Piero della Francesca at the Frick in NY

Unlike the recent Caravaggio exhibit in Los Angeles, where eight Caravaggios were set among several dozen canvases by his successors and followers, the works of Piero della Francesca now occupying the Frick Museum's Oval Room hang solo, with no other works for context or reference. But that's all right: Although Piero could be very usefully set beside his contemporaries, he's always occupied a realm of his own.

In Piero's time (1416-1492), perspective was being introduced into Western art for the first time, a gradual process but one that struck its first practitioners as deeply empowering. As the French poet and critic Yves Bonnefoy says, in Piero and a few others "the traditional opacity of symbolic representation, in which colors have fixed meanings, seemed to mingle with the light of day…. the sun came in from everywhere, casting faint shadows, the light was born from the very color of things which recreated earth, drenched in life, as it was on the first morning."

Bonnefoy is alluding to the sense of new vision offered by the subtle shifts in spatial relationships opened up by perspective, a discovery that seemed like a rebirth— in short, a "renaissance." Piero in particular conveys that sense of floating in a newly vivified space that is such a striking feature of 15th-Century Italian art. The effect is, paradoxically, both to plant the figure more firmly in the things of this world and yet to abstract it from them.

The hummingbird's stillness

You might say that a Piero figure is spinning so rapidly that, like a hummingbird, it appears the image of perfect stillness. This dynamism in repose is what makes us linger in front of his canvases, always wondering a bit just where we are and what that slight but decisive thing is that we're missing.

The Frick itself owns four of the seven Pieros on display, all from the great altarpiece of the Augustinian church in Piero's hometown of Borgo San Sepulcro in north central Italy. Piero worked on the sacred scenes and portraits of the altarpiece between 1454 and 1469, but it was disassembled in 1555. The current exhibit, with loans from the National Gallery of Art in Washington and Lisbon's Museu Nacional de Arte Antigua, reunites more of what survives than at any time since the 18th Century.

The last work in the show is a Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Angels from the Clark Institute in Williamstown, Mass., the chef d'oeuvre of a separate altarpiece.

Two sides of the Church

All told, five of the seven works on display are saintly portraits: the Frick's St. John the Evangelist, St. Monica and St. Leonardo; the National Gallery's St. Apollonia; and Lisbon's splendiferous Augustine, surely one of the most imposing full-length portraits in the Western canon. The Frick portraits are all small, with the figures depicted against gold leaf, and its Crucifixion, placed among them on a single wall, is modest in scale though hardly in ambition.

The portrait of the Evangelist, like that of Augustine, is a large work, and seeing the figures side by side is (as Piero obviously intended) a witness of the two poles in the life of the church: the pilgrim St. John in his customary rude vestments, and Augustine in his bishop's hat and a brocaded gown adorned with Biblical scenes, with a mitre of transparent crystal in his hand to symbolize both the holy simplicity of the church's mission and of the Word itself.

"'Uncle' Augustine

Augustine is dark-complected and stern-visaged, with a flowing white beard: not quite God the Father, but a temporal uncle who obviously represents divine authority below. Both John and Augustine are painted against similar backgrounds— a low white wall and blue sky, with richly marbled flooring— signifying the incorporation of both figures in the house of the church. The smaller St. Monica, solemn-faced and black-clad in a nun's habit and bearing a scroll representing the rules of the Augustinian order, indicates the religious life itself.

The 15th-Century Catholic church, like the present one, was an embattled institution, but, looking at Piero's imposing figures, one is certainly cautioned not to underestimate the power of the story and the weight of tradition that it embodies.

The heart of the Christian saga is, of course, the life of Christ, and the other two pictures on display— the Clark's Virgin and Child Enthroned and the Frick's own Crucifixion— show Christ at both extremes of his journey, as a child supported by his mother and as the figure on the cross. These are markers only for the beholder, for the Child is fully deific and the Man of Sorrows no less the ruler of the world in his agony.

Infant as sage

What one observes in a Crucifixion scene is an image of eternity superimposed upon one of temporality— the stricken Virgin being comforted by disciples; the Roman soldiers in their cynical indifference or their apprehension of awe. In Piero's version, the figure of Christ is distended, giving the impression that it simultaneously presides over the scene and is already withdrawn from it— a tome of theology condensed into strokes of paint.

The Clark Institute's Virgin and Child shows its subjects in a porticoed interior, flanked by four angels. The Virgin, her eyes cast down, holds a flower in one hand and the child in her lap. This infant Jesus is no baby, but a sage, coequal presence, as he often was portrayed in late medieval or early Renaissance art.

The angels, all long-robed but barefoot, have discreet, butterfly-like wings, and look as much like the page boys of a ducal court as seraphic beings. Each is quite individuated, and although two seem to be moving toward Jesus, the other two occupy an abstracted space of their own, and one looks halfway out at us, his features tensed with personality. We are on the cusp of the moment in the Renaissance when it is no longer sufficient to create types, but where persons appear.

Suspended moment

Piero's enduring fascination for us is the way he embodies this transition; but the mystery of his art is how his figures achieve what one must call, paradoxically or not, the dynamic timelessness that they inhabit. Every painter is of course of his moment. But in Piero the moment is curiously suspended, almost levitated.

De Chirico would go back to Piero four and a half centuries later, with his empty plazas and his clocks that refuse to strike. But De Chirico's canvases betoken silence, whereas Piero's speak of plenitude. It's the distance between his day and ours.