Description
During the course of the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, black vessels (commonly called black-glaze vessels) were made with increasing frequency in both Greece and South Italy. Many of them replicate the shape of metal vessels. Others have detailing that is molded or incised. While the quality of these vessels varies greatly, all would have been less expensive than vessels decorated in other contemporary techniques, for example, in red-figure.
Provenance
Augusto Mele, Naples, Italy; sold to the Art Institute of Chicago through J.C. Fletcher as agent, 1889; price reimbursed by Charles Hutchinson and Philip D. Armour, 1889.
Accession Number
161
Medium
terracotta, black-glaze with impressed decoration
Dimensions
9.2 × 22.5 × 16.2 cm (3 5/8 × 8 7/8 × 6 3/8 in.)
Classification
drinking vessel
Credit Line
Gift of Philip D. Armour and Charles L. Hutchinson
Background & Context
Background Story
The Resurrection, painted around 1463, is Piero della Francesca's most celebrated work. Christ, massive and stern, rises from a marble sarcophagus at the center. Below him, four Roman soldiers sleep in various postures. The landscape behind Christ is divided: to his left, bare winter trees; to his right, leafy summer vegetation - a visual metaphor for the transformation that resurrection embodies.
The painting was created for the Palazzo della Residenza in Piero's hometown of Sansepolcro. Sansepolcro takes its name from relics of the Holy Sepulchre, and the painting served as both a devotional image and a statement of the town's sacred identity.
Piero della Francesca was rediscovered in the 20th century after centuries of neglect. His geometric clarity, his stillness, and his refusal of dramatic gesture appealed to modern sensibilities shaped by Cubism and abstraction. The Resurrection, with its massive Christ who seems less a man than a force of nature, anticipates the monumental figures of modern sculptors from Maillol to Moore.
Cultural Impact
Piero della Francesca's Resurrection influenced the 20th-century rediscovery of Early Renaissance painting as a precursor of modern abstraction. His geometric compositions and still figures appealed to artists from Seurat to Balthus, who recognized in his work a rigor that modernism recovered.
Why It Matters
This painting is the most concentrated image of resurrection in Western art: Christ rises not in triumph but in implacable authority. The sleeping soldiers, oblivious to the miracle above them, remind us that most of humanity sleeps through the events that matter most.
