San Ludovico di Tolosa

Piero della Francesca painted this on a wall of the town hall in Sansepolcro, his own home town, in 1460. The town had just revived an old office, the gonfaloniere of justice, a magistrate meant to keep the powerful honest, and the saint chosen to watch over the room fit that idea. Louis of Toulouse was a prince who gave up his claim to a throne to become a humble Franciscan friar, and then a bishop, dying young. Piero shows him as a calm boy in the brown friar's habit under the gold vestments of a bishop, standing in a niche of green and red marble. Centuries later the fresco was cut off its wall and moved. The Latin line beneath it, which had named who paid for it and given the year, was destroyed in the removal.