San Ludovico

HISTORICAL NOTE

di by Davide Gasparotto (Piero della Francesca Foundation)

Piero's Saint Ludovico

On June 29, 1140, on the great plane that lies between San Sepolcro and Anghiari, the troops of the Duke of Milan, Filippo Maria Visconti, led by the famous condottiere Niccolò Piccinino, suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of the papal army and its Florentine allies. Thus saved from the expansionist aims of the Visconti, Sansepolcro passed under the dominion of the Church. But just over a year after this event, in February 1441, Pope Eugene IV ceded the city to the Florentines in exchange for a conspicuous sum of money. The Pope needed the money to pay back some loans he had contracted with the Florentine Republic at the time of the great Council of the Roman and Byzantine churches that had been held two years earlier in the Tuscan city. On February 28 of that year, Niccolò Valori, First Commissioner of Florence, took possession of the city. A short time later he dictated the city's charter and body of laws and ordered a complete reordering of the judicial system. From that time on the Florentine Commissioners, succeeding one another every six months, occupied the highest poltical office in the city

This background is essential to an understanding of the genesis, about twenty years after these events, of the fresco of Ludovico of Toulouse painted by Piero della Francesca. Today the fresco shows the effects, not only of its poor conditions in which it has been conserved, but also of damage inflicted by previous interventions. The damage dates back to 1846 when the fresco was inexpertly detached from the wall on which it was first painted, inside the Palace of the Captain of the People (also known as the Palazzo Pretorio). In those years of medieval revivalism, the palace was subjected to a series of reconstruction and rehabilitation projects that altered its appearance so radically that it is now impossible to determine the original location of Piero's fresco. Some years before it was detached, however, Francesco Gherardi Dragomanni, worthy and erudite citizen of Sansepolcro, was able to read and transcribe the entire inscription that he found at the foot of the figure of the Saint and which, in all probability, was an integral part of the work conceived by the maestro of Sansepolcro. The original Latin text was as follows: "Tempore regiminis nobilis et generosi viri Ludovico Acciaroli pro magnifico et excelso populo florentino rectoris dignissimi capitanei ac primi vexilliferi iustitiae, popoli aere Burgi anno MCCCCLX," which can be translated into English as "At the time of the administration of the noble and generous Lodovico Acciaioli, most worthy captain and rector of the magnificent and excellent Florentine people and first standard-bearer of justice, in the year 1460, paid for by the people of Borgo."".

The lost inscription is thus essential to an understanding of the origins of the fresco, whose obvious religious value is accompanied by a profound civic significance, as is also the case for the nearby Resurrection in the Palazzo Comunale. It is clear that the people of Borgo, by engaging their most important local artist to paint a portrait of the patron saint of the Florentine Commissioner on the wall of his home, chose a most discreet way of honoring Lodovico di Odoardo Acciaioli, in office from July 3, 1460 to January 3, 1461, who had succeeded in obtaining for the city the reestablishment of the office of "gonfaloniere di giustizia" or standard-bearer of justice, which he was then the first to occupy, as the inscription reminds us. There is also a small trace of documentary evidence about these events. The city records from October 30, 1460 make reference to the new magisterial office and to Lodovico as its first occupant (Archivio Comunale di San Sepolcro, serie II, Deliberazioni, reg. n. 5, cc. 5-6). It is quite interesting to observe, as Ronald Lightbown has done (1992), that it was on that same day that Piero della Francesca took office as a member of the twelve-man Council of the Dodici Buonomini. How can we not believe then that the maestro did not have an important part in the decision to honor Acciaioli in that particular way; in practically assigning himself the commission for the work?

The lost inscription was in all probability written by the man who was chancellor in that year, Niccolò di Pier Paolo Lucarini, as is demonstrated by the correspondence between his dictation and the text of the minutes in the city records. All of this, besides giving us a clear idea of the occasion for the commissioning of the work and thus also of its fundamental civic value, also provides a precise time frame for its execution - something very rare for the works of Piero - which must have taken place between early November and the end of December 1460, just prior to the expiration of Acciaioli's term of office.

Piero della Francesca who, twenty years earlier - at the outset of Florentine domination - had only recently returned to the city from his apprenticeship with Domenico Veneziano in the Tuscan capital (where he had also participated sufficiently in the social occasions and activity generated by the Council of the two churches to have formed an indelible impression of the event), had become by 1460 one of the most respected members of the Sansepolcro community. He had been given its most prestigious artistic commissions (Polyptych of the Misericordia, Polyptych of the Augustinians). He had traveled around the north of Italy and executed works for the noble families of the Po valley (the Este family in Ferrara, the Malatesta in Rimini), and he had recently returned from Rome, where he had been invited by the highly cultivated Pius II Piccolomini to paint frescoes in the rooms of the papal apartments.

The Saint represented in the fresco is a life-size figure. He is a young man, who wears the Franciscan habit under his elegant bishop's cope, closed around the neck by an ornate button, and a white miter with gold decorations and precious gems, which is similar to the miter of Saint Augustine, now in Lisbon. He holds his pastoral staff in his right hand and a book in his left, painted in a perspective that indicates that the image was to be viewed from below. The figure is turned slightly toward the right and looks intently at a point beyond the frame. The direction of his glance is probably related to the original position of the fresco, which is intensely illuminated from the left. The figure's pose, as has been noted by various observers, is the reverse image of the Saint Ludovico painted by Piero for the fresco cycle in Arezzo in that same period. It is possible that the maestro adopted the same cartoon drawing, as he did quite often during his career, and perhaps the current restoration will provide us with the definitive answer to this question. The imposing figure is placed in front of a false niche with classic molding in pale brown stone and decorated with precious marbles; red porphyry on the left and green serpentine on the right. The fresco, as we know from some documents concerning the detachment, was originally positioned inside a shallow, rectangular shrine, and so this allusive effect must have been deliberately chosen by Piero as part of his composition, still more proof of his mastery in the rendering of space. The current centering of the figure may also be an allusion to its original position within the shrine but, unfortunately, we have no sure evidence on how the work presented itself in its original context.

The historical sources all agree in attributing the fresco to the master of Sansepolcro. Pietro Farulli, for example, writing at the beginning of the XVIII century, recalled with pride that "Piero painted a Resurrection in Palazzo dei Priori and a Saint Ludovico in the Palazzo of the Commissioner, that are among his most prized creatons. (Annali e memorie dell’antica e nobile città di S. Sepolcro, Foligno 1713, p. 77).

After its detachment (1846), which was carried out with the most primitive methods but which saved at least a part of the work that already appeared destined for total destruction, the fresco's conditions continued to deteriorate. Its colors, which originally must have been the bright constituent elements of a dynamic interaction of lights and darks, are utterly flat and lusterless, and the surface presents a number of large repainted areas. This situation may have contributed to the negative judgment concerning the attribution of the work to Piero that prevailed among critics for a number of years. Roberto Longhi, writing in 1927, was the first to see in the work the hand of one of Piero's best known students and collaborators, Lorentino d'Arezzo, a position subsequently shared by numerous authoritative critics up to recent years. Despite the restoration carried out in the early 1950s under the direction of the Florentine Superintendency (G. Rosi), which remedied the most visible damage, a definitive judgment regarding the execution of the work remains problematic. We are, however, certain to be able to affirm that the idea for the composition is without any doubt attributable to Piero della Francesca, who surely prepared the cartoon, in an important moment in his career, not long after his return from the Vatican and very close to the terminal phase of the work on the cycle of the True Cross in the main chapel of the church of Saint Francis in Arezzo.