Of Sepulchres and Miracles

Many years ago, a young British traveller and journalist complained about the difficulty of getting to Borgo San Sepolcro, a small walled city in Tuscany. He said there was a “low-comedy railway” from Arezzo, or a seven-hour up-and-down motor bus ride through the Apennines from Urbino. He said the trip was worth it, though. And why? Because, he said, in the small, remote town there was something very special: nothing less than “the greatest picture in the world”.

The young journalist was Aldous Huxley, and the year was 1925. The picture was Piero della Francesca’s fresco, The Resurrection of Christ. Of course, he could not know that far in the future, his words would prove that a typewriter can be mightier than artillery. But that required help from a benevolent fate, as we shall discover.

Sansepolcro (it’s no longer “Borgo San Sepolcro”, although the locals still call their town “the Borgo” among friends) is in the Valtiberina, the upper reaches of the Tiber Valley where the eastern border of Tuscany meets Umbria. Nestled in the valley, the town is overlooked by the achingly perfect hilltown of Anghiari (site of the famous battle between Florence and Milan in 1440 which was the subject of Leonardo’s legendary “lost painting” for the Signoria in Florence).

*A View from Anghiari of Sansepolcro, in the valley at the end of the long, straight road*

Holy Sepulchre

San Sepolcro means Holy Sepulchre. The official coat of arms of Città di Sansepolcro is a stylized rendering of Piero’s painting.

I first saw Sansepolcro long before I knew that Huxley had written anything about it. I knew that Piero della Francesca’s painting was there in the Museo Civico; it’s on the “Piero Trail” that devotees of the early Renaissance artist must follow to add his scattered works to their life-list. We were rather listlessly joining the trail until we saw the frescoes in the church of San Francesco in Arezzo. There, the astonishing “Legend of the True Cross” cycle spurred us on to Sansepolcro. We’d planned to stop in Monterchi on the way – Piero’s Madonna del Parto is there – but it was off-season and the town museum in Monterchi was closed.

*San Francesco Church in Arezzo, home to Piero’s “Legend of the True Cross” fresco cycle*

Sansepolcro is a manageable town, blessedly level for people who, like us, had been clambering up and down the hilltowns of Umbria and Tuscany. The Museo Civico, on Via Aggiunti, is just a short walk from Porta Romana, a gate in the old city walls where the bus stopped. I expected a crowd of Piero Trail art fanciers at the museum, but we found ourselves alone there except for the ticket seller and a guard. They had prudently turned off all the lights in the building, but the guard obligingly switched them on when we entered a room, and off again when we left.

The Museo Civico is housed in the former communal meeting hall of the town. The Resurrection is in one of the larger rooms of the ground floor, on a wall facing the former entrance. It was painted in 1463; it may have been painted where we found it, or it may have been moved from a nearby room around 1480. It captures your attention because of its size: a large fresco, 6 ½ by 7 ½ feet. At first you notice the size, then the composition – four soldiers asleep at the base of a classical sarcophagus, and, rising from it, a tall, powerful figure, one foot resting on the marble edge of the sepulchre, holding a staff with a banner, white with a red cross. The figure bisects the picture, with a curious landscape behind him, dawn light on low hills, old, bare, autumnal trees on his right, young trees in abundant leaf on his left.

Sleeping Soldiers

The perspective of the lower and upper parts of the painting is slightly skewed. We see the faces of the sleeping soldiers from below, but the risen Christ looks levelly in our direction. Piero was a master of Renaissance perspective; in fact, he is the author of a famous treatise for painters on the subject. So the dichotomy is surely not accidental, and serves a subtle function: the triangular composition rises to Christ’s face, so both the soldiers and Christ are in the same picture. But they are in different worlds.

And, finally, you see Christ’s eyes. They’re dark, black eyes, fixed and staring. The haunted eyes, perhaps, of a man who has been tortured to death and now lives again. But they’re also implacable eyes; they look through you and beyond you. Does he see the day of judgement somewhere beyond us in time and space? I didn’t want to turn around to find out.

Piero was a skillful painter, though perhaps there are pictures more skillfully executed. It has been pointed out that the sleeping soldier holding a spear, in the tangle of his compatriots’ limbs, apparently has no legs. But if we can’t allow Piero a little artistic license, to whom can we grant it?

There are more overtly dramatic paintings – think of Caravaggio. But Christ’s terrible stillness in this picture is unequaled, for me, in dramatic power. It’s called terribilità in Italian – an awesome grandeur. I thought then, and I still think, it is the most powerful painting I’ve ever seen. I don’t know if it is the greatest picture in the world, but for someone raised in the Christian tradition, it is like a blow to the heart.

A Step in Time

Those were my first impressions. Recently we returned to Sansepolcro, this time in June, to revisit the picture and enjoy the town, which we had little time to do on our winter visit years ago. This time we came by car, so that we could include Monterchi and the Madonna del Parto.

Sansepolcro is livelier in the sunshine, and the Passeggiata our first evening was a cheerful throng with lots of young people parading in their finery along with their elders. The café tables on the street were filled; the bars did a booming business. Some sort of bicycle rally was being wound up in Piazza Torre di Berta, the main square. Above was a huge banner celebrating the event, and below were dozens of sweaty people milling about in Spandex. In an odd way, their tight and colorful uniforms are reminiscent of Renaissance garb, though definitely not as elegant. And we had a chance to mentally compare the two, the afternoon of our second day in town.

We were strolling along and, in anticipation of dinner, looking for likely restaurants (of which Sansepolcro has many). Suddenly, we heard the sound of drums echoing along the walls of a small side street; then the brassy blare of trumpets. A flash of color at the end of the street pulled us hurriedly toward a green park with a marble statue of – who else? – Piero della Francesca. The gate was a time warp, a portal to the past. Inside, like a scene from a painting by, well… you know who… were thirty or forty young men in doublets, capes, and parti-colored hose: red, yellow, pale blue, green, even orange. They wore close-fitting caps with plumes and upturned brims. Their costumes glowed in the sunlight.

There were drummers and trumpeters, and others who carried huge colorful flags with dizzying abstract designs. As they marched, the flags unfurled with their motion. These bright ghosts of the past circled the garden and then formed a line. The flag bearers, by twos and threes in turn, stepped forward, lifted their banners, and in intricate patterns waved the flags above their heads, around their backs, up, down, the fabric billowing in the wind. Tossing the banners high above their heads, they waited while the floating colors reached the tops of their arcs and turned over, slowly, the weighted staves answering gravity’s call. Then, amazingly, each man casually reached out to catch his flag before it touched the earth.

Finally, one man, dressed in red and yellow, stepped forward. With his black hair, moustache, and goatee, he seemed almost a central-casting idea of a 15th century hero, a Tuscan Errol Flynn or Johnny Depp. He carried two flags, and after an appropriate fanfare, he began to whirl and dance with them: around his shoulders, around his waist, between his legs, behind his back, over his head the flags circled, stretched and rippling with the speed of his movement. And then the toss and catch ended the show. All the spectators cheered, and proud family members posed for photos with their Renaissance sons and husbands and fathers.

Ancient Challenge

What could possess these young men to dress in the Sunday-best fashions their ancestors wore half a millennium ago? Why march to drums and trumpets and perform feats of skill with silken banners on a 21st-century sunny afternoon? I found out that the performers are members of an organization called the Sbandieratori Sansepolcro, and that they are quite famous. They have performed in various places in both Europe and the Americas, and even in Australia. But their origin is historical, and is associated with an annual festival called the Palio della Balestra, celebrated in two cities: Gubbio, in Umbria, and Sansepolcro. Like the well-known Palio in Siena, which features a horse race, the Palio della Balestra also ends with a hard-fought contest. Rather than hoofbeats on sanded cobbles, though, you hear the thud of arrows, or rather fearsome bolts, into a wooden target. They are fired from huge, heavy crossbows of ancient design.

The tradition dates from the 15th century, when both towns celebrated their patron saints with an archery competition. In May, the archers from Sansepolcro journey to Gubbio, and in September the heroes of Gubbio march into the main square of Sansepolcro to answer the ancient challenge. The contestants are, like the flag-wavers, dressed in Renaissance finery, and the event is marked with music, revelry and spectacle – including, of course, a spectacular display by the Sbandieratori. I don’t know if the demonstration we saw was a dress rehearsal for an upcoming performance, or a show for the entertainment of the home folks.

We stayed a week in Sansepolcro, enjoying the easy hospitality of the town. We drank the local wine and an occasional birra alla spina at our favorite bar, where the cheerful proprietor rewarded our patronage one day by replacing the usual accompanying nuts or crisps with bruschetta generously topped with grated truffles.

And, of course, we went back to the Museo Civico. All the lights were on this time, but again there were very few visitors. There is an alterpiece, Piero’s Madonna della Misericordia, painted early in his career, to which we’d devoted little time in our first visit, and works by other Tuscan masters such as Santi di Tito and Raffaellino del Colle. Piero has two more fragmentary frescoes in the building, one a portrait of a young man thought to be St. Julian, and another of St. Louis of Toulouse. Both are beautifully painted, but the star attraction is still the Resurrection, its awesome power still in full force.

The Greatest Picture

The literal power of the Piero’s masterpiece extended, unexpectedly, into WWII. I mentioned that Aldous Huxley declared it the “best picture in the world” in a 1925 essay. In 1944, British forces who were pursuing the retreating Germans occupied the high ground above Sansepolcro. A young artillery officer named Anthony Clarke commanded the battery of guns that was to bombard the town before the British troops advanced. As the shelling began, he remembered having read Huxley’s essay. Clarke was an art lover, and though he’d never seen the picture, he was horrified at the prospect of destroying so important a work. A “ragged youngster with a dog” happened upon Clarke’s vantage point. “Tedeschi?” Clarke asked. The youngster grinned and waved toward the hills. Clarke guessed that he meant the Germans had left, but of course he could not be sure. Nevertheless, he ordered his guns to cease firing. He continued to scan the town with his binoculars but could not see any German targets, and refrained from further shelling.

In fact, the Germans had already abandoned the town, and the next day, the British advance proceeded without incident. Sansepolcro was saved from destruction. Years after the war, when the writer H.V. Morton and others revealed Clarke’s action, the citizens of Sansepolcro hailed him as a hero, and in a ceremony attended by Clarke, the town fathers named a suburban street for him. The city is proud of Piero, her greatest son; and of his masterpiece, whose fame protected them.