes place in the Jordan when Christ is baptized

and the flow is reversed. The second aspect is geometry. Scholars have related Pierre's work

in his compositions to the work of the great classical mathematician, Euclid. To the naked

either, it's much easier to see this line, the central axis that starts at the very top of

the arch, goes straight down through the dove or holy spirit through the water that's

being poured onto Christ's head and straight down through his face and down through his hands.

And everything emanates from that line. That's bang at the center of the picture. And it's that

idea, this geometric idea that sets the tone for much of Pierre's subsequent work.

A marked sense of geometry looms large in this, perhaps the oddest of all Pierre's works

made around 1458. It shows the fragilation of Christ, tied to a column,

being whipped by curiously languid Roman soldiers while Pontius pilot looks on.

In the foreground, three men dressed in the clothes of contemporary aristocrats,

seem oblivious to what's happening. There have been numerous interpretations of the work

in its iconography, the most interesting of which relates the three men to diplomats in the conflict

between Christendom and the Turks. But the impact of the painting is spatial. It's like a giant

chessboard on which the figures have been placed. And the perspective is so elaborately worked out

and it can actually be reproduced in plan and elevation, creating a claustrophobic stage set

in which a brutal ritual nonchalantly takes place. In 1458, Pierreo comes here to Rome to decorate

the paper apartments of past the second work which was subsequently covered up a few decades later

by Raphael. But then, according to reports, Pierreo hears news that his mother's died,

so it returns back north to Sansa Polcro. It seems likely that sometimes soon after the death of his

mother, Pierreo began to work on one of his most celebrated and popular images, this one,

the Madonna del Parto. Now, the Madonna del Parto means the Madonna of the Delivery,

which is slightly a misnomer because she's not giving birth here, but is clearly in a heavily

pregnant state. And the work resides in the small hill town of Monterci, about six miles or so

from Sansa Polcro. And it was in a church where there was an altar piece already in the existence

and Pierreo painted this fresco over it. And it's now been moved to a rather drab school building

behind protective glass to protect it from all the pilgrims who come from all over the world to

look at it. Essentially, it's an image of revelation. The two angels on either side of the virgin

pull open this canopy or tent to reveal her. And at the same time, it mirrors the gesture that she's

making with her hand pointing to her womb. The idea of what's inside and what is about to burst

forth, which in turn rhymes with this amazing space that Pierreo has created from the canopy behind

her. And this idea of flip rhythms and rhymes in the painting is wonderfully exemplified

with the two angels, who in fact, if you look at her, a mirrored image, one of the other.

And this stems from the fact that Pierreo seems to have used the same cartoon or drawing sketch

from one to the other, but just reversed it. And he's done the same with the colours of their robe

and their wings, this brownie red and green. The heart of the picture and the dominant

most dramatic central image is the opening in the virgin's dress to which she points. And we read

this in two ways. Firstly, vaginal, this is the opening through which Christ will be born.

But we also read it as a wound. And in a way, this anticipates or prophesies,

Christ's wounds on the cross, so in an image of birth, death is also present. But Mary, as the

also a symbol of hope, because through the birth of Christ, people will be saved. It's a root

to salvation and redemption. People come from all over the world to look at this image,

but its power is enhanced by our knowledge of what it was originally intended for. When it was

there, as an altarpiece in a church, it formed part of a cult that had developed in the 40th century

throughout Tuscany and then intoumbria, where pregnant women would come to pray in front of images

like this for the safe delivery of their child. And those who couldn't conceive came to pray for

for funnity or fertility that they might themselves have children. And when we look at this image,

and we compare it say to other images that Pierre is made of the Virgin Mary, it seems more

personalized, less generalised. And we can't help but think that this might have something to do

with his own relationship to his mother and his state of mind after her death.

The Madonna del Parto is perhaps Pierre's most explicitly personal painting, but it was soon

to be a clipsed by the most ambitious work of his entire life.

Pierre de la Francesca's most spectacular work is here in the Capella Maggiure in the Church of San Francisco

in the Hilton of Arrezzo. He begun the work sometime around the middle of the 1450s and we

fill in the wall with 15 or so grand scenes telling the story of the true cross.

Now the piece was commissioned by a wealthy mercantile family, the Batchi, but the tone of the piece

was established by the Franciscan Order who ran this church. And from the beginning, Pierre was original.

He wanted to experiment and innovate, not least with the technique of fresco. Now traditionally

it's done on wet plaster, which Pierre a does to begin with, but restoration and cleaning has

shown that in fact he also used tempera and oils on top of the surface of the fresco once it

had dried to give it a kind of lustre and a sheen. Traditionally in the 19th century these frescoes

were badly restored and there was damp in them and so some of them have been obliterated but

there's still enough here for us to see quite what an achievement it is. Now the story of the true

cross effectively is a 13th century epic saga that details the cross as an instrument of salvation

how it's lost and found and finally restored to Jerusalem and all of that is told by Pierre.

But from the beginning he has his own original vision. So he starts right at the top with something

totally from his own imagination. That is the aging Adam and Eve talking to their three children

about the consequences of their original sin, from which of course salvation springs in the form

and from then on in it's a saga really of hunt the cross in various forms in the various images

that he paints. Historians tell us that a contemporary audience would have made a immediate sense

of this work but I find it an amazingly complex experience where your eyes are drawn from left

to right from right to left up and down and cross ways and it seems to me that's the logical

mind of a rather complex mathematician at work here. What I like is how you start to make these

extraordinary juxtapositions the most powerful of which are the two vast battle scenes that are on

the lowest walls that in fact are closest to the viewer starting on the far wall with an image

of constant time the first Christian emperor defeating the infidel who scramble out of the river

and off into the distance without any violence at all all he does is show the cross to them and rather

using military might a miracle has taken place. On this wall mirroring the non-battle scene we've

just seen over there Pierre reproduces one of the most powerful depictions of a battle I think anywhere

in Italian art it reveals itself to a different ways and in different facets every time you look

at it. For a start Pierre seems to have done seven or eight layers D soldiers, three or four of

which you could say are unnecessary but he wants to marshal this idea of chaos.

And when you look at the work you see extraordinary images expressions of fear of anger,

of humility, odd vignettes like the lins of a figure on the extreme left-hand side bent at the

knee and framing ahead that's been decapitated and it's one of those works that seems both

intensely personal as well as universal and in fact we know that Pierre's may have witnessed

the celebrated battle of angiari in 1440 when the millenies fought the Florentines,

but also we do know that in 1453 he was issued with a crossbow by the commune of Sansa Polcro in

case he needed to fight in a battle against them the apologists and so this sense of claustrophobia

and of being involved is probably the result of some kind of direct experience.

The real impact of this work though through its ambition through its scale through its drama,

Viora is that it seems to push Pierre de la Francesca right to the forefront of Italian and indeed

Western art even though it was centuries before that genius was fully recognised.

As far as we can tell Pierre a remained unmarried and childless it may be something of a cliche

but it seems that he was married to his life as an artist. In 1459 this large building was given over

the people of Sansa Polcro as a meeting place and Pierre de la Francesca as already the most

distinguished artist in town was given a commission to produce a work of art and this is the result.

Now most works of art in places like this are explicit depictions of civic virtue. This though

is almost unique because it's a religious subject matter and one of the most difficult

the resurrection of Christ which is alluded to in the gospels but not explicitly described.

Now why would Pierre de la Francesca do that? Well I think the most obvious answer is because

here he is having burst out of the Holy Sepulca, burst out of the tomb and of course Sansa Polcro

is named after the Sepulca and the myth is that fragments from Christ tomb were brought here in the

first or second century artory's death. Pierre de la Francesca is a approach to depicting the resurrection

is highly individual, highly original. We're down below perhaps six or seven feet from the bottom of

work. We look up to it. What we're confronted by initially are the four soldiers, some sleeping,

one shielding his eyes if he can't bear to look at that which we are looking at. But then we see

the Holy Sepulca. Now there's an element of mystery here because we can't see how Christ has got out.

We can't see if the lid of the Sepulca has been pushed to one side and in a way Pierre de la Francesca

manages to maintain the mystery of the resurrection by not showing us too much. On the other hand,

when he shows us Christ, he shows us a huge amount, a muscular figure, credible, believable,

as if one of us allows slightly larger than us larger than life. But also, he shifted the perspective

again because it's as if when we look at Christ, we're on the same level as him. He's painted

Christ as if he shares the same plane. And by doing that, he suggests a real man having broken through

death rather than the sometimes very story-like depictions you get of Christ floating upwards

above the tomb. And then look at Christ's eyes. This is the most extraordinary thing I think about

the painting. He confronts us their hypnotic. This isn't the image of a gentle savior. This is the

image of someone who's gone through the night who for three days has been wrestling with death

and has finally conquered and he holds the standard of the red cross that symbols his triumph over death.

On the left hand side, there are trees with no leaves on. On the right hand side,

the trees do have leaves. And that's a much flatter path. This is a much more rugged and steep

path. And there's a choice being given here. And it's a moral painting. You have two choices.

You can take the easy way that doesn't lead anywhere in particular or you can take the hard,

slog, the passage of virtue. And this, I think, is the point of having the painting in this

particular context. Because in the next room, this is where meetings took place and also

where judgments were made. And in a way, Piero is using the central image of Christianity,

the resurrection as a way more practically insane to people, judges and those who are about to be

judged, to choose the more difficult but the virtuous path.

There's a neat post-cript of this painting because it's widely believed that the soldier

leaning back against the tomb with his eyes closed, his Piero himself, and that this in fact

is a self-portrait. Of course, we don't know, but there's a neat twist I think to this,

because most artists, when they pick themselves in their work, have their eyes open,

looking out at us, looking at their work. But Piero, one of the most

animatic and mysterious figures in the history of Western art, chooses to paint himself with his eyes

closed. And ironically, this work and this image is perhaps the closest we ever get to him.

In the 1470s, Piero made the short journey to Abino for a very illustrious commission. He'd been

summoned at the court there to paint a double portrait of Federico de Montefeltro,

and his young wife, Batista Sforza, who was only 26 when she died in July 1472,

having born eight daughters and finally a son and heir. Piero's portrait of the couple is

believed to have been painted posthumously as a tribute from Federico to his wife. It's unusual

to have a woman on the view as left, as this was considered the honorary position, but it's also

to avoid showing his missing right eye, lost in a jouse that also shattered his nose.

For the remaining 20 years of his life, Piero stayed in Santa Polcro.

During the mid-1470s, Piero began to write a book on perspective. This, more than his paintings,

ensured that he was initially remembered after his death. At the heart of Piero's studies,

was an analysis of the proportions of the human body, which can be seen as part of an ongoing

program in Renaissance scholarship, where man is seen as the centre of all things.

But Piero so much more than a student of mathematical formulae, for his art shows that the

human imagination is the real measure. Having spent his life painting works for other people,

Piero seems to have ended his career with a work for himself, possibly for his family tomb.

The work in the past so harshly cleaned that the surface is damaged,

shows the nativity, with the shepherds visible in the background, and an angelic,

quiet, strumming and singing above the vulnerable Christ child, who lies on his mother's robe in

the foreground. It's an odd, disjointed image, but it's a joyful picture, where Piero seems to have

shed his customary somberness in favor of a loud celebration, and with the sacred scene once again

transported from the Holy Land to the outskirts of Santa Polcro.

Piero died in 492. His fame rapidly diminishing, partly because the great geniuses of the

high renaissance were about to burst onto the scene, and also because his work was in such

mainly obscure places. But 400 years later, his reputation began to flourish,

says Ann and Picasso both hailed him. Today thousands make the Piero pilgrimage to Italy,

yet he still remains the most enigmatic of all the great artists.