The Flagellation of Christ (Piero della Francesca)

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The Flagellation of Christ (Piero della Francesca)
The Flagellation of Christ
Piero della Francesca , 1444/78
Oil with tempera on panel
59 × 81 cm
Galleria Nazionale delle Marche

The Flagellation of Christ is an oil and tempera painting by Piero della Francesca . The 59 cm × 81 cm panel painting is an early example of consistently applied central perspective and belongs to the collection of the Galleria Nazionale della Marche in Urbino . The exact time of creation and the meaning of the picture are controversial.

history

The picture is mentioned for the first time in 1744 in an inventory of the old sacristy of the Urbiner cathedral, where it is mentioned as "The flagellation of Our Lord on a column by Pietro Dall'Borgo, while the dukes Oddo Antonio, Federico and Guid'Ubaldo stand by" Archpriest Ubaldo Tosi is listed. Johann David Passavant , a German art historian, saw the picture in 1839 and probably found the inscription CONVENERUNT IN UNUM on the frame of the picture. According to Crowe and Cavalcaselle, the inscription and frame disappeared in 1864. In 1916 the picture was moved from the sacristy of the cathedral to the Palazzo Ducale, where it is kept to this day.

The painting was restored in the 19th century, causing three large cracks on the surface, which were removed during a further restoration in the early 1950s by the Istituto Centrale del Restauro in Rome. Another restoration took place in 1968 by the same institute. The theft of the painting from the Palazzo Ducale caused a sensation in early February 1975. The painting was due to be auctioned, but was found on March 23 in a hotel in Locarno .

description

Signature on the throne base

The subject of the picture is the flagellation of Christ before the eyes of the Roman governor Pontius Pilate . The governor, dressed in the official costume of a Byzantine dignitary, watches from his throne the scourging carried out by two torturers in the presence of an oriental-clad man with a turban . The event takes place in the background of the picture in a columned hall from which a staircase leads to an upper floor. On the right half of the picture, three men stand together in the foreground as if in a conversation, but their eyes pass one another. A barefoot blond youth dressed in a red tunic looks with a melancholy look past the viewer into the distance. The middle-aged man on his right, dressed in oriental robes, has raised his left hand in a gesture of speech, and his gaze also goes past the person opposite. This third person in the group, who is shown in full profile, wears a costly cloak made of blue gold brocade ; a narrow, light red sash is barely visible over his right shoulder. The three stand together in a courtyard, which is enclosed by the open court loggia, a Renaissance architecture consisting of a palace and a tower, and behind them by a wall facing the garden. Behind the wall, trees tower into a pastel blue sky.

The picture is completely constructed according to the laws of the central perspective discovered in the Renaissance , while lighting effects and detailed surface treatment reveal the influence of Flemish painting.

The picture is signed on the throne plinth with the inscription OPUS PETRI DE BORGO SANCTI SEPULCRI (= Work of Peter from Borgo San Sepolcro) in Roman capital letters.

Interpretations

The three enigmatic people

“The Flagellation of Christ” belongs to the stately series of enigmatic images of the Italian Renaissance , which to this day have eluded a comprehensive and conclusive interpretation. It has been interpreted in the most varied of ways and so far has not received a valid and satisfactory interpretation in all aspects. The puzzling nature of the picture is probably one of the reasons for the unbroken fascination that it exerts on historians and art historians over and over again and that has led to widely divergent theories about the picture's content, about its function and client, and about assumed dynastic, political or church-historical backgrounds. In her monograph, published in 2002, the American art historian Marilyn Lavin lists 35 different interpretations, most of which are mutually exclusive. Apart from the name of the author on the picture itself, there are almost no sources or evidence about the picture, but there are only a few works of art from the West that have been more researched, discussed and published.

The key to the image's meaning lies in itself, namely in the relationship between the three men in the foreground and the scourging scene in the background.

Since the 18th century, the description of the men as Oddantonio da Montefeltro , Duke of Urbino, in an inventory list from 1744 , has been killed in a conspiracy in 1444, in the picture flanked by his half-brother and successor as Duke, Federico , and his son Guidobaldo , common. This thesis, which was not tenable because of the absurdity of the age of the two companions and the lack of portrait similarity between the people - Guidobaldo was born in 1472, long after the picture was taken, exact portraits of Federico by Piero - was abandoned: the two companions of the barefoot youth mutated into the "bad advisors" Manfredo dei Piedi and Tommaso dell'Agnello, who were also killed in the conspiracy, or also to three people who meditate on the Passion of Christ , in view of the threat to Christianity from the Turks, who by the conquest of Constantinople had been triggered in 1453.

Gombrich suggests the bearded than the traitor Judas , who is in the process of two members of the High Council to " Judaslohn receive" 30 pieces of silver, of which in the picture, however, nothing can be seen. Jean-Louis Ferrier believes an allegory on the fall of Constantinople is likely - the figure on the left is an occidental prince who, like Pontius Pilate, remained inactive and the figure on the right is a Greek. The youth in the middle would play the role of an “athlete of virtue”, in analogy to the “athletic Christ” on the column in the Renaissance sense. He should urge the prince to fight against the unbelievers. The British art historian Pope-Hennessy , however, takes a completely different view: The figure on the column is Saint Jerome and the scourging scene refers to a dream of the saint in which he was chastised for reading. So the group in the foreground is discussing the problem of pagan writers. Aldous Huxley and other viewers, on the other hand, advocate the thesis that the content of the picture cannot be interpreted at all, but merely served as a showpiece for Piero's mastery in perspective-mathematical picture construction.

The Italian art historian Carlo Ginzburg argues that the painting should be located in the context of the Council of Ferrara / Florence . Piero divides it into a primarily allegorical and a primarily realistic half. The headgear of the figure on the throne on the far left in the picture suggests a Byzantine emperor, in this case John VIII Palaeologus . The figure on the back with a turban is symbolic of the Ottoman Empire, which threatens the Christian Constantinople , capital of the Eastern Roman Empire (embodied in the scourged Christ). According to Ginzburg, Giovanni Bacci, representative of the Medici bankers who financed the council, can be identified in the right group of figures . It is the man at the right edge of the picture in the magnificently ornamented blue robe. His counterpart, the figure with a headgear in a red robe, presumably represents the Eastern Roman Cardinal Bessarion , who took part in the Council as a Byzantine representative.

Drawing on Ginzburg, Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton interpret the symbolic content of the painting as “equipoised between East and West, legible to both Eastern and Western Churches”.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Roeck 2006. p. 10
  2. ↑ quoted in Ginzburg 1985, p. 133.
  3. ↑ = The kings of the earth stand up, the great have allied themselves against the Lord and his anointed , a passage from a verse of the second psalm
  4. ^ JA Crowe, GB Cavalcaselle: A History of painting in Italy. Vol. 2, London 1864.
  5. ↑ Ferrier. Munich 1998; Theft to order. The time. 1979 [1]
  6. ↑ AM Lavin: Piero della Francesca. London, New York 2002, p. 96.
  7. ↑ Kenneth Clark : Piero della Francesca. 2nd edition 1970, p. 34.
  8. ^ Ernst Gombrich : The Repentance of Judas in Piero della Francesca's Flagallation of Christ. In: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes. Vol. 22, 1939, pp. 105-107.
  9. ^ Jean-Louis Ferrier: The adventure of seeing. An art history in 30 pictures. Munich: Piper 1998, ISBN 3-492-04019-5 , chapter: A mathematical dream, pp. 27-38.
  10. ^ Aldous Huxley: Along the Road. New York 1925, p. 189; Philip Guston : Piero della Francesca. The Impossibility of Painting. In: Art News. 64, 1965, pp. 38-39; Urte Krass : Structural Change in the Public. Piero della Francesca's flagellazione as a showpiece for the relentlessness of perspective. In: Beate Fricke , Urte Krass (Ed.): The Public in the Picture. Involving the Beholder in Antique, Islamic, Byzantine, Western Medieval and Renaissance Art. Diaphanes, Zurich / Berlin 2015, pp. 249–266.
  11. ^ Ginzburg, Carlo .: The enigma of Piero: Piero della Francesca: The baptism, the Arezzo cycle, the flagellation . Verso, 1985, ISBN 0-86091-116-0 ( worldcat.org [accessed May 20, 2020]).
  12. ↑ German ≈ "In the balance between East and West, readable for both the Eastern and Western churches." Nicholas Terpstra: Global Interests: Renaissance Art Between East and West, by Lisa Jardine and Jerry BrottonGlobal Interests: Renaissance Art Between East and West, by Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton. Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 2000. 224 pp. $ 39.95 US (cloth). In: Canadian Journal of History . tape 37 , no. 1 , April 2002, ISSN  0008-4107 , p. 116-118 , doi : 10.3138 / cjh.37.1.116 .

literature

  • Ernst-Erich Doberkat: The three. A journey through the role of numbers in art, culture and history. Berlin: Springer 2019. In it: Piero della Francesca's Flagellazione di Cristo . Pp. 185-236. ISBN 978-3-662-58787-4
  • David A. King: Astrolabes and Angels, Epigrams and Enigmas. From Regiomontanus' Acrostic for Cardinal Bessarion to Piero della Francesca's Flagellation of Christ. Steiner, Stuttgart 2007, ISBN 978-3-515-09061-2 .
  • Bernd Roeck : murderer, painter and patron. Piero della Francesca's “Flagellation”. An art-historical crime story. Munich 2006, ISBN 3-406-55035-5 .
  • Carlo Bertelli : Piero della Francesca. Life and work of the master of the early Renaissance. Cologne 1992, ISBN 3-7701-3058-8 .
  • Ronald Lightbown: Piero della Francesca. Abbeville 1992.
  • Carlo Ginzburg : Explorations about Piero. Piero della Francesca, an early Renaissance painter. With e. Introduction by Martin Warnke . Berlin 1985, ISBN 3-8031-3500-1 .
  • Marilyn Aronberg Lavin: Piero della Francesca. The flagellation. University of Chicago Press, 1973.
  • Kenneth Clark : Piero della Francesca. 2. through Ed., London 1970.

Web links

Commons : The Flagellation of Christ  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files