After the monastery in Sansepolcro was dissolved in the 1860s, the National Gallery in London acquired the painting in 1861.
We are seeing the Baptism of Christ by Piero della Francesca, one of his most famous works. Piero was a mathematician before he became an artist, which made his works really special for his time. He was born in San Sepolcro, a town near the Republic of Florence at the time. According to Giorgio Vasari, Piero had written many books on geometry and perspective, but due to his unfortunate illness, he was unable to publish the books. Tragically, his student, Luca Pacioli, stole these books and later published them as his own. Despite this series of events, Piero was a revolutionary artist of his time. Moving onto the artwork, we are seeing the composition centred on Christ getting baptised by St.John. Right behind them, we see a figure of a man taking off his shirt, his foot in water, getting ready to be baptised by John. According to the Bible, John actually suggested that Christ be baptised by him instead of him baptising Christ. We can see the focus in John’s eyes and the concern in the eyes of the angels located on the left side of the painting, followed by the tentativeness in their hands. The feature that amazed me the most is definitely the background that Piero constructed. As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, Piero was born in San Sepolcro. Most art historians claim that the town and the landscape that we see in the background in Piero’s hometown,San Sepolcro. It seems that Piero aimed to suggest one of the geological features of the area, of the mountains behind Borgo. The grey areas show or represent what the locals still call ‘genga’, a type of loose, crumbly mix of clay and limestone that is very common in this area. The town of Borgo is marked by several distinct features: its bell tower is easily spotted by its steep, pyramid-shaped roof and three arches, as are the two buildings standing to its left. Another feature that I would like to mention is the medium that was used to paint the water. Comparing it to the other areas of the painting that used egg tempera, it is claimed that Piero used oil paint to depict the water as reflective and luminous. Ultimately, through his mathematical precision and intimate local details, Piero della Francesca transforms a sacred biblical event into a timeless masterpiece that feels both heavenly and deeply rooted in his own home.
It is a somewhat uncanny depiction of Jesus, both humanising and dehumanising at the same time. The intense symmetry of his upper posture and the bird above his head contrast against the more realistic man struggling to get his shirt off, the imbalance of the foreground and background's composition that set the main figure apart even further from the rest of the people. He is a person but remains a symbol.
