Saint Nicholas of Tolentino had been waiting for them for an infinity of time, in his humble but elegant habit of the Augustinian Hermits, corpulent and peaceful, the belt with the metal buckle tightened far above the waist. The finger points to a star, an inevitable attribute of his iconography, which shines in the blue sky, an inevitable attribute in the Tuscan universe interwoven with mysticism and geometry of Piero della Francesca. Those “pieces of sky” signs of a “sovereign pacification”, as Roberto Longhi wrote.
They had made him a saint only eight years ago, in 1446, when Piero began working on his magnificent polyptych for the high altar of the Augustinian church in Borgo San Sepolcro, his hometown today Sansepolcro. The Augustinian clients did not miss the opportunity to have their new star placed on the altar. The monumental work, thirty panels set in an enormous Gothic carpentry – that was what they had given him to reuse, and to escape those medieval cages the Master had to use all his perspective science – was ready only in 1469. But only a few decades later, that Renaissance masterpiece suspended in a Gothic frame, with its saints who seemed to descend from heaven to the earth of our dimension, had already been dismantled and dispersed.
From then on, Piero’s saints took the most diverse paths around the world. Now for the first time they are back together, where Saint Nicholas was waiting for them. Saint Augustine from the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisbon; St. Michael the Archangel from the National Gallery in London, St. John the Evangelist from the Frick Collection in New York. Since 1879, with the legacy of Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli, San Nicola da Tolentino had instead found a home here, in the commendable house-museum in the center of Milan, together with Pollaiolo, Mantegna and the many others that the collector of great taste had gathered together. Since then we have been waiting for this moment, the reunion of the century. A story of “miracles”, secular and artistic miracles, says the curator of the exhibition, Machtelt Brüggen Israëls, smiling and diaphanous like Piero’s figures. For the art historian of the Rijksmuseum and the University of Amsterdam, a specialist in our Renaissance, the first miracle is precisely this: the polyptych by Piero della Francesca, or rather what remains of it, eight panels in all, for the first time since it was dismantled more than four centuries ago it has returned together in the exhibition “Piero della Francesca – The reunited Augustinian Polyptych” at the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan (until 24 June). Together with the four majestic figures that in the grandstand of the altar of Borgo San Sepolcro crowned the lost central image – a Coronation of the Virgin (are you sure? Yes, we will see) – four other small panels from the predella have arrived in Milan and the pillars, again by the hand of the great mathematician and painter: from the Frick Collection the Crucifixion, Santa Monica and San Leonardo. Santa Apollonia from the National Gallery in Washington. The result of this meeting, small in numbers but enormous in value, is striking from the first glance. In the room on the ground floor the architect Italo Rota and the Carlo Ratti Associati studio tried to recreate “the atmosphere and lighting conditions of Piero della Francesca’s Tuscan atelier”. On the walls are reproduced the drawings with which he measured the perfect spatial representation of bodies and objects with mathematical numbers. Freed from the weight of the carpentry, the four large sacred figures are arranged like a theatrical backdrop, the Augustinian Polyptych becomes perspective, between light and theological symbolism.
Against declinist rhetoric
I’m there. Finally. The cover is the San Michele of the National Gallery in London, the very essence of Piero’s art. Hieratic and boyish, he wears the lorica, the anatomical armor of high Roman officers, blue as the sky and studded with precious stones. He has just cut off the head of the devil, a large snake from the Tuscan countryside that lies at his feet, shod in very cute red boots. On the sword still a shadow of blood, faith and religion in a magically human space. Then Saint John wrapped in a regal red cloak that seems sculpted, while reading the book of the Apocalypse, his face framed in the curls of his white beard that Piero, a maniacal perfectionist, or perhaps simply a lover of truth and reality, painted on a hairless face made before – it is one of the gems that the innovative instrumental and restoration investigations have allowed us to discover. Finally, Saint Augustine, the bishop, with a brocade cope in which a story from the Gospel is painted in each square of the fabric, designed with the precision of a miniaturist and the measure of an architect. It is “the impact with the true mastery, the monumentality of Piero in the search for the human figure”, explains Machtelt Brüggen Israëls. “These saints are pushed into space by a parapet, the physical but also atmospheric perspective merges. So that heaven and earth merge, but also the present and the past.” Piero della Francesca is “like a director in search of that magical moment indicative of what happened before and what will happen after”, he says to explain that enchanted moment of San Michele, still with the sword in his hand and his eyes looking towards ‘infinite.
But first, it took the miracle of the reunion, thanks to a splendid cultural and programming operation. As the director of Poldi Pezzoli Alessandra Quarto says, this incredible exhibition could not have been created without a concomitance of events. In April 2023, having recently started his role at the top of the Milanese museum (a private foundation, it should be remembered, of which the presidents are still heirs of the founder, now Gian Giacomo Attolico Trivulzio), Quarto is in New York. There is also a visit to the prestigious Frick Collection, temporarily located in a temporary location awaiting the restoration of the historic headquarters on Fifth Avenue. The move will lead to closure for a few months, in 2024. So why not propose to Xavier Solomon, deputy director of the Frick Collection, the never before successful loan of the four panels of the Augustinian Polyptych they own? An operation that had never been successful in the past, neither at Poldi Pezzoli nor at Frick itself – they had been Machtelt Brüggen Israëls and Nathaniel Silver, another scholar from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and now co-curator of the Milanese exhibition, to try in 2013 – nor, in 2018, at the Hermitage. Solomon is generous and enthusiastic, but on one condition: that the other museums also lend their plates. The alignment of the stars of art history is rapid and perfect, the reunion of the century had taken off. “Milan is at the center of this international cultural operation” says Quarto, “with an interdisciplinary team with different skills of the highest level”. But it is also a great miracle for Milan itself. Poldi Pezzoli is an excellence, a jewel of private patronage, but more was needed to achieve a similar undertaking.
The Milan system was needed at its best for a huge economic effort and a project that interested the whole city (“The exclamation point on the centrality of this house museum for the cultural offer of our city”, Beppe Sala). She took action to support the project Intesa Sanpaolo, already an institutional partner of Poldi Pezzoli and whose Gallerie d’Italia are only two hundred meters away, just beyond Don Lisander’s garden: “It seemed essential to us to be alongside an important Italian museum, on the occasion of this unique project that unites the work of large international institutions,” explains Michele Coppola, director of the bank’s cultural project. And the fundamental commitment of the Bracco Foundation – which is the main sponsor of the exhibition – which made possible a campaign of scientific studies on the eight panels never seen before. “The Bracco Foundation has supported the museum’s activities for over ten years – says Diana Bracco – From this commitment was born an innovative diagnostic imaging study on San Nicola, carried out by a team of researchers from the University of Milan, of the IUSS Pavia DeepTrace spinoff Technologies and with the collaboration of the La Venaria Reale Conservation and Restoration Centre, coordinated by Professor Isabella Castiglioni”.
High resolution diagnostic techniques, ultraviolet, near infrared, X radiation, microscopy analysis and punctual spectroscopy. Each lender has allowed these sophisticated analyzes – what better occasion for an exhibition to be able to regress knowledge? – Now much more is known about Piero’s mastery, from the way of preparing the poplar boards to the way of exploiting light through the use of oil, as the Flemish painters already did and in Italy he had begun to experiment with another genius like Antonello da Messina.
From this scientific and critical work was finally born, if not a miracle, a decisive step forward in the solution of the main mystery that still surrounds the masterpiece. The Sansepolcro Polyptych has no longer existed for centuries, but in the second room of the exhibition an interactive reconstruction allows us to understand what the work looked like, while a video tells what the researchers discovered. Who were the four saints crowning and especially the two most central ones, Michael and Augustine? The lost central panel, which until now was believed to depict a Virgin and Child, as in the Polyptych of Saint Anthony, also by the artist, preserved in Perugia. But at the feet of the lateral figures, analyzes have identified the base of a step of porphyry, a regal stone, and the trail of an equally regal purple cloak. Elements deleted, because they were incongruent, when the polyptych was dismembered. Likewise, in the segments of sky, the angels’ wings that protruded from the central scene had been erased and with the stereomicroscope it was also possible to see a foot. Unlike the Perugia polyptych, this is almost certainly a Coronation of the Virgin, as can be seen from the foot of the Madonna kneeling to receive the crown from her Son. Similar models, historians explain, Piero certainly knew: those of Filippo Lippi of the Uffizi and the Vatican Museums. Indeed, according to the curators of the exhibition, that lost panel by Piero served as the model for the Pesaro Altarpiece by Giovanni Bellini, whose panel, that of the Lamentation over the Body of Christ, also visited Milan in recent months, at the Diocesan Museum. The subtle interweaving of the mysteries of art that is the fabric of our Renaissance. As Roberto Longhi wrote: “That pure and simple perenniality of certain visual sources that help those thirsty for invention in decisive moments, leading them back to the main path of figurative tradition.” Or, as Machtelt Brüggen Israëls says, “Piero made the sky descend from the earth”.
For anyone passing through Milan, discovering the precious treasure chest of Poldi Pezzoli is an adventure. With this wonderful meeting, it is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
