Piero della Francesca waited a long time to be widely acclaimed. Not until the 20th century did artists and art historians become obsessed with this Italian quattrocento master. The perspectival precision of his compositions and the emotional restraint of his figures suddenly made him seem like the contemporary of, say, Cézanne.
Art lovers are like birders. We are willing to go far to add Rembrandts or Richters to our life lists. The point is not to check boxes but to be in the presence of the work of an artist we love, even—or especially—if the work is not easy to understand.
For years, Mary Jo Salter was moved by Piero’s paintings and above all by his famously expressive faces. So she journeyed to Urbino to press her own face close to the most enigmatic of Piero’s creations, The Flagellation of Christ.
“About suffering they were never wrong,” W. H. Auden remarks about the Old Masters in his poem “Musée des Beaux Arts.” The point for Auden, who was writing about Brueghel, was that suffering and cruelty take place in the background of daily life; they are part and not the whole or center of it.
Probably he would have approved of The Flagellation, where Christ’s torture is depicted in a recessed interior colonnade while three figures take up the foreground. But who are they, these mystery men? Art historians have never agreed. (Note that Christ’s face is expressionless, but only because it has been slashed by, Salter speculates, “some art restorer’s well-meant swipe.”) And what does Salter find outside the museum and this timeless scene of suffering? Everyday life going on in the piazza. Old men with their “liver-spotted hands” and grandmothers “wobbling in heels” have gathered to celebrate the newest college graduates, their faces lit up by the moment.
