Piero’s polyptych, return to the origins

The Hermits of Sant’Agostino, a mendicant order brought together under the Augustinian rule by Pope Alexander IV, arrived in Borgo San Sepolcro towards the middle of the 14th century. They wore a black habit, cinched at the waist by a leather belt. One hundred years later they had become a flourishing community of friars, lay and consecrated, devoted to withdrawal from worldly life and study (theology, liturgy, music, law); they sought the truth in a contemplative dimension and exercised charity as an evangelical commitment to education and learning. On 4 October 1454 the prior of the convent summoned the other brothers, two workers, the benefactor Angelo di Giovanni di Simone – a merchant and “donkey driver” (i.e. muleteer) – and the painter Piero della Francesca, more than local fame, to the sacristy. who was asked to paint, decorate and gilded a polyptych (already existing in the wooden structure) for the main altar of the Augustinian church.

The reunited Augustinian polyptych

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At that time the artist, around forty years old, was frescoing the cycle with the Legend of the True Cross for the church of San Francesco in Arezzo (1452-1457), he had already worked for the Order in the church of Sant’Agostino in Ferrara and boasted an Augustinian cousin, Brother Angelo di Niccolò, who had been prior of the convent of Borgo. Piero therefore enjoyed very high esteem and not only in his hometown; despite having first-rate commissions at the main courts of the peninsula (Ferrara, Urbino, Rimini) and others awaiting him in Ancona, Pesaro and Bologna, he accepted the assignment.

It took him fifteen years to complete the polyptych of Sant’Agostino, during which he moved to Rome, called by Pope Pius II to fresco the Apostolic Palace, created famous masterpieces and escaped the plague of 1468 by taking refuge in Bastia Umbra.

While he worked on the polyptych of the Misericordia (circa 1444-1464) now in the Civic Museum of Sansepolcro and that of Sant’Antonio (circa 1460-1470) today in Perugia, at the National Gallery of Umbria, he also completed the polyptych of Sant’ Augustine, who remains the most innovative in the Renaissance conception of space, devoid of a gold background, replaced by an open sky between classical balustrades and with the figures of saints with accentuated monumentality. Unfortunately it is also the only one to have been dismembered a few decades after its masterful execution and then dispersed on the antiques market. Being able to admire it together – albeit partially because of the hypothetical 31 tables that would have constituted the complex structure only eight have so far been identified – is thanks to the history of art, to the most advanced diagnostic investigations carried out above all by the Bracco Group and to the new director of the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan, the architect Alessandra Quarto, who in the article on the page retraces the stages of reunification of the surviving compartments.

The one depicting the Augustinian friar Saint Nicholas of Tolentino was already in Milan from the mid-nineteenth century, in the house-museum of Count Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli, while Saint Michael the Archangel reached him from London, Saint Augustine bishop of Hippo from Lisbon, Saint John the Evangelist from New York (with Santa Monica, Saint Leonard and the little one Crucifixion of the predella), Saint Apollonia from Washington: they hadn’t all seen each other together again for half a millennium!