The Resurrection

In the late summer of 1944 the fighting in Italy reached the upper Tiber valley, and a young British artillery officer, Tony Clarke, had his guns turned on Sansepolcro. The first shells had already gone over when the name of the town began to nag at him. Then he remembered an essay by the English writer Aldous Huxley, published in 1925, that called a fresco in this town "the greatest picture in the world". Clarke ordered his battery to stop. The Germans, he learned later, had already pulled out, and the town came through. A street in Sansepolcro now carries his name.

The picture he had never seen is this one. Piero painted it around 1460, though estimates run from the late 1450s into the 1470s, on a wall of the hall where the town's governors met. The subject suited the room. Sansepolcro means Holy Sepulchre, and the risen Christ stepping out of his tomb is the town's emblem. Below him four soldiers sleep through the moment, and an old tradition holds that the one in brown armour, his head tipped back against the tomb, is Piero himself.