Piero della Francesca’s ‘Resurrection’

(Museo Civico, Sanspolcro)

by A M Rossett 22nd April 2011

The eyes of Piero’s risen Jesus gaze with the compelling blankness of a man who, just this very moment, has walked out of hell. It is a face that even atheists have found they recognize. Its gaze reminds us of Auschwitz, Srebrenica,  Hiroshima, Burma and Tibet, Libya, Rwanda, Côte d’Ivoire;  recall Akhmátova in frozen prison queues, and the nameless Kenyan mother who,   helpless, saw the child , wrenched from her arms by jeering soldiers, hurled, still alive, into the furnace of a church.