La Flagellazione di Cristo

This panel is small, not much larger than a sheet of paper, and it has puzzled people for centuries. Piero della Francesca painted it around 1459 in Urbino, and he did something strange with it. The event in the title, Christ being whipped before Pilate, is pushed into the far background, cool and orderly under a colonnade, laid out with Piero's exact perspective and geometry. In the front, much larger and closer to us, three men in fifteenth-century dress stand talking, ignoring the scene behind them entirely. Nobody is sure who they are. There are something like forty-five competing theories, several tying them to the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 and the mourning of a young man. The painting keeps its meaning to itself. What is not in doubt is the ruthless clarity of the architecture and the light, every tile and cornice measured.