The story
Sansepolcro is the Tuscan town where Piero della Francesca was born, and its civic museum is the place to see him at home. It fills the medieval Palazzo della Residenza, where the town's governing council once met.
The centrepiece is the Polyptych of the Misericordia. In 1445 the local confraternity of mercy, a lay brotherhood devoted to charity, commissioned it, asking for a gold background and precious colours and giving Piero three years. He finished in about 1462, some 17 years later, while taking on commissions elsewhere in Italy. In the central panel the Virgin opens her cloak over kneeling townspeople, and one of them wears the black hood the brothers put on for their works of charity. Luca Signorelli, the painter from nearby Cortona, is here too, with a processional banner of the Crucifixion.
Two fresco saints by Piero hang close by, both cut from the walls of other buildings in town. Saint Louis of Toulouse, in a Franciscan habit under a bishop's cope, came from the Palazzo Pretorio. Saint Julian, a young man in a red cloak, came to light only in 1954, in the former church of Sant'Agostino.
