Piero della Francesca Completes Flagellation

1462

The Umbrian painter finished a small, enigmatic panel of Christ being scourged in the background while three mysterious figures converse in the foreground. Its perspective is mathematical; its meaning is still debated. Renaissance painting had begun quietly absorbing the principles of geometry and refusing to explain itself. Its mathematical precision has led scholars to describe it as a treatise on optics disguised as a devotional image.