Flagellation

In Fabriano, a paper-making town in the Marche, the brotherhood of the Raccomandati took in abandoned children and scourged themselves in public as penance. In the early 1480s they had Luca Signorelli paint the standard they carried through the streets, a banner with a picture on each face. The front carried the Virgin nursing her child. This is the side that showed what the brothers did to themselves. Christ is tied to a column set precisely at the centre of the perspective, in a cool courtyard of classical stone, and the men swinging at him are drawn with the hard wiry line the Florentine painters were using in those years.

Signorelli signed it as the work of Luca of Cortona and put no date on it, which is why the dating still moves around by a decade. The banner reached Brera in 1811, after Napoleon's government closed the confraternities, arriving without its frame and already split into two panels. This face has been catalogued as a painting in its own right ever since, under inventory number 327 to 347.