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End Notes
How one man saved the greatest picture in the world: Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection

[1] Formerly known as Borgo San Sepolcro
[2] Clarke’s diaries were accidently discovered, many years after his death, in a suitcase Cape Town in 2011: see Tim Butcher, “The man who saved The Resurrection”, BBC New Magazine, 24 December 2011, https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16306893
[3] Author of Brave New World (1932) and The Doors of Perception (1954), among others
[4] Aldous Huxley, “The Best Picture”, in Along the Road (1925). Extracted at http://www.travelingintuscany.com/art/pierodellafrancesca/resurrectionhuxley.htm. Huxley’s stated reasons for this judgment are rather obscure, but he places considerable value on the painting’s “genuineness” and the fact that the artist was “genuinely noble as well as talented.
[5] The story was later recounted in 1964 by author HV Morton in his A Traveller in Italy, as a result of a chance meeting with Clarke in Cape Town
[6] For a detailed treatment of his close connections with the city, see James R Banker, The Culture of San Sepolcro during the Youth of Piero della Francesca, University of Michigan Press, 2003
[7] Jeryldene Wood (ed), Cambridge Companion to Piero della Francesca, Icon, London, 1991“Introduction” at 1
[8] The large stone which we can see in the bottom right corner of the painting may actually represent that relic: see Marilyn Aronberg Levin, “Piero’s Mediation on the Nativity” in Wood, op cit at 74.  A similar object appears in di Segna’s painting.
[9] For detailed treatments of Piero’s life and influences, see Bruce Cole, Piero Della Francesca: Tradition and Innovation in Form and Idiom In Renaissance Art, Westview Press, London, 1991; and Jeryldene M Wood, op cit; for an informative documentary, see BBC, The Private Life of a Masterpiece, “Piero della Francesca”, DVD Vol 1, Disc 1
[10] Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists, Vol 1, Penguin Classics, London, 1987 at 194
[11] Possibly reflecting the medieval symbol of marriage, maybe the marriage of divine and human: Jonathan Baker, “The resurrection according to Matthew and Piero della Francesca” https://www.peterborough-cathedral.org.uk/157/section.aspx/156/wednesday_at_one_resurrection_in_gospel_and_art_matthew_piero_della_francesca
[12] Critic Andrew Graham Dixon describes the face as ”un-idealised, almost coarse-featured”: http://www.andrewgrahamdixon.com/archive/itp-157-the-resurrection-by-piero-della-francesca.html
[13] M B Israëls, Piero della Francesca and the Invention of the Artist, Reaktion, London, 2020 at 146
[14] Israëls, op cit at 147
[15] Christine Zappella, ”Piero della Francesca: Resurrection”, at https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/renaissance-reformation/early-renaissance1/painting-in-florence/a/piero-della-francesca-resurrection
[16] Trattato d'Abaco; De Prospectiva Pingendi; and Libellus de Quinque Corporibus Regularibus: see Christopher Booker. “The mathematical revolution behind ‘the greatest picture in the world’”, The Spectator Magazine, 19 April 2014 https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-mathematical-revolution-behind-the-greatest-picture-in-the-world-
[17] Vasari, op cit at 190
[18] In Piero’s On Perspective for Painting
[19] Israëls, op cit at 146
[20] This pose is similar to various perspectives sketched by Piero in his mathematical treatises: Renana Bartal, “Piero’s Faces: Artist and Image Making in Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection of Christ”, Notes in the History of Art, Fall 2019, at 31 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335535828_Piero's_Faces_Artist_and_Image_Making_in_Piero_della_Francesca's_Resurrection_of_Christ
[21] Philip Pullella, “Spared in war, Italy’s ‘greatest picture’ saved again by benefactor”, Reuters, 16 November 2014
[22] Cole, op cit at 79
[23] Cole, op cit at 141
[24] Huxley, op cit
[25] MD Aeschiman,”The Greatest Painting”, Nation Review, 21 September 2013, https://www.nationalreview.com/2013/09/greatest-painting-m-d-aeschliman/
[26] These and additional quotes about Piero’s work are collected in Aeschliman, op cit
[27] From ‘Pro Tempera Oratio’, c. 1920
[28] Clarke’s Bookshop website https://clarkesbooks.co.za/
[29] Brent Meersman, “A bookshop’s new chapter, different setting”, Mail & Guardian (South Africa), 16 August 2013, https://mg.co.za/article/2013-08-16-new-chapter-different-setting/
[30] See generally, Fausto Braganti, “M’Accordo… when I didn’t meet Anthony Clarke”, https://biturgus.com/104a-marcordo-quando-non-ho-incontrato-anthony-clarke/

​© Philip McCouat 2022
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