Exhibit of the week: Piero della Francesca in America

The Frick Collection, New York

Through May 19

“A strange and magical event” is taking place at the Frick this month, said Art & Antiques. The “most esteemed of early Renaissance painters,” Piero della Francesca, is enjoying his first solo American show. Piero, who died in 1492 when he was roughly 80, was little celebrated outside Italy until Georges Seurat, Paul Cézanne, and other post-impressionists created fresh interest in the formal qualities, or building blocks, of painted images. This exhibition brings together just seven paintings—four from the Frick’s own collection, two from elsewhere in America, and one from Portugal. But given that only 22 Piero paintings exist, that’s still an impressive feat. Naturally, the show does not include The Resurrection of the Christ, a fresco in Sansepolcro, Italy, that novelist Aldous Huxley called “the best painting in the world.” But visitors will be able to experience the “qualities of nobility and gravitas” that have won Piero’s work such reverence.

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The undoubted highlight of the show is Virgin and Child Enthroned With Four Angels, said David Ebony in Art in America. In this “tranquil scene,” an infant Jesus weightlessly floats above his mother’s lap and, “with a serious adult expression on his face,” reaches for a “delicately rendered” flower she holds in her hand. The image’s graceful stillness has made it an “effective object of veneration” for over 500 years. And while that loan from a Massachusetts museum gives the show “must-see ballast,” Piero’s “inimitable magic” is evident in every work here, said Lance Esplund in Bloomberg.com. In the artist’s portrait of St. Apollonia, the martyr who had her teeth shattered and is now the patron saint of dentistry holds a single tooth in a set of tongs. “Yet it is the hand of Piero”—who imbued each work “with spiritual mystery and mathematical solidity”—that gives the viewer a sense of having been transported into “an otherworldly realm.”

Visiting this “ravishing” exhibition still can’t quite compare with seeing Piero’s work in Italy, said Karen Rosenberg in The New York Times. The Church of San Francesco, in the city of Arezzo, “is filled top to bottom with Piero frescoes,” creating a “strictly have-to-be-there” experience that the Frick can only approximate. Still, visitors to this show will have no trouble imagining why American collectors “competed fiercely” to bring some of these paintings to our shores: Besides their formal rigor, they show Piero to be “capable of sensitivity and even pathos.” The overall effect will no doubt leave museumgoers “charmed but not quite sated”—consulting their calendars and their savings accounts to determine when they might visit Piero’s homeland.