Around Piero della Francesca's Baptism. The Polyptych of Matteo di Giovanni in Sansepolcro.

Visitors walking through the halls of the Civic Museum of Sansepolcro, after admiring the masterpieces by Piero della Francesca preserved here (the Polyptych of Mercy, the San Giuliano, the San Ludovico di Tolosa and the splendid Resurrection, the mural painting executed precisely for the Palazzo del Governo of the city, today the museum’s headquarters), will come across a somewhat alienating presence: a polyptych by Matteo di Giovanni (Borgo Sansepolcro, circa 1428 - Siena, 1495), lacking... the central compartment. It is the Polyptych of San Giovanni in val d’Afra, one of the most important works to be found in this corner of Tuscany, the Valtiberina: it bears this appellation because in ancient times it was kept in the church of San Giovanni Battista in val d’Afra (now deconsecrated and home to the Museum of Stained Glass), which despite its name is located in the very center of Sansepolcro, in the part closest to the Afra stream that flows at the edge of the town.

The history of the polyptych is particularly complex, since in addition to Matteo di Giovanni two other artists participated in its realization, namely Piero della Francesca himself (Borgo Sansepolcro, c. 1412 - 1492) and Antonio d’Anghiari (documented in the 15th century), and because some aspects about its events remain to be clarified. The date to start from is December 21, 1433: the contract for the carpentry to Benedetto d’Antonio di Matteo Cere, based on a design by Antonio d’Anghiari, dates from that day, at the time when the rector of the church was Nicoluccio di Nicolosio Graziani. This type of commission, explained art historian Andrea De Marchi, normally “already constituted a sort of pre-emption for the more demanding entrustment of the pictorial part.” Antonio d’Anghiari was Piero della Francesca’s master, who was his apprentice at the time of the contract for the polyptych’s assignment, and continued to work with him in 1436. We do not know how things turned out after that: it is possible that the master, at some point in history, passed the job on to his promising pupil, since we know from a document dated 1437 that Piero della Francesca was already in a relationship with the patron. Later, between 1444 and 1447, Antonio d’Anghiari moved to Arezzo, and Piero had a totally free field in his hometown: “in this context, in the early 1440s,” De Marchi again writes, “it is well explained that Piero took over the engagement for Don Nicoluccio” and began to paint the central panel of the polyptych: the Baptism of Christ, which is now in the National Gallery in London.

That very famous painting, one of the masterpieces of the Renaissance, reproduced in all art history books and now the pride of the London museum, was once part of a complex structure, despite the fact that today it is read by most as an independent work. One can, after all, well understand why: here, the artist, as Carlo Bertelli has written, “presents all the crystalline novelty of his poetic world, his admiring gaze toward creation, his search for a harmony of colors that almost erases shadows and makes bodies appear as immaterial projections.” What Piero della Francesca inaugurates with his Baptism of Christ is an unprecedented language, regulated on the basis of precise perspective and mathematical laws, in accordance with the principles that the artist himself, in his late maturity, would enunciate in his treatise De quinque corporibus regularibus. Christ is the perfect center of the composition, inscribed within regular geometric figures, flanked by figures with firm volumes, rendered in limpid colors and immersed in a landscape over which a sharp, diffuse light shines: Designed to emanate an atmosphere of calm, peacefulness and sacredness, The Baptism of Christ has been read by Timothy Verdon as a work in which the artist “also makes explicit Christ’s place in the Trinity and thus the link between the triune God and man,” a concept that is made manifest by the relationships that bind the various figures together.

Flanking Christ is the snow-white shaft of a poplar tree, beneath which are three angels. Another tree, further back, covers the piece of sky above the three angelic presences, which draw the viewer’s attention to the center of the scene. The trunk of the tree is balanced, to the right, by the figure of St. John the Baptist, whose hand is in axis with Christ’s head and the dove: water falls on Jesus’ hair, wetting it, but the Baptist does not touch his body, white almost like that of a marble statue. Behind, a neophyte, a sort of homage to Masaccio’s Baptism in the Brancacci Chapel, is undressing to receive Baptism in his turn, while even farther away appear the figures of some Pharisees, one of whom wears a headdress of oriental fashion, similar to those worn by the Byzantine dignitaries who participated in the council of Ferrara and Florence (to the Tuscan city the council was transferred in 1439) and who so inspired Piero della Francesca. The landscape is in all likelihood that of Sansepolcro, so much so that we see the town itself depicted in the distance, and of the Tiber valley: in a manner typical of Renaissance painting, the sacred scene is actualized (signifying that Christ’s teaching has a scope that transcends the ages), with Sansepolcro finding itself to be a new Jerusalem and the blond river becoming the Jordan. It is the “simple, noble and grand” landscape that fascinated Maurizio Calvesi, “the village with the indication of hedges, bushes, and roads,” which “as in Paolo Uccello, takes on breadth and distance because of the large, thick-stemmed leafy trees that shade the foreground.”

What Piero della Francesca concluded probably as early as the 1540s was thus, De Marchi wrote, the “first manifesto at home” of his language, “bold and paradigmatic,” characterized by the “novelty of that great atmospheric sky , with the clouds and foliage protagonists against the blue air, mirrored in the still stream,” which took on “all the provocative sense of an Albertian window in the vital contrast with the rich carved woodwork that framed the glimpse of the upper-Tiberian country.” The polyptych of San Giovanni in Val d’Adra, moreover, largely retains its original frame.

However, Piero della Francesca would not be able to complete the task, for reasons we do not know (perhaps, it has been speculated, financing difficulties): he was thus succeeded, probably around 1455, by Matteo di Giovanni, who completed the structure with the figures of the side saints (Peter and Paul, identified by their respective iconographic attributes, namely the keys and the sword) and the saints in the pillars (Stephen, Mary Magdalene, Egidius, Benedictine, Catherine of Alexandria, and Arcane). In the predella, on the other hand, we find the stories from the life of St. John the Baptist with the Crucifixion in the center (we find on the left the Birth and Preaching of the Baptist, and on the right instead the Baptist before Herod and Herod’s Banquet), separated by niches with the figures of the doctors of the Church: St. Augustine, St. Gregory the Great, St. Ambrose, and St. Jerome. Completing the structure painted by Matteo di Giovanni are the coats of arms of the patron, showing that it was therefore Nicoluccio Graziani himself who gave the commission to the painter from Biturgia but trained in Siena. As we can well see from what remains in Sansepolcro, Matteo di Giovanni decided not to follow the innovations of Piero della Francesca: in fact, he decided to paint his saints on a more traditional gold background, moreover executed with great skill and finesse notably in the punches that bring us back to the best Sienese school, although even his figures are not insensitive to Renaissance innovations. The two saints in the side compartments hark back to the composed solemnity of Donatello ’s more classical statuary, and it has been noted how even the architecture of the predella suggests references to the great Florentine sculptor (the scene of Herod’s Banquet, for example, is influenced by the homologous relief made by Donatello for the font in the Baptistery of Siena).

Matteo di Giovanni was thus not a lingering painter, far from it. If anything, it is another, precise circumstance that weighed on the fortunes of the panels of the Polyptych of San Giovanni d’Adra. “The constant comparison with the revolutionary central part of that polyptych, an element that must have weighed in no small measure even in Matteo di Giovanni’s efforts to achieve almost hypertrophic physicality and perfectly measurable spaces,” the scholar Michela Becchis has written, “has often diminished the effective value of the parts pertaining to Matteo di Giovanni that instead show themselves as the moment of greatest interpretative impetus that the then young painter offered of all the complex instances of Renaissance artistic research.” Why then did Matteo di Giovanni decide to resort to a language seemingly at odds with that of Piero della Francesca? It is impossible to think that the youngest artist from Borgo worked without taking into account what Piero della Francesca had produced a few years earlier. Evidently, Matteo di Giovanni somehow sensed the distance separating his language from Piero’s, and as a result he decided to give Piero’s panel as much prominence as possible, inserting it into a structure where the arrangement of spaces is intrinsically coherent: the side saints are inserted within two niches that dialogue with the oculi in which the Announcing Angel and the Virgin Announced take their places, and in addition, with the movement of the foot, which rests on the step by leaning outward, the two figures intend to make evident the spatial depth of the composition. In essence, it is as if Matteo di Giovanni had wanted to insert Piero’s Baptism within a solid architecture, arriving at a final result that, in the eyes of his contemporaries, must surely have appeared less jarring than it does to our contemporary eyes.

The Civic Museum of Sansepolcro, in the panels illustrating the polyptych of San Giovanni in Val d’Afra, establishes a parallel with the Loggia della Mercanzia in Siena, where the statues made by Vecchietta, an artist at whom Matteo di Giovanni completed his training, are inserted in niches of Gothic taste: the sculptures, imposing and barely contained in the spaces of the niches themselves, produce an effect not unlike that of the saints painted by Matteo di Giovanni for the Biturgense polyptych. A structure, then, that for the mentality of the artist (and of his time) must have had a very solid consistency.

What fate then marked the events of the work, which today we see separated from the central panel with Piero della Francesca’s Baptism? In 1629 the polyptych was still in the church of St. John the Baptist, except that in 1807 it was transported to the Cathedral of Sansepolcro. Fifty years later, in 1858, the Cathedral Chapter decided to break up the polyptych, which was in a poor state of preservation, exposed to centuries of sun and humidity, and sell Piero’s central panel. To win it, for the sum of four hundred pounds (the intermediary was in fact a young English painter and collector, John Charles Robinson), was the industrialist Matteo Uzielli, and after the latter’s death in 1861, the work was bought by the painter and writer Charles Eastlake, who had already tried to buy it three years earlier, but had it stolen by Robinson. Later that year, Eastlake sold the work to the National Gallery in London, and the painting has been on display at the London museum ever since. The move by the Cathedral Chapter was deemed reckless and ill-advised and was strongly criticized as early as the nineteenth century: “It is not many years,” wrote Giovanni Felice Pichi in his 1892 work La vita e le opere di Piero della Francesca, “that the Cathedral Chapter in order to make money under the specious pretext of restoring its Church, asked and obtained permission to sell part of this Painting, the central part the most esteemed and beautiful [...]. On my own account, either I would have gladly done without these restorations, which in truth did not succeed in the most beautiful thing, or I would have tried to make up for them by other means, which certainly could not be lacking, rather than deprive my country of a work by one of my great fellow citizens. But so did not think the reverend canons, nor those who recommended and solicited with the government, which in truth showed itself somewhat reluctant to grant the concession.”

Matteo di Giovanni’s panels have recently been dismantled on a couple of occasions: in 2009, when a campaign of studies regarding the woodwork was undertaken on the altarpiece, and in 2014, when seismic upgrading work was undertaken on the Museo Civico del Sansepolcro, and it was decided to schedule a restoration on the work, completed in 2019 and carried out by restorer Rossella Cavigli of the Polo Museale della Toscana, in collaboration with the lOpificio delle Pietre Dure for the technical part, under the direction of art historian Paola Refice of the Soprintendenza di Arezzo, who was succeeded by Felicia Rotundo. Everything took place at the Restoration Laboratory of the Superintendence of Arezzo. The story of this marvelous work of art is not over: it will be difficult to reunite it with the Baptism of Christ, but new studies may provide experts and the public with some more insight into the ancient events that affected this unique masterpiece of the Tuscan Renaissance.

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