Christopher Booker

The mathematical revolution behind ‘the greatest picture in the world’

Piero della Francesca, maths and masterpieces

Della Francesca’s ‘Resurrection’ [Getty Images/Shutterstock/iStock/Alamy] 
issue 19 April 2014

It seems odd to enter a room dominated by what Aldous Huxley famously called ‘the greatest picture in the world’ to find not another soul there. Looking down from an end wall of the mediaeval civic hall in the quiet little Tuscan town of Borgo San Sepolcro, Piero della Francesca’s ‘Resurrection’ is an image of astonishing power, showing a stern-faced risen Christ stepping out of his tomb in the dawn light of the first Easter morning like an unstoppable force of nature, exuding supernatural authority as he turns the leaves on the trees behind him from wintry death to the new life of spring. This is a painting like no other in the history of art. But we can only still see it today thanks to the essay to which it inspired Huxley in 1925, ‘The Best Picture’.

When in 1964 H.V. Morton published A Traveller in Italy, he recalled a few years earlier meeting in Cape Town a second-hand bookseller, Anthony Clarke, who told him the remarkable story of how Huxley’s essay had prompted him to save this fresco from destruction.

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