37km (23 miles) NE of Arezzo; 15km (9 miles) N of Città di Castello; 122km (76 miles) E of Florence; 240km (149 miles) N of Rome
The medieval walled town of Sansepolcro is far off the tourist path for anyone not enamored of the art of Piero della Francesca. It's the birthplace of painters Raffaellino del Colle (1490-1566) and Santi di Tito (1538-1603), and of the Buitoni pasta empire. The small village founded here around A.D. 1000 was so proud of the bits of the Holy Sepulcher a couple of pilgrims brought back that the town was named Borgo San Sepolcro. Chances are, if they'd held off on the christening a few hundred years, the place would now be called Borgo Piero della Francesca, after the monumentally important painter who was born here around 1420.
One of the leading lights of the early Renaissance, Piero took the perspective obsession of Florentine masters Masaccio and Paolo Uccello and mixed it with the ethereal posed beauty of the Umbrian school to create a haunting style all his own. Piero's figures are at once hyper-posed masses of precision Euclidean geometry and vehicles for a profound expressive naturalism and astute psychological studies. His backgrounds, even those of the countryside, are masterpieces of architectural volume. His painting has so fascinated the modern world that the connect-the-dots loop of cities preserving his works has become known as the Piero della Francesca Trail, a pilgrimage route of sorts for art lovers. When Piero's eyesight began to fail later in life, he wrote two treatises, On the Five Regular Bodies and On Perspective in Painting, which together set the rules for his universe of perspective and logic, broke down the human body into a geometric machine of perfect proportions, and became required reading for almost every Renaissance artist. He died near his hometown in 1492.
Piero is somewhere between a cultural hero and a patron saint here. Every Sansepolcran seems to be a Piero expert. A tourist-office employee argues stridently that Piero's is the first pregnant Madonna. The Fiorentino owner can give a ready discourse on the man and his art. And there's a tired office worker who climbs the steps to the glass window of the museum's Piero room every evening -- he just pauses and peers through the glass at the Piero della Francesca masterpieces inside for a few moments before walking back down the stairs and heading home.
