Computers and Art History

Piero della Francesca painted the Renaissance fresco cycle most admired by twentieth-century viewers (fig. 1). The frescoes represent the story of the True Cross, and were commissioned for the chancel area of the friary church of San Francesco. The decorations had been started by a popular, but rather workmanlike, painter Bicci di Lorenzo, in the late 1440s; it was probably after Bicci died in 1452 that Piero was called in. He completed the project sometime before December 20, 1466, fourteen years later. Aside from the documents confirming these two dates, we know little about the commission.' The frescoes were seldom mentioned during the following three and a half centuries, and when they were rediscovered as objects of artistic merit in the early nineteenth century, they presented the historian with a number of problems.2 By the 1960s the most intriguing of these questions had become that of the narrative order, that is, the physical arrangement of the individual episodes that make up the story as a whole. The cycle appears on the three tall vertical walls of the chancel, or apse area of the church. While these walls are divided into fields in a traditional manner-a number of tiers (a lunette and two rectangles on each wall) stacked one above the other-the reading order of the episodes in these fields does not follow what we might call normal expectations. The chronological sequence does not move from left to right and from the top down, in the manner of a printed book (fig. 2). Rather, the story starts on the top tier to the right and reads backwards, right to left (Story of Adam, fig. 4); it reverses direction on the next tier down (Story of Queen of Sheba, fig. 5); it then moves to another wall and descends diagonally right to left; it returns to the first wall, jumps back to the second, moves to the middle tier on the third, proceeds to the bottom, and finally jumps to the top of the left wall, ending in the lunette opposite to the one where it began. As a result, from the point of view of narrative, the cycle has often been

Art · Art history · Economics · Order (exchange) · Architecture and Art History Studies · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · Renaissance and Early Modern Studies

• Applied Narrative Analysis

  Emma Roe, Emery M Roe•New Literary History•1992

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