Studies in Iconography 38

Studies in Iconography

Studies in Iconography is supported and administered by the Index of Christian Art, Princeton University. For further details see .

ISSN 0148-1029

Composed by Kathy Bond Borie

Cover photo: Fall of the rebel angels. Très riches heures, before 1416; Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS 65, fol. 64v. (Photo: Art Resource, NY, © RMN-Grand Palais.) The Stone and the Dream: On Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection Cyril Gerbron

iero della Francesca’s Resurrection can be seen in Sansepolcro’s Museo Civico, a building that formerly was the city’s Palazzo dei Conservatori (Fig. 1).1 After the Tuscan city was Ppurchased by the Republic of Florence in 1441, it fell under the authority of a Florentine capitano, but its old municipal institutions were retained. In 1456, the government, led by a council of four conservatori elected for two months,2 reinstalled itself in the communal palace. It immediately set out to renovate the building, especially through the addition of two long rooms on the piano nobile, where the city councils would gather.3 Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection today appears in the first of these rooms, on the wall separating it from its neighbor, but it is uncertain whether it was intended for this location: the current restoration, whose results should soon be published, seems to show that the fresco was originally painted on another wall of the same room, or perhaps in another room of the Palazzo. Borgo Sansepolcro (as it was known in Piero’s time) was a city not quite like any other. As Marilyn Aronberg Lavin demonstrated in the case of the artist’s Baptism of Christ, at the heart of its identity and embedded in its very name is a strong bond, material and symbolic, with Christ’s sepulcher. In the earliest surviving document that mentions the fresco—which serves as the terminus ante quem of its creation (1474)—the subject of the scene is identified merely as “el sepolcro.”4 This object is somehow the reason, the justification for the commission. The sepulcher’s visual importance is limited in the fresco, but the stone under the soldier on the right may be linked to it. Apart from Michael Baxandall, who referred to it as an “amorphous object,”5 Marilyn Aronberg Lavin is the only art historian who has noted its presence. In her 1992 monograph she analyzes it as follows:

As we have seen in discussing the Baptism of Christ, the name “Sansepolcro” came from the precious relic of Christ’s tomb brought from Jerusalem to this Tuscan valley. Because of its identification with the Holy Land, the town had always considered itself to be a holy site. By painting the miracle of the Resurrection in the seat of government, Piero transformed a devotional image into a civic ensign. In this light, we must recognize the chunk of stone beneath the arm of the tumbling soldier on the right as the founding relic. Carried from the Holy Land by Arcano and Egidio, the relic of Christ’s tomb gave life, as well as name, to Piero’s native land.6 Lavin does not develop her analysis further, a task I would like to undertake in this essay. My main goal is to reach a better understanding of Piero della Francesca’s fresco, but also—with the help of several other images created in Italy during the Renaissance—of the poetic connection between stones, sleep, and dreams. Thus, the first part of my study is devoted to certain unchanging notions in the perception of stones. From Neolithic dolmens and stone circles up to our day, rocks have been THE STONE AND THE DREAM: ON PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA’S RESURRECTION 143

Fig. 1. Piero della Francesca, Resurrection, c. 1460; Sansepolcro, Museo Civico. (Photo: Sansepolcro, Museo Civico, picture by Enzo Mattei.) viewed as possessing the power to bring man in contact with gods and as linked to memory by virtue of their immutable nature. Like the men who fashioned the sites of Stonehenge and Carnac, Jacob, Genesis tells us, set up a stone and declared it sacred. The stone in this case is linked to a dream: hence arises an affinity between oneirism and minerality—an affinity that I develop in the following two sections, which deal more directly with Piero’s Resurrection. I argue that the soldier on the right is dreaming after laying his head on a rock, and that he is related to both Arcano, the legendary founder of Sansepolcro, and Jacob. The two allusions reinforce each other, thus extending the work’s civic and religious meaning. In the fourth section, I claim that Piero and his patrons intended to turn the Palazzo dei Conservatori into the counterpart of the church housing the relic of the Holy Sepulcher. The fresco not only represents Christ’s sarcophagus, but also introduces a tomb-altar into the Palazzo 144 CYRIL GERBRON

Fig. 2. Raphael’s workshop, Jacob’s dream, 1513–14; Vatican, Stanza di Eliodoro. (Photo: Musei Vaticani.) and should thus be read as a commemorative monument, an object that combines altar, altarpiece, and tomb; its stone frame, overlooked by historians and truncated or eliminated from nearly all reproductions of the fresco in monographs on Piero, will be considered here. In the fifth and final section, I reexamine the complex iconic structure of the fresco and the means by which Piero granted life to the greatest and most fathomless mystery of Christianity.

Stones Dead and Alive In Genesis, the story of Jacob’s dream begins with some very commonplace bits of information and the mention of humble objects that nevertheless lead to one of the most influential mystical visions in the Old Testament: “And as he had come to a certain place and wanted to rest after sunset, he took of the stones that laid there and putting one under his head he slept in this place. And dreaming, he saw a ladder [scala in the Vulgate, which means ladder or stairs] standing upon the earth and its top touching heaven, the angels of God also ascending and descending by it, and the Lord leaning upon the ladder” (Gen. 28:11–13) (Fig. 2). Jacob’s curious choice of a stone as a pillow is not explained any more than its possible role in the apparition. However, a link is suggested by the juxtaposition of these two statements, that is, the text provides the image of an object and a character related through a common outward inertia that hides inner activity. The state of sleep, sometimes likened to death, renders Jacob motionless and incapable of action; but as his “natural” conscience enters a temporary state of dormancy, he becomes susceptible to higher spiritual communication thanks to divine images infused in his mind. The same sort of ambivalence was perceived in stones before the onset of their scientific study in the seventeenth century. THE STONE AND THE DREAM: ON PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA’S RESURRECTION 145

On the one hand, stones were relegated to the bottom of the scale of creation. As Jacobus de Voragine explains, lacking understanding, reason, sensation, and life, they are among all creatures the most akin to death.7 In De mineralibus, Albert the Great likewise claims that stones do not have life or soul, though “all, or nearly all” of them have powers “by means of which natural magic could accomplish whatever it does.”8 Some attract other objects (magnets), produce light (carbuncles), or devour dead bodies (sarcophagi, as indicated by the Greek etymology of the word);9 many are use- ful in divination and magic rituals, while many more possess medicinal properties, as stated by all ancient lapidaries. Agate, “when placed under the head of a sleeper, is said to show him many dreams in his sleep.” As for quiritia, it “reveals secrets and produces hallucinations if placed on the breast of a sleeper.”10 The three books of Pliny’s Natural History on stones and gems likewise give the impression of a kingdom animated by multiple forms of sexuality and reproductive abilities, exchange with other elements, and a profusion of medicinal and magical properties. In the first epistle of Peter (2:4–9), Christ and the Christians are described as “living stones,” a term often used in medieval literature and liturgy that certainly fostered the perception of minerals as being, in a way, alive.11 In the story of Jacob’s dream, the character cannot act, for he is asleep and does not exercise his sense of touch by his own volition. Rather, the contact between his body and the stone awakens the latter’s potency, the skin becoming a point of transmission between it and the dreamer’s mind. Like a magnet, this rock seems capable of capturing and diffusing an invisible mystical power. “Our Lady of the Rock” is a place of worship founded in 1995 in the Mojave Desert, north of Los Angeles, and still active. There on the thirteenth of each month Maria Paula Acuña attracts hun- dreds of the faithful to an unchanging ritual. At around 11a.m. she begins a mystical communication of twenty to thirty minutes with the Virgin. Then she transmits Mary’s message to the crowd before performing the blessings and healing gestures typical of charismatic leaders. Large blocks of uncut stone, piled about in no particular order, have been transported to the site where she experienced her first vision of the Virgin (Fig. 3).12 Indeed, the phenomenon of sacred stones is common to many cultures and periods. In his Patterns in Comparative Religion, Mircea Eliade explains the spiritual strength attributed to stones as follows:

The hardness, ruggedness, and permanence of matter was in itself a hierophany in the religious consciousness of the primitive. And nothing was more direct and autonomous in the completeness of its strength, nothing more noble or more awe-inspiring, than a majestic rock, or a boldly-standing block of granite. Above all, stone is. … Rock shows [to man] something that transcends the precariousness of his humanity; an absolute mode of being. Its strength, its motionlessness, its size and its strange outlines are none of them human; they indicate the presence of something that fascinates, terrifies, attracts and threatens, all at once.13 The opacity of stones makes them impenetrable, while their weight often makes them impossible to transport. They are thus stronger than man, but this power derives from inertia, from gravity. Jacobus de Voragine already notes that stones “have existence only;” they are a manifestation of fundamental things—matter, existence—and thus grant access to what might be defined as “essence.” Because they cannot move or change appearance, stones are also associated with memory, sep- ulchers, and the idea of a monument. Jacob transforms the stone on which he has slept into a stele (Gen. 28:18) in order to mark the site of his vision and attest to the importance and greatness of the 146 CYRIL GERBRON

Fig. 3. The pile of rocks indicating the site of Maria Paula Acuña’s first vision at “Our Lady of the Rock” in the Mojave Desert (June 2006). (Photo: Matt Gainer.) object. Similarly, those who promote the cult of Our Lady of the Rock have marked with stones the site of Acuña’s initial vision, henceforth a distant experience, impossible to grasp fully in the present. Fences erected around the rocky crags have made them inaccessible, thus increasing their sanctity and ability to evoke the unspeakable. This type of holy site was not unknown in the Renaissance. In 1484, the Virgin appeared to two shepherdesses in Pontassieve near Fiesole and informed them of her desire to have a church built atop the rock on which she was sitting. The “sasso was eventually incor- porated into the sanctuary and treated as a contact relic of the Virgin.”14 Today the church is known as Madonna del Sasso (an expression that could be translated as “Our Lady of the Rock”), a name bestowed upon many Italian miraculous images and sanctuaries with similar foundation legends.15 Among the contact relics venerated in the medieval West, one is of particular significance: the sarcophagus of Christ in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.16 This object is directly linked to our subject, as it sheltered a corpse that mysteriously came back to life. According to medieval and Renaissance painters, the event occurred as Roman soldiers slept nearby. Piero della Francesca represented these characters as sitting rather than reclining because they were or were supposed to have been guarding the tomb (Fig. 1). But why did he depict them sleeping in broad daylight? Piero might have been inspired by Giotto, who, in the Noli me tangere in the Scrovegni Chapel, had depicted three seated soldiers (Fig. 4). The position of the second soldier in Piero’s work strongly recalls that of the third from the left in the Paduan fresco. Both painters brilliantly captured THE STONE AND THE DREAM: ON PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA’S RESURRECTION 147

Fig. 4. Giotto, Noli me tangere, 1308–12; Padua, Scrovegni Chapel. (Photo: Su gentile concessione del Comune di Padova—Assessorato alla Cultura.) the sense that the soldiers’ sleep is not entirely natural; the heavy torpor that overcomes their minds seems to derive from a superior power, perhaps that of God, who could thus have ensured that the mystery of the Resurrection would be preserved. In Giotto’s fresco, the soldiers’ heads are set against the strange surface of the sarcophagus, whose nebulous pattern could evoke the confusion and indistinctness that has overtaken their senses. The tomb of Christ is, in fact, an extraordinary object. Its dimensions are impressive and its precious material is visually disrupting in both the Noli me tangere and the mineral universe of the chapel’s fresco cycle. The stone seems animated by slow movements like those of clouds taking shape in the sky, while the use of various light and dark hues creates an impression of overlap and constantly 148 CYRIL GERBRON

Fig. 5. Master of the Osservanza, Resurrection, ca. 1440; Detroit, Institute of Arts. (Photo: Detroit Institute of Arts, USA. Founders Society Purchase/Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ford II/Bridgeman Images.) shifting layers. The white and red color may be linked to the two eucharistic species, that is, the body and blood of the Savior (for is not a sarcophagus a stone that eats the bodies it holds?). In the fresco, Christ’s body is white and his stigmata consist of red spots. The stone is also linked to the experience of Mary Magdalene, who learned during the Noli me tangere how to convert physical to spiritual love. The transformation at work in her is expressed in the transition of the red in her cloak to the pink of the sleeves of her tunic, and finally to the white of her hands extending to Christ. The same colors appear on the variegated surface of the tomb, the site of passage from human corporeity to divine glory. The Master of the Osservanza, too, painted a remarkable sarcophagus in a panel today at the Detroit Institute of Arts Museum (Fig. 5). The tomb is hermetically sealed in order to underscore the belief that Christ’s resurrected body overcame all natural laws. Its weight and compact quality express materiality, but its colorful appearance implies the flight of Christ; the stone is tinged in white and grey, the colors of his body and shroud, and golden yellow, the color of the supernatural THE STONE AND THE DREAM: ON PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA’S RESURRECTION 149 light emanating from him. Through contact with a body and the miracle that affected it, the stone has become more beautiful, almost shimmering, alive. Minerals do possess a metamorphic character. It is therefore not surprising that in Renaissance images they share an affinity with the Resurrection.

The Story of a Relic The earliest known evidence of the foundation of Sansepolcro lies at the beginning of the Libro rosso, a book used to register the city’s accounts but also conceived as a source of historical memory for its inhabitants. The relevant passage was written in 1418 by the notary Francesco di Cristofano Largi;17 it is translated here literally in order to convey the meaning of the Italian text as closely as possible:

As everyone knows, the two holy pilgrims, Arcano and Egidio, the principal founders of this our land, had gone to the Holy Sepulcher of Jesus Christ and from there had obtained certain holy relics; and then they had gone to visit the steps of the consecrated churches of the blessed Sts. Peter and Paul Apostles in Rome [“steps” might emphasize the idea of a pilgrimage made on foot and spiritual ascension], and from there had obtained, through their holiness and devotion, more relics of saints; and turning around, they left Rome to go back to their fatherland, Arcadia. But this did not please Sir our Lord God, who had foreseen that this our land would have its first building miraculously through the hands of these two holy pilgrims; so, when they arrived in Valle di Nocea, which the Ancient called this place where we are because it was full of enormous walnut trees, they rested, took bodily food, and as pleased God fell asleep with words of him in their mouths; and, while sleeping, the blessed Arcano saw in a vision that he should make his tabernacle in that place and should no longer hope to return home. Naturally eager to see his homeland, Arcano stood up and called for his companion; after two similar visions he tried to leave, lured by the sweetness of his Arcadia. He took up his things and making sure that none was missing, he realized that he did not have the Holy Relics. He, who had placed all his hope and singular devotion in them, began to feel afflicted while looking for them carefully. And finally, humbly raising his eyes and hands joined together toward heaven, he saw the case in which were the said Holy Relics. Hence, struck by the miracle that what had no feathers flew up to a very high branch of a walnut tree, and no longer wishing to oppose the will and predestination of the glorious God, he decided to remain in this place. He reobtained the Holy Relics and settled there. Certain peasants who understood the miracle left their own homes, gathered and erected new buildings in this place, and multiplied so much in a short time, as pleased God, that it was a marvelous thing. Given that the said holy pilgrims came from the Holy Sepulcher of Jesus Christ, they named these first buildings Borgo di Sancto Sepolcro.18 Then Largi explains that the relics are still preserved in the abbey church and specifies their nature. Among them is “some stone of the Holy Sepulcher in which our Lord Jesus Christ was buried, and in whose name this land was built.”19 As in so many hagiographic texts, the revelation occurs while the hero is asleep. During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, dreams were not seen as psychic experiences undergone by self-aware subjects, but as the result of external forces acting on the spirits of men—devils in the case of bad dreams, God or angels in the case of positive dreams, which were perceived as similar to mystical visions.20 Although the text states that Arcano “saw in a vision”, the revelation has a discursive tone; he has clearly been subject to a divine command. 150 CYRIL GERBRON

The foundation legend is also known from the Historia Burgi Sancti Sepulcri, written in 1454 by an anonymous Camaldolese monk who offers a similar account.21 This author situates the dream of Arcano in 937 and claims that the relics were first housed in a chapel kept by a Camaldolese her- mit. In 1012, another Camaldolese monk called Bonilo, “seeing that the Borgo had grown to the dimension of a city, built a pontifical temple.” About this temple we are told: “During the year 1012 after the birth of the Lord, the church of the Holy Sepulcher in the city of Jerusalem was destroyed by the infidels; it can be said to be truly amazing that our own new church in Borgo Sansepolcro was built in the image of the destroyed church, as though its foundation had arisen from the materials of that church; just as the phoenix rises from a phoenix, so in the same way it took the origin of its material being [the Latin word is res] and name.”22 The monastic church of Sansepolcro, called the Badia during the Quattrocento, was built not only to house a fragment of Christ’s tomb, but also “in the image” of and even as a substitute for the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. Consequently, though Piero della Francesca’s fresco shows the site where Christ was buried outside of Jerusalem, in the minds of Sansepolcro’s inhabitants this place was conflated with their own city, where the tomb of Christ was also present. The tall hills in the background of the fresco recall those surrounding the plain of Borgo Sansepol- cro (Fig. 1), depicted earlier by Piero della Francesca in his Baptism of Christ.23 Marilyn Aronberg Lavin has shown that the walnut trees mentioned in the Libro rosso appear in this image. Although botanical precision is less accurate in the Resurrection, the large trees with smooth gray trunks in the background certainly evoke them as well. To Christ’s left, the castle with its crenellated tower is very close to the medieval and Renaissance architectural types that one would have encountered around Sansepolcro.24 Thus, the scene has an air of familiarity that brings the gospel event closer to the foundation of the Borgo. The stone that visually impinges on the tomb of Christ and is of the same color could then be related to the most precious relic brought by the two pilgrims from Jerusalem, as it is precisely a piece of stone detached from the tomb. According to Lavin, the soldier above the stone is “tumbling;” he “falls backward as if magneti- cally attracted to a chunk of stone lying on the ground behind him.”25 She also acknowledges that the character is asleep, which seems hard to reconcile with her other characterizations. The four soldiers do indeed seem sound asleep, but two of them are in curious positions. The legs of the first soldier on the left are joined together and bent while his torso leans forward over his legs, all elements expressing withdrawal, a refusal to see and understand. Furthermore, he lowers his head and leans forward, placing his right hand over his eyes, and wears a helmet with a visor that prevents him from seeing Christ. By contrast, the soldier at farthest right assumes an open position. His legs and arms are spread out, his torso oriented so as to receive Christ’s influence to the full. The effect of magnetic attraction to which Lavin refers is evident, but the pole of attraction is Christ; bathed in light, the body and face of the soldier are fully turned and irresistibly attracted to the invisible strength emanating from him. His position is strikingly close to that of Paul in Benozzo Gozzoli’s Conversion of Paul (Fig. 6): lying on the ground with open legs, head bent backward, the saint is submerged, as if pierced by divine illumination. His closed eyes remind us that we are witnessing an inner revelation that involves not the senses but the spirit and that this is truly a conversion, a passage from a state of blindness to one of light and grace.26 The soldier in the Resurrection is also experiencing an inner illumination. Like Arcano, he sees God in his sleep; in other words, he is dreaming. THE STONE AND THE DREAM: ON PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA’S RESURRECTION 151

Fig. 6. Benozzo Gozzoli, Conversion of Paul, ca. 1470; New York, Metro- politan Museum. (Photo: New York, Metropolitan Museum.) The difficulty with such a reading is that the Roman soldiers are a priori negative characters who do not take part in Christian revelation. Confronted by the prodigies that accompanied the death of Christ, the centurion Longinus nevertheless converted and thus revealed the spiritual strength of the sacrifice, which struck even those furthest from the true faith. Moreover, the need to prove the importance of the Christian message has often led painters to introduce positive characters with whom viewers could identify: the propagation of the faith becomes a necessity, a logic of the narrative when conceived as exemplary. In the Resurrection he painted for the funerary chapel of Marco Zorzi in the church of the Camaldolese abbey of San Michele in Isola,27 Giovanni Bellini also created a contrast between two soldiers (Fig. 7). Like Christ, the one sitting on the ground is naked except for a white cloth around his waist. Yet, this common feature helps emphasize a radical opposition. The soldier’s attitude expresses abasement and closure; sleep indicates his lack of consciousness, his inability to perceive the possibility of awakening to a new life promised by the Resurrection. On the other hand, like Christ, the fully armed soldier on the left directs his face and eyes upward, raises his right arm, and, like the risen Christ, holds something in his left hand. He looks directly at Jesus, marveling at the miracle of Resurrection. The painting thus suggests that he who recognizes the divinity of Christ, who has faith in his Resurrection, resembles the Savior and can hope in his own resurrection. St. Paul’s epistles already refer to the Resurrection of Christ as the prototype and necessary step leading to the resurrection of every Christian (see, in particular, Rom. 6:4–8). The soldier appears with his back turned to the picture plane, in the same position vis-à-vis Christ as is the beholder, so that the latter can easily project him- or herself onto him. The message is valid for 152 CYRIL GERBRON

Fig. 7. Giovanni Bellini, Resurrection, c. 1475; Berlin, Gemäldegalerie. (Photo: © BPK, Berlin, Dist. RMN- Grand Palais / Jörg P. Anders.) THE STONE AND THE DREAM: ON PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA’S RESURRECTION 153 the visitors to the chapel, but also for Marco Zorzi buried nearby; the way indicated by the soldier is the one he hopes to follow. Like Giovanni Bellini, Piero della Francesca inserted two models, two possible paths in his Resurrection: the absence of faith, synonymous with spiritual blindness, and belief, synonymous with elevation and enlightenment—an opposition confirmed by the juxtaposition of dead and living trees on the left and right sides in the background (Fig. 1). In addition, like Bellini, he has turned a Roman soldier into a positive character. But Piero has a more precise goal: the evocation of the legendary Arcano. The painter would certainly have been interested in the story of the foundation of Borgo Sansepolcro. He was born in that city, spent most of his life there, and was an active member of its government.28 He painted numerous works for its churches, especially for the Badia29—where he was buried according to his will.30 In the chapel where Arcano’s relics were kept, in fact, Piero would have seen a fresco cycle relating the story of Arcano and Egidio painted by Jacopo di Balduccio in 1380.31 Piero himself included depictions of the two pilgrims in the Polyptych of the Misericordia, painted for the church of the confraternity of the Misericordia in Sansepolcro. Finally, he represented the Badia’s steeple in the Proof of the True Cross in Arezzo, a scene that takes place in Jerusalem,32 and, as we have seen, he alluded to the topography of his native land in the Resurrection and Baptism of Christ, as well as in the Nativity now in London.33 As shown by Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, he inserted a reference to the vision of Augustus and the sibyl in this painting, a sign of his interest in supernatural revelations.34 During the Quattrocento, humanists placed human will at the heart of historical events and attempted to grasp chains of causality independent of God’s influence. Sansepolcro’s foundation legend, by contrast, presents Arcano and Egidio as the instruments of the will of God, “who had foreseen that this our land would have its first building miraculously by the hands of these two holy pilgrims.” The place of the vision is “predestined”; the expression “as pleased God” appears twice in the passage quoted here, and all of the events recounted are marked with the seal of the miraculous. Piero chose to allude to this legend, which reveals his adherence to this kind of providential sense of history, and he focused precisely on Arcano’s vision. The name of this character might not be coinci- dental: the Latin word arcana means secrets, mysteries, hidden things. This perfectly suits the soldier in the fresco, who has a still indistinct vision of the greatest of Christian mysteries. Even if Lavin’s idea that “we must recognize the stone as the relic” seems an excessively univocal and prescriptive way of interpreting the detail, the rock beneath the soldier could indeed have evoked for Borgo Sansepolcro’s inhabitants, not in a straightforward but in an oblique and puzzling way, the stone from the Holy Sepulcher, which in certain respects is the foundation stone of their city.

Jacob’s Dream and the Soldier’s Dream Minerals play a key role in Giovanni Bellini’s Resurrection (Fig. 7). In contrast to the celestial clarity, brightness, and evanescence of the celestial sphere, they speak to the gravity and physicality of a world momentarily inhabited by God, but from which he escaped. The body of the naked soldier is enveloped by a cleft in the rock, which recalls the envelopment of Christ’s body in the tomb, itself housed in a rocky crevice (Mt. 27:60). On the left side of the image, this crevice is depicted as a black hollow whose boundaries are impossible to grasp; it seems to open onto an unfathomable infinity, an absence of matter that does not suggest spiritual growth but rather darkness and death. 154 CYRIL GERBRON

The appearance of Christ’s tomb is quite unusual. As we have seen in the Master of the Osservanza’s panel, it is sometimes shown sealed in order to emphasize the fact that the risen Christ has been able to overcome the limitations imposed on his body by the hardest material (Fig. 5). The tomb created by Bellini, however, has neither lid nor opening; strictly speaking, it cannot be identified as a tomb likely to contain a body. Its first function seems to be to confront the viewer with the essence of stone: an opaque, blind, heavy, impenetrable type of matter. The middle soldier in Bellini’s picture sits on a rock that seems to have been cut and transformed into a seat; he sleeps with his head resting on one arm, itself pressing the rock. This attitude is often used for dreaming characters, as in the case of St. Romuald asleep on the steps leading to an altar in a panel attributed to the Pseudo-Jacopino (Fig. 8); St. Lucy, who sleeps on St. Agatha’s tomb in a panel by Jacobello del Fiore (Fig. 9); and Jacob in the fresco in the Stanza di Eliodoro by Raphael’s workshop (Fig. 2). The soldier appears at the center of the image, beneath Jesus: he suggests a different way of apprehending the risen Christ—not through a refusal to look or through physical vision, but rather through a more mysterious and inner intellection that might refer to Jacob’s dream. The allusion to the patriarch, however, is clearer in Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection. Here is a translation of the story of Jacob’s dream in the Vulgate:

And as he had come to a certain place and wanted to rest after sunset, he took of the stones that lay there and, placing one beneath his head, he slept in this place. And dreaming, he saw a ladder standing upon the earth and its top touching heaven, the angels of God also ascending and descending by it, and the Lord leaning upon the ladder, saying to him: I am the Lord God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac, I will give to you and your seed the land in which you sleep. And your seed will be as the dust of the earth, you will spread to the west and the east, to the north and the south, and all the tribes of the earth are blessed in you and in your seed. And I will be your keeper wherever you head to and will lead you back to this land, and I will not abandon you until I have accomplished all that I have said. And when Jacob awoke from his dream, he said: Truly the Lord is in this place, and I didn’t know it, and with fear he said: How terrible is this place, it is no other than the house of God and the gate of heaven. Rising in the morning, he took the stone on which he had laid his head and raised it as a stele, pouring oil on it. And he named the city, which before had been called Luza, Bethel. (Gen. 28:11–19)

This text has much in common with the passage from the Libro rosso quoted above: • A traveling character sleeps in the open (fleeing Esau’s anger, Jacob is on his way from Beersheba to Haran). • A divine vision occurs while this character is asleep: “dormivit viditque in somnis” / “dormendo ebbe in visione.” • The site of the vision, itself sacred, becomes a foundation place. Jacob erects a stele that “will be called the house of God” (Gen. 28:22). He also says that the place where he has slept “is no other than the house of God” and renames the city Bethel, which, as was well known in the Middle Ages, means “house of God” in Hebrew. The city therefore takes its name from the stone. Sansepolcro is likewise built around a church in which the stone relic was still kept in the fifteenth century, and was dedicated to the Holy Sepulcher (and to the four Evangelists): it also arose and took its name THE STONE AND THE DREAM: ON PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA’S RESURRECTION 155

Fig. 8. Pseudo-Jacopino, Romuald’s dream, 1329; Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale, 63.5 × 37.5 cm. (Photo by the author.) 156 CYRIL GERBRON

Fig. 9. Jacobello del Fiore, Lucy’s dream, c. 1420; Fermo, Pinacoteca civica. (Photo: Mondadori Portfolio / Electa / Sergio Anell / Bridgeman Images.) THE STONE AND THE DREAM: ON PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA’S RESURRECTION 157

from a stone.35 Furthermore, “domus Dei,” house of God, was a common designation for churches in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. • The fact that the relics are transported upwards may be linked to the vision of the ladder/stairs, an object also evoked in the curious reference to the “gradi de le consacrate chiese.” In addition, the Italian verb multiplicare in the penultimate sentence of the Libro rosso passage also exists in Latin. It has a strong biblical resonance, as it appears no fewer than twenty-three times in Genesis. In fact, in Genesis 28:3, before Jacob’s departure to Haran, Isaac orders his son to take a wife and says to him: “Deus crescere te faciat, atque multiplicet.” But it is most often used by God himself, who enjoins men—as, for example, Adam and Eve in Genesis 1:28—to multiply. In the Libro rosso, the multiplication of men too is presented as the result of God’s will (“come fo piacere a Dio”). The story of Jacob’s dream, therefore, played a key role in the invention of the foundation legend of Sansepolcro. To its readers or listeners, the similarities would not have appeared as the result of human fabrication, but as signs of the divine design of human history, which is coherent and repetitive because it is ordered by a single consciousness throughout its course. Thus, the legend gains greater value and authority; it allowed Piero’s fellow citizens to connect their city not only to the two holy pilgrims and to the time of the Evangelists, but also to the very positive character of Jacob and the glorious era of the patriarchs, when God acted directly and regularly upon history. The entire story of Sansepolcro’s foundation is based on the desire to relate it to ancient events recorded in the Bible, to reenact what already existed rather than to create something anew. By alluding to Jacob’s dream, the author of the Libro rosso did in fact repeat what many authors had done before him. Christian Heck has examined several instances of ecclesiastical foundations that were justified a posteriori through stories featuring characters, who, like Jacob, laid their head on a rock and experienced a vision.36 An interesting case is that of St. Romuald, the founder of the Order of Camaldoli. From the thirteenth century onward, sources describe the saint as having had a vision “instar Jacob”, for he saw in his sleep a ladder to heaven with monks ascending it. Romuald then founded the abbey of Camaldoli in the place where he had this dream.37 The sources do not mention a stone, but the Pseudo-Jacopino shows Romuald sleeping very close to a stone object, an altar (Fig. 8).38 The ladder leans on this altar, which thus becomes a “gate of heaven,” and which is seen before a domus Dei, a church: the allusion to the stone of Bethel is clear.39 The Pseudo-Jacopino makes the reference to Jacob’s dream present in the texts more explicit, which testifies to the strength of the biblical prototype in the late medieval imagination. Similarly, though in the legend Arcano does not fall asleep on a stone, Piero suggests that, like Jacob, the soldier-Arcano used one for a pillow. The stone, he, and Christ appear on a single oblique axis, the soldier’s right arm and invisible gaze connecting the three elements. A story such as the following could thus be formulated: the soldier was sleeping on the stone, which contains the mystery of Christ and the Resurrection. Contact with the rock enabled his mind to absorb the mystery, which appeared to him in spite of himself, and the mid-section of the fresco represents the projection of his dream. Thus revealing the biblical intertextuality of the hagiographic text, the painter unfolds a new network of possible associations. First, a stone can symbolize Christ. In the first epistle to the Corinthians, St. Paul equates the rock from which Moses made the water flow with the Savior: “Christ was the rock,” he writes (10:4). This formula is often taken out of context and applied to any kind of stone.40 Other New Testament verses equate Christ with a “stumbling-stone” (Rom. 9:32), a “living stone” (1 Pet. 2:4–8), 158 CYRIL GERBRON the “stone rejected by the builders that became the cornerstone” (Lk. 20:17), and the “chief cornerstone” on which the Church is constructed (Eph. 2:19–22; 1 Cor. 12:12–13). It is easy, therefore, to understand why the exegetes identified the stone of Bethel with Christ.41 Of greater significance to Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection, the ladder or stairs seen by Jacob were likened by exegetes to Christ as mediator between man and God,42 while Hrabanus Maurus relates all aspects of the Old Testament episode to the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. He identifies the stone of Bethel with Christ before stating that “the erection of the stone is the Resurrection of Christ.”43 We cannot know whether the painter or the viewers of Sansepolcro’s fresco knew this text, but that hardly matters. Hrabanus Maurus’s equation of the two reveals that an association between the story of Jacob in Bethel and Christ’s Resurrection is possible, even natural. The dream marks a moment of transition between man and God, between earth and heaven. The upward dynamic of Resurrection appears both in the erection of the stone and in the form and function of the scala; the heavenly opening and the presence of God at the top look ahead to the moment when Christ, released from all corporeal bonds, will join the heavenly abode of his father. Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection is a quiet image, an invitation to contemplation and meditation. With its dreaming figure, it fosters reverie, suggesting associations rather than imposing precise meanings. Standing before the anonymous Roman soldier, the fifteenth-century viewer may well have been reminded of a dreaming patriarch and of a pilgrim, who, on his way to Arcadia, finally decided to settle in the upper Tiber valley. Contemplating the rock, he may have recalled not only the relic of the Holy Sepulcher kept in a church close to the Palazzo dei Conservatori, but also the stone of Bethel, the prototype for any foundation stone of a religious building.

The Tomb and the Altar, Memory and Presence The story illustrated in Jacobello del Fiore’s panel (Fig. 9) is also one in which supernatural communication involves the sense of touch. According to Jacobus de Voragine, St. Lucy “went to the tomb of Saint Agatha with her mother Euthicia, who for four years had suffered from an incurable flow of blood.” Lucy told her mother that she would recover her health if she “touched” the saint’s tomb. “So the mother and her daughter stayed to pray at the tomb. Lucy then fell asleep and had a vision of Agatha standing surrounded by angels,” who informed Lucy that thanks to her faith her mother was cured.44 Stones are used in monuments for their solidity, the security they offer to saintly remains; they facilitate memory by preserving the power of the dead in a perpetual present. The relics, in turn, transform the stone monuments into sacred focal points: Lucy touches not Agatha, but her sepulcher. In Jacobello’s panel, this object is rendered precious by the green, pink, and yellow veined slabs of stone that adorn it and thus reveal the beauty of Agatha’s actual dwelling and the spiritual energy that inhabits the site of her presence.45 Furthermore, Agatha’s tomb looks very much like an altar, and like most altars it is raised and preceded by several steps. Sarcophagi with the corporeal remains of saints had been consecrated as altars since Late Antiquity; this practice continued into the Middle Ages in Italy.46 All altars, in fact, are tombs: they had been required to contain relics in order to be consecrated since the Fifth Council of Carthage (401). These are usually embedded in a cavity at the back of the altar before its consecration. Significant to our subject here, this cavity is known as the sepulcrum.47 William Durandus explains that if no relics are available, a host can be placed in the sepulcrum.48 For this reason, and because the altar is the site of the reenactment of Christ’s sacrifice, it is THE STONE AND THE DREAM: ON PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA’S RESURRECTION 159 viewed as a memorial of his tomb. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the surfaces of altars were often painted to imitate stone, a way of making their appearance more animate. The decoration could include an image of Christ, both dead and alive, standing erect in the sarcophagus, the image known as the Man of Sorrows (Fig. 10).49 Fictive stone, painted sarcophagus, actual altar, and Christ’s body then merge into a single object that is both the historical tomb and a liturgical device of the present, a support for the eucharistic rite. The same connection is established in countless Renaissance images. In Giovanni Bellini’s Resurrection, for example, the parallelepiped stone in the crevice resembles an altar (Fig. 7). The door of the sepulcher is set obliquely on the ground, so that it lies perpendicular to the tomb. Before and beneath this altarpiece stood the altar of the Zorzi Chapel: the door served as a perfect transition between it and the image. It thus induced the viewer to read the tomb in the painting as an altar and the real altar as a tomb—that of Christ or of any of his followers. In Piero della Francesca’s Polyptych of the Misericordia, the Savior’s tomb appears at the center of the central panel of the predella (Fig. 11), near the altar and on the axis of the elevation of the Host, through which Christ is made visible to the faithful. In the image, his body, wrapped in a white shroud, is being lowered into the sarcophagus, an action that inscribes his presence on the altar covered by the corporal. The altarpiece contains two other images of the sarcophagus in the predella, as well as depictions of Arcano (carrying the box with the relics) and Egidio in the pilasters: the allusion to the foundation of Sansepolcro is clear. Set in a Tuscan landscape, Piero’s Resurrection recalls the origins of Sansepolcro, that is, the foundation of the church dedicated to the Holy Sepulcher; the altar is, of course, the first and fore- most stone of any church. In contrast to Niccolò di Segna’s Resurrection (ca. 1348), executed for the main altar of the Badia of Sansepolcro and Piero’s principal model (Fig. 12), the lid of the sarcophagus in Piero’s version is not visible, and the low viewpoint prevents the beholder from seeing its upper surface.50 Is it even a hollow object? One of Christ’s legs is depicted inside it, but he has the power of transcending the limits of matter. As a result the tomb appears like a stone table, an altar.51

Fig. 10. Giovanni del Biondo, painted altar, c. 1365; Florence, Santa Croce, Rinuccini Chapel. (Photo by the author.) 160 CYRIL GERBRON , 1445–1462; Sansepolcro, Christ , 1445–1462; Sansepolcro, of Entombment panel of the predella: , central Misericordia of the Polyptych della Francesca, 11. Piero Fig. Mattei.) Enzo picture by Museo Civico, Sansepolcro, (Photo: Museo Civico. THE STONE AND THE DREAM: ON PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA’S RESURRECTION 161

Fig. 12. Niccolò di Segna, Sansepolcro Altarpiece, c. 1345; Sansepolcro, Duomo. (Photo: Sansepolcro, Museo Civico, picture by Enzo Mattei.)

The Resurrection of Christ is an act parallel to the elevation of the Host above the altar, so that the fresco shows the invisible signified of the Eucharist, the real presence of Christ. The thick drops of blood flowing from the side wound refer to the eucharistic wine and create a striking image of a wellspring of life: the blood flows just as it did when Christ was exposed on the cross—as if time has stopped and the flow is destined to continue forever. This is the essence of liturgical commemoration: the perpetuation of the redemptive effect of a past act for all future generations. Piero thus sanctified the seat of Sansepolcro’s government, but not merely by representing an historical event. Far from being a simple ornamental border with a geometric pattern, the frame of the fresco portrays a real object: a thick stone plinth supporting two columns, which themselves support an architrave (Fig. 1). The illusionistic effect is striking, as Piero took into account the spectator’s viewpoint within the room. While the scene of the Resurrection is captured frontally, the architectural frame is depicted as if viewed from below; the lower portion of the architrave is visible while the bases of the columns are slightly hidden by the plinth. This shift in viewpoint allows the spectator to 162 CYRIL GERBRON appreciate the depth of the fictive architecture. More than a screen, this is a robust, three-dimensional structure whose relief is enhanced by shadows, a threshold granting access to the proper place of the image. Venetian painters applied this effect to their altarpieces as well. The real stone frame that surrounded Giovanni Bellini’s Pala di San Giobbe is continued by the fictive architecture within the image, which seems to become a new space inserted into the church.52 In Bellini’s Diletti Altarpiece (1513; Venice, San Giovanni Crisostomo),53 the threshold, this time painted within the image, leads to a natural landscape sheltering St. Jerome, and serves as a transition between two spaces that seem equally real. The fact that both these works are altarpieces is not insignificant: illusionistic effects are particularly welcome in objects that aim to portray Christ and the saints as present at the eucharistic liturgy and listening to the prayers of the faithful. If the frame of the Resurrection can be regarded as an object, its plinth is analogous to an altar or tomb. It once featured a Latin inscription in humanist capitals, of which only a few letters are still legible (HUMAN / ORTE). Inscriptions transform stones into commemorative monuments. Tombs usually display the identity and date of death of the individual as well as the titles and achievements that offer a reason for his or her remembrance.54 The fresco’s frame thus relates to the image of the Resurrection from both an iconographic and a formal point of view. The plinth is close to the stone beneath the dreaming soldier on account of its color and to the sarcophagus by virtue of its structure and details. The architrave looks like the tomb’s upper section. The gray and white vertical form of the columns bears an affinity to the figure of Christ, while the shafts’ fluting echoes the folds of his shroud. The proportions of the columns as well as their division into bases, shafts, and capitals, make them comparable to the human body.55 Here they express the soundness of the humanity of Christ and the strength that faith in him brings to men as well as his beauty, since they are brighter and more richly decorated than are the other architectural elements. Finally, the simple structure of the frame, constructed entirely out of horizontal and vertical lines, accords well with the overall composition of the scene, which includes few oblique lines. Thus, the entire fresco forms an object that does not simply recall a past event but also inscribes its effects onto a real place. It appears to become one with the object—a sepulcher, that is, a stone object sheltering a dead and living body—that it represents. As noted earlier, Piero’s Resurrection was largely inspired by the main panel of the altarpiece realized by the Sienese painter Niccolò di Segna for the main altar of Sansepolcro’s Badia (Fig. 12). The shape of the two images, the respective placement of the tomb and the figures, the attitude of Christ, and the color of the shroud are indeed closely comparable in the two works. Certainly the conservatori asked Piero to follow the model present in the altarpiece, which itself had a clear civic dimension.56 But this work was located on an actual altar, directly connected to Eucharist through the images of Christ’s body and of his sacrifice in the predella, and located in the church sheltering Arcano and Egidio’s relics. Its sacredness was transferred to the seat of political power, a phenomenon that recalls the relationship between Simone Martini’s Maestà in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico and Duccio’s Maestà in Siena’s cathedral. Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection has no sacred res around it, but it looks like a tomb, an altar, and an altarpiece at the same time, and it creates in the Palazzo the presence of Christ and the relic that together justify and legitimize the communal government’s authority. It comes as no surprise that around 1600 an altar was placed below the Resurrection:57 what was implied by the fresco—the process of sacralization of the conservatori’s room—was then achieved. THE STONE AND THE DREAM: ON PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA’S RESURRECTION 163

A New Life The Resurrection is not described in the Gospels. The narrative stops with the Entombment and does not resume until the morning of the third day, when the holy women go to the tomb to anoint Christ’s body. Only Matthew mentions that a few guards were sent to watch the sepulcher, but he does not say whether or not they saw anything. An angel tells the holy women that the Resurrec- tion has already taken place without explaining when or how. In other words, this major event is in the Bible a narrative void—an empty tomb, an absent body. The ellipses preserve the mysterious or “terrible” nature (as one might say, citing Jacob)58 of the episode. This is confirmed by the women’s reactions to the angel’s announcement: they panic (Mk. 16:8: “But going out, they fled from the sepulcher, for a trembling and fear had seized them; and they said nothing to no one, for they were afraid”) while the apostles remain in disbelief (Lk. 24:11: “And these words seemed to them as delirium, and they did not believe them”). The Gospels thus underscore the weakness of human understanding when confronted by the unspeakable magnitude of divine mysteries. It seems that by treating the human area at the bottom of the fresco and the divine one at the center quite differently, Piero sought to generate this same effect.59 Let us begin with the human area. On first view, the soldiers seem asleep; their eyes are closed and they are unconscious. However, the position of the soldier on the left is highly unnatural for someone in a state of sleep. The placement of his hand over his eyes could be an attempt to block out light, but appears to be a conscious gesture. While the second soldier seems to lean against the tomb, the contour of his shadow on the object implies a distance, which is confirmed by the staff of Christ’s banner that inserts itself between the two. A closer look allows us to see that his torso is actually leaning on his shield,60 a precarious and uncomfortable position that demands significant muscular effort. The third soldier does not lean on his spear but holds it firmly, an attitude betokening a certain vigilance. Furthermore, his legs are not visible; he appears rooted in the ground.61 As for the fourth soldier, the truncation of his arm by the column prevents us from fully understanding his relationship to the stone, and his chest seems to float as a result of a mysterious strength. Also, do the (bat?) wings attached to his knee and the feathers attached to his helmet refer in some way to his limited flight? According to Charles de Tolnay, the soldiers at each side are “awake and seem to be dazzled,” while the other two are dreaming.62 Indeed the heads of the latter seem to float in a vaguely aqueous medium (Figs. 13 and 14), and their tilt signals the torpor and languor that overcome the body during deep sleep. The emphasis placed on their closed eyes—the separation between the two lids is a nearly straight, wide black line—invites us to see them as a surface for projecting images. In addition, the face of the second soldier is bathed in light, while the third one’s hat, mysteriously illuminated from below, recalls an aureole.63 In some respects, these two characters, too, could be taking part in the revelation of Christ’s Resurrection. The fresco’s lower section is thus dominated by an ambiguity between negative and positive forces, spiritual blindness and awareness, between sleep, awakening, dream, vision, or something else in the case of the soldier on the left. This generates uncertainty in the spectator’s mind. There is a vague sense that something spiritual is at stake here, but even extensive analysis fails to grant precise comprehension of the situation, the complexity of which is heightened by the visual puzzles and truncations introduced by Piero. On the other hand, the painter strove for visibility and even a kind of obviousness in the figure of Christ. The sole elements that recall the traditional supernatural effects created by medieval and Renaissance painters are the flowing blood from Christ’s chest and the choice of pink for his 164 CYRIL GERBRON

Fig. 13. Detail of Fig. 1. (Photo: Sansepolcro, Fig. 14. Detail of Fig. 1. (Photo: Sansepolcro, Museo Museo Civico, picture by Enzo Mattei.) Civico, picture by Enzo Mattei.) shroud—a rare, precious, and delicate color that helps detach the Savior from his environment. Yet, Christ’s body does not emit any light, and Piero does not include the ambiguous glow of dawn so commonly depicted by painters of the time (Figs. 5, 7). According to Christ himself the Resurrection takes place on “the third day” (Mt. 16:21; Lk. 24:47), and the holy women arrive at the tomb “very early in the morning” (Lk. 24:1): the event has to happen during the night or at dawn. Instead, in Piero’s fresco, the Savior is illuminated by the white light of a sunny afternoon, from a point located almost in front of him, slightly to his right. In addition, Christ’s position does not correspond to any specific action: he is not about to walk on the ground (the soldiers would prevent him from doing so) but is simply standing with one leg up on the tomb’s ledge. What we see is a resurrection in the flesh: a strong and weighty figure firmly rooted in the earth and in the stone whose strength he shares. The power of the Resurrection, the force of life it generates is here expressed in a body that overrides all other forces without aggression, gloating triumph, or a will to dominate: Christ is simply present. We are reminded of the kind of immediate, total, and self-justified presence that appears in God’s statements, “I am the way, the truth and the life” (Jn. 14:6) or “I am he who is” (Ex. 3:14), that is, I am the one who ever is, a superior type, the origin and essence of life and being. Although the Resurrection is a narrative image, Piero used for Christ the features of the iconic mode. Typical of Byzantine icons and revitalized by fifteenth-century painters in the devotional images of the Salvator mundi in particular,64 this mode is characterized by centrality, frontality, and a direct gaze toward the beholder. As a consequence, far from interacting with the other characters, THE STONE AND THE DREAM: ON PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA’S RESURRECTION 165

Christ escapes the place and temporality of the gospel narratives and addresses the beholders in the Palazzo dei Conservatori. Indeed, God’s sacrifice and Resurrection concern all the generations of men: they make possible a new life, and the sight of God “face to face” in heaven. The main temporal dimension of the fresco is thus the present: the enduring present of the effects of Christ’s sojourn on earth, the here and now of Sansepolcro, the particular land in which Christ decided to inscribe the strength of his Resurrection. Proof of his special benevolence toward Sansepolcro’s soil is a fragment of his tomb, which became sacred through contact with his body—a simple stone, figure and presence of his being.

2 Confronted by the mystery of the Resurrection, the Evangelists chose silence. Most Renaissance painters, on the contrary, depict a glorious manifestation of that event. In their images, Christ decided to rise from his tomb at a certain moment and hover above it for a while. This solution has the advantage of revealing the special nature of the Savior’s body and announcing the upcoming Ascension, but at the same time it does away with the secret nature of the metamorphosis that took place in the sarcophagus. Piero della Francesca’s painting is less spectacular but more profound. Due to the disruption in narrative mode and the incongruous features included by the painter—the flow of blood, the trees, the soldiers asleep during the day and their strange behavior—the beholder realizes that he is not attending an event as it actually occurred: the fresco conveys the truth of the Resurrection rather than its process. Resurrection marks the awakening from death to a new life. To give shape to this particular quality of apparition and presence, Piero used stones: a rock on the ground with mystical effects, a sacred tomb-altar, an architectural frame particularly evocative of the sound and enduring materiality of minerals. The energy of stones is not expressed through movements or actions, but through constancy and a form of muted, invisible life. Not much has been written on stones in Renaissance paintings, certainly because their abstract appearance and amorphous shapes escape facile iconographic readings.65 But painters could exploit precisely these features to convey a sense of religious mysteries. For example, the marble slabs in the décor of Andrea del Castagno’s Last Supper or Alesso Baldovinetti’s Annunciation in San Miniato al Monte in Florence certainly serve this function,66 as do the extraordinary stones in Piero della Francesca’s fresco of a saint (Julian?) painted for the church of Sant’Agostino in Sansepolcro (Fig. 15). The light green molded frame and the vibrant slab might appear to confer on the fresco a funereal character well suited to its memorial function, or rather, stones, with their ability to withstand the ravages of time, place the saint in a temporality different from that prevailing on earth. They also may relate to the beauty of Paradise (the frame’s light color is not easily found in terrestrial stones, and isn’t the beauty of stones the trace of the invisible hand that created them?), to the virtues and strength of the saint (the mineral frame is surprisingly large in relation to his figure), or to the unfathomable things he is envisioning (there are veins on the frame, dashes and shapes on the dark slab, but these visual signs mean nothing and cannot be deciphered). Stones are material, earthly, yet mysterious and unknowable. Piero della Francesca’s world is familiar: one can recognize and name some of the trees, buildings, or sites he depicted. But his aim is not to drain the world of enchantment. On the contrary, the painter has the capacity to reveal how the supernatural sometimes inhabits it, and the powerful images that God can infuse in human minds. In Sansepolcro’s fresco in the Palazzo dei Conservatori, the extremely convincing effect of presence created by Piero serves a more forceful depiction of the enigma of Resurrection. 166 CYRIL GERBRON

Fig. 15. Piero della Francesca, A saint, ca. 1455?; Sansepolcro, Museo Civico. (Photo: Sansepolcro, Museo Civico, picture by Enzo Mattei.) THE STONE AND THE DREAM: ON PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA’S RESURRECTION 167

notes I would like to thank for their insightful remarks and their help the two anonymous readers of Studies in Iconography, as well as Andrea Czortek, Matt Gainer, Irina Oryshkevich, and Alessandro Polcri. This essay has been written in the enchanted world of Villa I Tatti: my deepest gratitude goes to all the tattiani and mem- bers of staff, especially Patrizia Carella for her kindness and constant benevolence. All biblical texts have been translated by the author from the edition: Biblia sacra iuxta Vulgatam versionem, ed. Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994). 1 The main studies are: Mariano Apa, La Resurrezione di Cristo. Itinerario sull’affresco di Piero della Francesca a Sansepolcro (Sansepolcro: Biblioteca Comunale di Sansepolcro, 1980), with a complete anterior bibliography; Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, Piero della Francesca (New York: Abrams, 1992), 37–39 and 108–11; Ronald Lightbown, Piero della Francesca (Milan: Leonardo, 1992), 194–202; Eugenio Battisti, Piero della Francesca (Milan: Electa, 1992), vol. 1, 216–25 and vol. 2, 478–84; Michael Baxandall, Words for Pictures: Seven Papers on Renaissance Art and Criticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 117–61; and James R. Banker, Piero della Francesca: Artist and Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 107–13. 2 See Gian Paolo G. Scharf, Borgo San Sepolcro a metà del Quattrocento: istituzioni e società (1440–1460) (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 2003). 3 Banker, Piero della Francesca, 107–108. 4 See the document in Battisti, Piero della Francesca, vol. 2, 478. 5 Baxandall, Words for Pictures, 133. 6 Lavin, Piero della Francesca, 39. 7 Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), vol. 1, 39: “The birth of the Lord was made manifest through every level or class of creatures. There are the creatures which have existence only, such as the things that are simply material or corporeal, like stones; others have existence and life, like plants and trees; others have existence, life and sensation, namely, the animals; still others, in addition to the above endowments, have reason, as human beings do; and finally some creatures have understanding, or knowledge, and these are the angels.” 8 Albertus Magnus, Book of Minerals, trans. Dorothy Wyckoff (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 57–58, 103. The reason given at the beginning of book II is quite interesting: “Therefore, leaving aside these and similar statements as too ridiculous, let us say that there are no two opinions about it: stones do have powers of wonderful effect and these powers reside not in their constituents but in the way they are combined, for a reason that we shall explain later. Nor is it true that living beings only ought rather to have these powers. For throughout all nature it is as if a thing which is occupied with the higher powers is withdrawn and cut off from the lower ones. Evidence of this is that intelligent beings, such as men, are not so keenly aware of changes in the elements as brutes are—for instance, birds judge the different hours and seasons better than men do. And man himself, when he is occupied with meditation, does not exert his sight and hearing, so that he does not perceive what is before his eyes. Thus in the whole of nature it is as if living beings, when they are occupied with the higher powers of the soul, do not exert the lower, less noble powers that inanimate compounds exert. … Hence it is known that stones, too, undoubtedly are effective—all, or nearly all, stones, although the effects of many of them are unknown.” 9 Ibid., 77, 103, 116. 10 Ibid., 72, 114. For stones and dreams, see also 104 and 109. 11 See Joseph C. Plumpe, “Vivum saxum, vivi lapides: The Concept of ‘Living Stone’ in Classical and Chris- tian Antiquity,” Traditio 1 (1943): 1–14; and, more generally: Gaston Bachelard, La terre et les rêveries de la volo- nté (Paris: José Corti, 1947), 183–288; Sonia Macrì, Pietre viventi: i minerali nell’immaginario del mondo antico (Torino: UTET libreria, 2009); Alina A. Payne, “Living Stones, Crying Walls: The Dangers of Enlivenment in Architecture from Renaissance Putti to Warburg’s ‘Nachleben,’” in The Secret Lives of Artworks: Exploring the 168 CYRIL GERBRON

Boundaries between Art and Life, ed. Caroline van Eck, Joris van Gastel, and Elsje van Kessel (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2014), 308–39. 12 Lisa Bitel and Matt Gainer, Our Lady of the Rock: Vision and Pilgrimage in the Mojave Desert (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), 29, 33, 37–38. A larger view of the site appears on the front cover of this book. 13 Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1958), 216. 14 Megan Holmes, The Miraculous Image in Renaissance Florence (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013), 112, with a photograph of the sasso p. 113. 15 For example, in 1428 a shepherdess saw an apparition of the Virgin above a rock in the countryside outside of Stia; this rock was eventually enshrined beneath the main altar of the church built on the holy site: see Megan Holmes, “Visions and ‘Popular’ Visual Experience,” in Voir l’au-delà. L’expérience visionnaire et sa représentation dans l’art italien de la Renaissance, ed. Andreas Beyer, Philippe Morel, and Alessandro Nova (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), 202–12, with a picture of the stone breaking through the floor of the church and clearly visible under the altar p. 204. 16 Colin Morris, The Sepulchre of Christ and the Medieval West: From the Beginning to 1600 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). On the various stones venerated by Christian pilgrims in Jerusalem in the Middle Ages and Quattrocento, see Yamit Rachman-Schrire, “Evagatorium in Terrae Sanctae: Stones Telling the Story of Jerusalem,” in Jerusalem as Narrative Space: Erzählraum Jerusalem, ed. Annette Hoffmann and Gerhard Wolf (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 353–66. 17 This text is edited in Gian Paolo G. Scharf, Cronisti borghesi del Quattrocento (Selci-Lama: Pliniana, 2011), 144–47. For an introduction to it and to its author, see ibid., 10–13 and 16–18. Earlier traces of the legend are known: see Andrea Czortek, “La fondazione dell’abbazia e la nascita del Burgus,” in La nostra storia: lezioni sulla storia di Sansepolcro, ed. Andrea Czortek (Sansepolcro: Graficonsul, 2010), vol. 1, 147–49. 18 Francesco di Cristofano Largi, Leggenda Egidiana, in Scharf, Cronisti borghesi, 145–46: “Como è a tucti palese i doi sancti pelegrini Arcano e Gilio, principali fondatori de questa nostra terra, erano andati al Sancto Sepolcro di Yhesu Christo e de lì havieno optenuti certi sancti reliqui e da poi erano andati a visitare i gradi de le consacrate chiese di beati sancti Pietro e Paulo apostoli in Roma, e de lì ancho havieno per loro sanctità e devotione optenuti più reliqui di sancti e, dato volta sì, si ritornavano da Roma in Archadia per ripatriare. Ma non piacque così a messer Domenedio, che havia preveduto questa nostra terra, per le mani di detti doi sancti pelegrini, miracolosamente havesse il primo edificio, sì che pervenuti in valle di Nocea, che gli antichi cusì chiamavano questo luocho ove siamo, imperoché era piena di grandissime noci, reposandose, preso il corporal cibo, come fo piacere di Dio s’adormentaro con le parole di lui im boccha e, dormendo, il beato Archano ebbe in visione che li convenia fare in quel luocho il suo tabernaculo e che non sperasse più ripatriare. Archano, naturalmente desideroso veder la sua patria, levatose in pè e chiamato il suo compagno, doppo doi simili visioni tentò partirse, tracto da la dolceçça de la sua Archadia. Enprese le sue cose, fatto di quello conto che niente li manchasse, ritrovò non havea i Sancti Reliquii. Ello, che in quelli havea tucta la sua sperança e singulare devotione, comenciò forte a dolerse, sutilmente per quelli ricercando. E finalemente gli occhi e le gionte palme al cielo umilmente levando, vidde il bossolo nel quel erano i prefati Sancti Reliquii. Onde, compuncto dal miracolo, che quello che non havea penne era volato in uno altissimo ramo di noce, non volendo più opponerse a la volontà e predestinatione del glorioso Dio, disposto remanere in questo luocho, rihebbe i Sancti Reliquii. E qui fermatose, concorsero certi paesani, i quali inteso il miracolo, lasciate le proprie habitationi, edifficaro in questo luocho nuovi edifficii, e multiplicaro tanto in pocho tempo, come fo piacere di Dio, che fo cosa mirabile. I quali primi ediffici, imperò che i prefati sancti pelegrini veniano dal Sancto Sepolcro de Yesù Christo, nominaro Borgo di Sancto Sepolcro.” Andrea Czortek has shown that the story is not entirely legendary (“Borgo Sanse- polcro e Gerusalemme: dalle reliquie alla toponomastica,” in Come a Gerusalemme. Evocazioni, riproduzioni, imitazioni dei luoghi santi tra Medioevo ed età moderna, ed. Anna Benvenuti and Pierantonio Piatti (Florence: SISMEL, 2013), 309–56). An abbey dedicated to the Holy Sepulcher and the four Evangelists, mentioned for THE STONE AND THE DREAM: ON PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA’S RESURRECTION 169 the first time in a document from 1012–13, predates indeed the expansion of the city. Pilgrims carrying back relics from Palestine, including pieces of Christ’s tomb, as well as churches built in imitation of Jerusalem’s Holy Sepulcher, were not uncommon between the ninth and eleventh centuries. 19 Di Cristofano Largi, Leggenda Egidiana, 146: “de la pietra del Sancto Sepolcro ove fo immesso il nostro signore Yesu Christo, a cui nome fo edificata questa terra.” The relics have disappeared in unknown circum- stances: see ibid., 319. 20 Among a vast bibliography, see Steven F. Kruger, Dreaming in the Middle Ages (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Jean-Claude Schmitt, Le corps, les rites, les rêves, le temps: essais d’anthropolo- gie médiévale (Paris: Gallimard, 2001); Maria Ruvoldt, The Italian Renaissance Imagery of Inspiration: Metaphors of Sex, Sleep, and Dreams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 21 The text is edited in Scharf, Cronisti borghesi, 30–143, p. 30 for the foundation legend. 22 Ibid., 36–38: “Nam cum eisdem temporibus currentibus annis nativitatis Domini millesimo duedecimo ecclesia Sancti Sepulchri civitatis Ierusalem ab infidelibus destructa fuisset mirum profecto hoc dici potest, ad instar illius destructe novam hanc ecclesiam nostram in Burgo Sancti Sepulcri constructam fore tamquam ex illius materialibus exortam principiis, sicuti ex fenice fenix exoritur, ita etiam et rei et nominis originem traxisse.” On the story of this church, which became the cathedral of the city in 1520, see Il Duomo di Sanse- polcro, 1012–2012: una storia millenaria di arte e fede, ed. Liletta Fornasari (Sansepolcro: Aboca, 2012). On the story of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem and its destruction in the eleventh century, see Robert Ousterhout, “Rebuilding the Temple: Constantine Monomachus and the Holy Sepulchre,” Journal of the Society of Architec- tural Historians 48 (1989): 66–78. 23 Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, Piero della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 24–26. 24 We find this specification in the Historia Burgi Sancti Sepulcri, 30: “Circum vero nemus [in which Arca- dio had the vision] illud in planitie et in collibus castra plurima a proceribus nonnullis incolebantur.” 25 Lavin, Piero della Francesca, 37 and 39. 26 Paul assumes the same position in Federico da Montefeltro’s Bible in Urbino (fig. in La Bibbia di Federico da Montefeltro: Codici urbinati Latini 1–2, Biblioteca apostolica Vaticana: Commentario, ed. Ambrogio Piazzoni (Modena and Città del Vaticano: Franco Cosimo Panini and Biblioteca apostolica vaticana, 2004), vol. 2, 117). If the mystical dimension of his experience is less emphasized here, the position is closer to that of the soldier in Piero’s Resurrection, as one arm rests on the ground and the torso rises above the earth. Much later, the effect of a body lifted up by a mysterious power, the force of Resurrection or of conversion to the Christian faith, appears in another Conversion of Paul: the one Caravaggio painted for the Cerasi Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo, now in the Odescalchi Collection. 27 On this painting see Rona Goffen, Giovanni Bellini (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), 142–43; Monica Ferrando, “La pittura sapienziale di Giovanni Bellini nella Resurrezione per San Michele in Isola,” Studi giorgioneschi 8 (2004): 7–32. 28 The documents gathered by James Banker reveal that Piero was elected member of the collegio dei dodici probiviri in 1460 (Documenti fondamentali per la conoscenza della vita e dell’arte di Piero della Francesca (Sel- ci-Lama: Pliniana, 2013), 82), member of the consiglio del popolo in 1477, 1479, and 1480 (pp. 138, 140–41), and ragionere del comune in 1480 (p. 142). He was chosen as responsible of the Palazzo dei Conservatori in 1477 (p. 139) and received other official missions (pp. 119, 141). See also Banker, Piero della Francesca, 193–96. 29 Battisti, Piero della Francesca, vol. 2, 556–57; Il Duomo di Sansepolcro, 106–7. 30 Banker, Documenti fondamentali, 180 and 201. 31 This cycle is lost but known through the document of the commission: see Andrea Di Lorenzo, Cecilia Martelli, and Matteo Mazzalupi, “La cattedrale di Sansepolcro nel Quattrocento: altari, patronati, opera d’arte,” in Il Duomo di Sansepolcro, 103–104. 170 CYRIL GERBRON

32 Czortek, “Borgo Sansepolcro e Gerusalemme,” 340. 33 Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, “Piero’s Meditation on the Nativity,” in The Cambridge Companion to Piero della Francesca, ed. Jeryldene M. Wood (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 68 and 74. 34 Ibid., 71. 35 As made clear by the last sentence of the quoted passage of the Libro rosso. See also Historia Burgi Sancti Sepulcri, 32: “[In 937] Burgus Sancti Sepulchri ab hiis sanctis supra memoratis viris concurrentibus hinc et illinc nobilibus, marchionibus ac proceribus, fundatus est. Cui Sancti Sepulchri a Sancto Domino nostri Iesu Cristi Sepulcro cognomen indictum est.” 36 Christian Heck, “Du songe de Jacob aux visions de saints dans l’art médiéval: théophanie et géographie sacrée,” Micrologus 6 (1998): 50–52. 37 Cécile Caby, “Du monastère à la cité. Le culte de saint Romuald au Moyen Âge,” Revue Mabillon 6 (1995): 137–58. 38 The same solution is adopted in the last panel of the predella of Nardo di Cione’s Trinity altarpiece (1365, Florence, Accademia). 39 This stone is logically likened to an altar by exegetes; many references in Éric Palazzo, L’espace rituel et le sacré dans le christianisme: la liturgie de l’autel portatif dans l’Antiquité et au Moyen Âge (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), passim, especially 53–59; see also Heck, “Du songe de Jacob,” who analyzes the fact that in medieval art the stone of Jacob often assumes the appearance of an altar made of cut stones. On medieval images of Jacob’s dream, see Eva-Maria Kaufmann, Jakobs Traum und der Aufstieg des Menschen zu Gott: das Thema der Himmelsleiter in der bildenden Kunst des Mittelalters (Tübingen: Wasmuth, 2006). According to Linda Seidel, the image of Jacob erecting the altar sculpted on a capital at Autun’s cathedral relates to the foundation of the church that shelters it: Legends in Limestone: Lazarus, Gislebertus, and the Cathedral of Autun (Chicago: Univer- sity of Chicago Press, 1999), 151–57. The stone of Jacob was mentioned several times during ceremonies for the consecration of the altar. This ritual is known through the book of the bishop, the pontifical. Two pontifi- cals were used in fifteenth-century Italy, and both mention the stone of Jacob with reference to the consecration of an altar three times (when the consecration intervenes in the midst of the dedication of a church or when a new altar is dedicated in an existing church): Le pontifical de la Curie romaine au XIIIe siècle, ed. Monique Goullet, Guy Lobrichon, and Eric Palazzo (Paris: Le Cerf, 2004), 228, 232, 236; William Durand, Le Pontifical romain au Moyen-Âge III. Le pontifical de Guillaume Durand, ed. Michel Andrieu (Città del Vaticano: Biblio- teca Apostolica Vaticana, 1940), 470 (“Singulare illud propitiatorium in altari crucis pro nobis redimentis oblatum, in cuius prefiguratione patriarcha Iacob lapidem erexit in titulum, quo fieret sacrificium et porte celi desuper aperiretur oraculum; supplices tibi, domine, preces fundimus, ut lapidis huius expolitam materiam, supernis sacrificiis imbuendam, ipse tue dotare sanctificationis ubertate precipias, qui quondam lapideis legem scripsisti in tabulis”), 477 and 487. 40 See for example Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Prov- ince (New York: Benziger Bros., 1947), III, q. 83, a. 3: “As we read in De Consecr., dist. 1, altars, if not of stone, are not to be consecrated with the anointing of chrism. And this is in keeping with the signification of this sacrament; both because the altar signifies Christ, for in 1 Cor 10:4, it is written, But the stone was Christ. And because Christ’s body was laid in a stone sepulcher.” 41 See Jerome, Tractatus in librum Psalmorum, De psalmo CXXXV, in Obras completas de San Jerónimo, I, Obras homiléticas, trans. Mónica Marcos Celestino (Madrid: Biblioteca de autores cristianos, 1999), 564; Augustine, Reply to Faustus the Manichean, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, ed. Philip Schaff (Peabody: Hen- drickson, 1995), XII, 26 (vol. 4, 192): “Who is the stone placed under Jacob’s head, but Christ the head of man? And in its anointing the very name of Christ is expressed, for, as all know, Christ means anointed. Christ refers to this in the Gospel, and declares it to be a type of himself, when he said of Nathanael that he was an Israelite indeed, in whom was no guile, and when Nathanael, resting his head, as it were, on the stone, or on THE STONE AND THE DREAM: ON PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA’S RESURRECTION 171

Christ, confessed him as the Son of God and the King of Israel, anointing the stone by his confession, in which he acknowledged Jesus to be Christ. On this occasion the Lord made appropriate mention of what Jacob saw in his dream: ‘Verily I say unto you, you shall see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man’ [Jn 1:51].” William Durand, Rationale divinorum officiorum, ed. Anselme Davril, Ber- trand Georges Guyot, and Timothy Thibodeau, Corpus Christianorum – Continuatio Mediaevalis, vol. 140B, 128–29 (VII, 48, 5): “Sane huic festo competit quia Iacob vidit scalam et angelos ascendentes et descendentes, id est totam Ecclesiam vidit una visione, et erexit lapidem, id est Christum, qui est lapis in summo, et est lapis angularis et fundamentum qui omnia sustinet; erexit, inquam, in titulum preconialem, memorialem et trium- phalem, fundens oleum desuper. Siquidem Iacob, id est prelatus, fundit oleum super lapidem, id est Chrstum, ad ostendendum eius carismata et idem prophetavit dicens: Terribilis est locus iste! Non est hic aliud nisi domus Dei et porta celi.” 42 See Heck, “Du songe de Jacob,” 47–48; and Christian Heck, L’échelle celeste dans l’art du Moyen Âge: une image de la quête du ciel (Paris, Flammarion, 1997), 51. 43 Raban Maur, Commentariorum in Genesim libri quatuor, PL, vol. 107, col. 591: “Somnus iste Jacob mors sive passio est Christi. Lapis ad caput ejus, qui nominatim quodammodo dictus est, etiam unctus Christus significatur. … Erectio autem lapidis resurrectio Christi est. Porro scala Christus est, qui dixit: Ego sum via.” 44 The Golden Legend, vol. 1, 27–28. 45 On the paradisiacal dimension of colored marbles, see Cyril Gerbron, “Le Couronnement de la Vierge de Fra Angelico au Louvre, entre expérience liturgique et expérience spirituelle,” Memorie domenicane 42 (2012): 661–85; on the fact that saints’ tombs are viewed as places in which their praesentia is forever active, see Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 3–5. 46 See Scott B. Montgomery, “Quia Venerabile Corpus Redicti Martyris ibi Repositum: Image and Relic in the Decorative Program of San Miniato al Monte,” in Images, Relics, and Devotional Practices in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, ed. Sally J. Cornelison (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006), 7–25; Henk W. Van Os, Sienese Altarpieces: 1215–1460: Form, Content, Function (Groningen: E. Forsten, 1988–90), vol. 2, 85; André Vauchez, “La commune de Sienne, les ordres mendiants et le culte des saints. His- toire et enseignement d’une crise (novembre 1328, avril 1329),” Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome – Moyen Âge 89 (1977): 756–77. 47 Le pontifical de la Curie romaine, 202: “In medio autem altaris, in eius videlicet superiori parte, fiat con- fessio sive sepulcrum, id est foramen ad magnitudinem palmi quadratum, muratum undique tabulis marmoreis vel ligneis, in quo sunt recondende reliquie.” In his own Pontifical, William Durand uses only sepulcrum: Pon- tifical, in Le Pontifical romain au Moyen-Âge, 462, 479, 485–86. 48 Rationale divinorum officiorum, I, 7, 23, in Timothy M. Thibodeau, The “Rationale divinorum officiorum” of William Durand de Mende: A New Translation of the Prologue and Book One (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 83. 49 Other examples are: Pietro di Miniato, Prato, San Bartolomeo in via Cava; anonymous, Loreto, cappella di San Pietro (fig. in I pittori bergamaschi dal XIII al XIX secolo. Il Quattrocento, ed. Gian Alberto Dell’Acqua (Bergamo: Bolis, 1994), vol. 2, 608); Pinturicchio, Spoleto, Duomo, San Leonardo Chapel. For this theme see most recently Catherine R. Puglisi and William L. Barcham, eds., New Perspectives on the Man of Sorrows, Studies in Iconography: Themes and Variations (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2013). 50 After having been removed from its altar at the beginning of the sixteenth century and several displace- ments, the altarpiece now stands at its original location. On this work see Matteo Mazzalupi, “Altari, patronati, opera d’arte al tempo degli abati. Un saggio di topografia sacra,” in Andrea Di Lorenzo, Cecilia Martelli, and Matteo Mazzalupi, La Badia di Sansepolcro nel Quattrocento (Selci-Lama: Pliniana, 2012), 13–14; Alessio Monciatti, “Vestigia per la più antica storia pittorica dell’abbazia di Sansepolcro,” in Una Gerusalemme sul 172 CYRIL GERBRON

Tevere. L’abbazia e il “Burgus Sancti Sepulcri” (secoli X–XV), ed. Massimiliano Bassetti, Andrea Czortek, and Enrico Menestò (Spoleto: Fondazione Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo, 2013), 323–31. On cultic continuity in Sansepolcro, see Christa Gardner von Teuffel, “Niccolò di Segna, Sassetta, Piero della Francesca and Perugino: Cult and Continuity at Sansepolcro,” in From Duccio’s Maestà to Raphael’s Transfiguration: Italian Altarpieces and their Settings (London: Pindar Press, 2005), 399–479. As explained by Gardner von Teuffel, the 1454 Historia Burgi Sancti Sepulcri mentions that “a seal figuring Christ resurrected is being attached to the very early communal statutes” (ibid., 414). Also, the conservatori commissioned a painting of the Resurrection for the door of the communal palace, then called the Residenza (Banker, Documenti fondamentali, 108: “pro reficiendo et pingendo arma et insignia nostri comunis super porta et in summitate porte Residentie videlicet sepulcrum Christi”). 51 Eugenio Battisti writes that “il sarcofago assomiglia ad un altare,” and that Piero della Francesca has repro- duced “con fedeltà assoluta, quasi da archeologo o collezionista di reliquie” the tomb-altar conceived by Alberti in San Pancrazio’s Rucellai sacello, which itself reproduces, according to the will of its commissioner, the tomb of Christ in Jerusalem (Piero della Francesca, vol. 1, 222). But the color of the stone slabs is different; the slabs are wider in Piero’s fresco, and the moldings are far more complex. Both Alberti and Piero della Francesca relied on conventional shapes for tombs and altars. This is already evident in a work created by Piero before Alberti’s shrine was built, namely in the central panel of the predella of the Polyptych of the Misericordia (Fig. 11). 52 The altarpiece, dating ca. 1478, is now in the Accademia but the frame is preserved in the church of San Giobbe; see the reconstruction in Goffen, Giovanni Bellini, 111, and the comment at 143–60; Emanuele Lugli, “The Collapse of Representational Planes: On Giovanni Bellini’s San Giobbe Altarpiece”, in Beyer, Morel, and Nova, eds., Voir l’au-delà, 255–78. 53 See Goffen, Giovanni Bellini, 183–88, figs. on p. 180 and 182. 54 This is also the case in the images of the triumphs of Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza in their double portrait by Piero della Francesca in the Uffizi. The inscribed stones in the lower section are a painted transposition of a funerary stele. The work was certainly commissioned by Federico in order to commemorate the death of his wife, whose livid face looks like a death mask in her portrait, while it has a sinister gray aspect in her triumph. As for the duke, the temporality of his action exceeds that of human life (see, especially, the importance granted to the figure of Fame in his triumph). The two panels, once certainly connected by hinges, constituted a single commemorative monument, an object enabling the memory of the noble couple for future generations. 55 See Joseph Rykwert, The Dancing Column: On Order in Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). The relation between man and column is particularly important in Francesco di Giorgio Martini’s treatises on architecture written during the artist’s stay in Urbino during the 1470s and 1480s: Francesco di Giorgio Mar- tini, Trattati di architettura ingegneria e arte militare, ed. Corrado Maltese and Livia Maltese Degrassi (Milan: Il Polifilo, 1967), vol. 1, 27–28, figs. 24–25 and vol. 2, 375–76, figs. 216–17. 56 The Badia and the political government maintained close ties in the Quattrocento, as explained by Scharf, Borgo San Sepolcro, 181–83. 57 Banker, Piero della Francesca, 108. 58 Gen. 28:17: “Terribilis est locus iste.” In classical Latin terribilis means scary, terrible, dreadful, but also respectable and venerable. 59 As shown by Daniel Arasse (“‘Oltre le scienze dette di sopra’: Piero della Francesca et la vision de l’his- toire,” in Piero della Francesca and his Legacy, ed. Marilyn Aronberg Lavin (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1995), 105–13), the same opposition appears in Piero’s frescoes at Arezzo, and especially in the two battle scenes. In that of Heraclius against the armies of Chosroes, only human powers are at stake. Its setting in Arezzo is nearly staggering in terms of implausibilities and confusion. The composition is an inextricable tangle of bodies set in a remarkably narrow space; some severely injured characters feel no pain while others THE STONE AND THE DREAM: ON PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA’S RESURRECTION 173 gesture emphatically; arrows and spears launched from a place impossible to determine fly aimlessly above the fray. The victory of Constantine over the barbarians in the other mural occurs after the emperor’s dream, in which an angel tells him he will win thanks to the sign of the cross. This scene is remarkable for its clarity; Constantine scatters the opposing army without fighting, but merely by waving the same cross as does the angel in the previous scene. 60 As noted by Thomas Martone, “Spatial Games in the Art of Piero della Francesca and Jan van Eyck,” in Piero della Francesca tra arte e scienza, ed. Marisa Dalai Emiliani and Valter Curzi (Venice: Marsilio, 1996), 106. 61 See Baxandall, Words for Pictures, 141–44. 62 Charles de Tolnay, “Conceptions religieuses dans la peinture de Piero della Francesca,” Arte antica e moderna 23 (1963): 26: “Parmi les quatre gardiens couchés devant le sarcophage, deux semblent dormir et rêver de la Résurrection, alors que les deux autres sont éveillés et paraissent être éblouis par l’apparition du Sol novus; l’un ferme les yeux, l’autre les protège avec ses mains.” 63 This effect might be the result of the poor quality of the pigment; on this point and others the results of the current restoration are expected with great anticipation. 64 Sixten Ringbom, Icon to Narrative: The Rise of the Dramatic Close-Up in Fifteenth-Century Devotional Painting (Doornspijk: Davaco, 1984), esp. 171–81. 65 The most stimulating reflexions are: Roger Jones, “Mantegna and Materials,” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 2 (1987): 71–90; Georges Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico: dissemblance et figuration (Paris: Flam- marion, 1990), 29–110; Alexander Nagel, The Controversy of Renaissance Art (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 260–85; Fabio Barry, “Painting in Stone: The Symbolism of Colored Marbles in the Visual Arts and Literature from Antiquity until the Enlightenment” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2011), 420–506. 66 For Baldovinetti’s Annunciation (ca. 1465), see Linda A. Koch, “The Early Christian Revival at S. Min- iato al Monte: The Cardinal of Portugal Chapel,” Art Bulletin 78 (1996): 527–55, fig. p. 550. For Andrea del Castagno’s Last Supper (1447), see mainly Eckart Marchand, “Monastic imitatio Christi: Andrea del Castagno’s Cenacolo di S. Appollonia,” Artibus et Historiae 24 (2003): 31–50; and Dominique Rigaux, Un banquet pour l’éternité. La Cène d’Andrea del Castagno (Paris: Mame, 1997), with numerous color illustrations of the marbles.