Across the Mountains of the Moon to Urbino.
Molly and her companions drive across the mountain massif known as Alpe della Luna called by another character in the novel “Mountains of the Moon” down into Urbino. Like many an art historian, she stands alone before the extraordinary Flagellation puzzled at the meaning of it whilist her friends rush off “to knock off the Raphaels” before the Palace closes. Perhaps it would interest Molly to know that over forty interpretations have been made of this famous picture whose titular subject is relegated to the background whilist a mysterious trio of renaissance men stand planted to the earth in the foreground. It is impossible to enumerate these readings here which show every sign of being increased with James Banker adding his own theory to the accumulated pile. Banker divides interpretations into three groups: the three men “as contemporaries of the Biblical moment;” they are portraits of fifteenth-century individuals (the majoritarian view); the third group see the figures “as types of some abstract quality.”[1] Banker’s reading falls into the second group; he claims that the oldest figure is Jacopo Anastagi, adviser to the Malatesta for whom Piero worked.[2] As to its dating, Piero’s Flagellation is thought to date from the 1460s; Banker dates it to either 1467-68 or 1470-71, the first date because it is a fact that Piero was in Urbino in early 1469- and Urbino is where the painting was first located. Moreover, it the time when Piero’s “theoretical interest in perspective intensified” and he was about to begin his De prospective pingendi which would be completed in the mid-1470s.[3]
[1] Banker, Piero della Francesca, 136.
[2] Banker, Piero della Francesca, 136.
[3] Banker, Piero della Francesca, 134.
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