THE RESURRECTION: Christ goes through Hell while Piero (second from left?) sleeps.

That’s Kenneth Clark writing, in 1951, about Piero della Francesca’s The Resurrection of Christ, the fresco that Aldous Huxley called, only half in jest, “the best painting in the world.” The best painting in the world resides not in the Louvre or the Uffizi or the Met or London’s National Gallery but in the civic museum of Sansepolcro, the small Tuscan town on the Umbrian border where Piero was born. Arezzo and Monterchi and Urbino boast Piero masterpieces; New York and London and Paris have hardly any. Yet he casts what’s been called “a giant shadow.” Stendhal rediscovered him in the 19th century; Seurat resurrected his immobile, precisely calibrated forms in Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of La Grande Jatte; Cézanne found in him the first Cubist. De Chirico, Morandi, Guston, and Hockney would hardly be possible without him. D’Annunzio salutes his “deep garden”; for Camus he’s the first Existentialist, whereas he has Pasolini waxing homoerotic and Marxist. The History of the True Cross frescoes in the church of San Francesco in Arezzo frame an epiphanic moment between Hana and Kip in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. A mirror as well as a shadow, Piero is Renaissance Italy’s international artist of mystery, by turns painful and rejoicing, always involuntary. He may have painted himself as one of the Resurrection’s sleeping soldiers.

Not that we know what he actually looked like, or his birth date, or even his name, which is also given as Piero de’ Franceschi. He died on October 12, 1492, the same day Christopher Columbus first sighted the New World. He was born, it’s now thought, in 1411 or 1412, into a middle-class merchant family. There is no record of his ever having married. His father and his brothers belonged to the Compagnia di Santa Maria della Misericordia, a charitable brotherhood who fed and clothed the poor and also practised public flagellation (it didn’t start with Opus Dei); Piero was surely a member as well. Our only clue to his appearance is a woodcut in the second (1568) edition of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists: Piero as a curly-haired, pouty-lipped 15th-century Italian teen idol. It’s the basis for the three self-portraits that have been proposed: the wide-eyed man to the right of the black-hooded Misericordia member huddling beneath the Virgin’s mantle in his Madonna della Misericordia altarpiece; the stern, professorial figure in The Meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, one of the True Cross frescoes; and the Roman soldier in the Resurrection, the artist, like the rest of us, dreaming while the world changes forever.

He ranged as far afield as Florence and, in 1458-’59, the Vatican (frescoes lost) but for the most part stayed close to home, the Upper Tiber Valley, source of the river that runs through the Eternal City, as if he had been born into an Eternal Secret, older than the Roman Empire, that he was sworn not to reveal. His work, much of it fresco, stayed home too. Sansepolcro has the Resurrection and the Misericordia altarpiece. The Madonna del parto — the Virgin as pregnant diva — enjoys a building all to herself in the eastern Tuscan village of Monterchi, where Piero’s mother was born, under what one observer has called “disco lighting,” as if she were the other Madonna; small wonder Pasolini alludes to her in the opening shot of The Gospel According to Matthew. Arezzo has the True Cross frescoes and also a St. Mary Magdalene, Urbino the Senigallia Madonna and The Flagellation of Christ, a contender for the most puzzling painting in the world. There’s little outside Tuscany and Umbria, less still outside Italy. London has the early Baptism of Christ and the possibly late, possibly unfinished, totally bewildering Nativity. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston owns one of America’s two uncontested Pieros, a fresco’d Hercules who looks warily to one side, all brawn and some brain; with a Beatle haircut and the skin of the Nemean Lion tied around his loins in a way that suggests testicles, he’d be set to head down to the Disco della Francesca if his legs hadn’t been lost when he was removed from Sansepolcro. The Clark Art Institute in Williamstown has a Madonna with Child and Four Angels whose faces are heavy and vacant. Maybe it’s a workshop production; maybe it’s another Piero mystery.

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