Kenneth Clark called it «the greatest small painting in the world»: sixty-seven by ninety-one centimetres, tempera on panel, and for more than a century no art historian has managed to agree on who the three men are who, in the foreground, turn their backs on the flagellated Christ.
One practical thing before starting: both the Flagellation and the Ideal City are in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of the Marche, with no loan and no restoration under way to know about before you go.
This article is not a visiting guide: that is in Ducal Palace of Urbino and the National Gallery of the Marche, which covers hours, tickets and the rest of the piano nobile’s rooms. Here only the two works remain: what they actually show, what debate they have set off among scholars, and why, a century on, no one has yet closed it.
The scene splits in two, and the split is the first enigma
The Flagellation hangs in the Sala delle Udienze together with the Madonna of Senigallia, also by Piero della Francesca, and at first glance it looks like two paintings held together by force. On the left, under a classicising loggia with a coffered ceiling, Christ is tied to the column and flogged: a man seated on a throne, in eastern dress, watches the scene, and much of the criticism, starting with Kenneth Clark, identifies him with the Byzantine emperor John VIII Palaiologos. On the right, in the foreground, three richly dressed men converse on a square paved in marble, without looking at what is happening behind them.
The two scenes share the same panel but not the same space: a perspective construction calculated with rigour, following the principles Leon Battista Alberti had just theorised, keeps them deliberately apart. The vanishing point falls inside the loggia of the flagellation, not among the three men, and it is a detail scholars keep returning to, trying to work out where Piero wanted to send the viewer’s eye.
The only documentary certainty is the signature on the step of the throne, «OPVS PETRI DE BURGO S[AN]C[T]I SEPVLCRI». The gallery today dates the work to 1459-1460, but that has not always been the case: the dating is itself the product of the debate that follows.
Even the chequered floor of the square in the foreground is part of the calculation: the marble lozenges shrink toward the back exactly as much as needed to carry the eye from the square to the loggia, without the three men in between interrupting that visual path. It is a construction straight out of a treatise on perspective, applied to a Gospel episode, and for most of the twentieth century it was precisely this technical quality, more than the subject, that kept the painting at the centre of scholarship. For centuries, before twentieth-century criticism brought it back to the centre of attention, the small panel had remained a local curiosity of Urbino Cathedral, cited in church inventories but almost absent from the art history that counted.
Three centuries of dynastic readings, before criticism changed its tune
So who are the three men who turn their backs on Christ? The oldest reading comes from two eighteenth-century documents kept in Urbino: the report of Archbishop Marelli’s pastoral visit, between 1725 and 1731, and a 1744 inventory by father Ubaldo Tosi, taken up again in 1775 by Michelangelo Dolci. All three recognise in the three men the ducal family: Oddantonio da Montefeltro at the centre, murdered at just seventeen in a conspiracy on 22 July 1444, flanked by his half-brother Federico and by his son Guidobaldo. That is the dynastic reading, and it is the one that accompanied the painting in local guides for centuries.
In the twentieth century Roberto Longhi, in the 1927 monograph that restored Piero della Francesca to major critical attention, took up and endorsed this reading, placing the painting around 1445, right after the conspiracy. More recently the German historian Bernd Roeck, of the University of Zurich, has proposed a less commemorative variant: the painting would be a coded denunciation, commissioned by a patron who accused Federico da Montefeltro himself of having ordered his half-brother’s assassination to seize the dukedom. Same family, same three names, but the Flagellation stops being a monument and becomes an accusation.
Kenneth Clark and the crusade that never set out
In 1951 Clark set the dynastic reading aside and looked east. For him the three men reflect on the sufferings of the Church evoked by Christ’s flagellation, at a precise moment: the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453. He dated the painting to 1459, the year Pope Pius II summoned the Christian princes to Mantua to organise a crusade against the Turks, or to 1461, when Thomas Palaiologos brought the relic of Saint Andrew to Rome.
Clark also added a technical observation no one had made before him: the entire composition is built on a module of 4.699 centimetres, repeated with a precision that turns the Flagellation into a small treatise on applied geometry before it is even a story. That is why, even today, Clark keeps being cited even by those who do not share his identification of the three men.
Carlo Ginzburg names the two men at the sides
In 1981, with The Enigma of Piero, the historian Carlo Ginzburg proposed the most discussed identification of recent decades. The man on the left would be Cardinal Bessarion, the learned Byzantine who had worked at the Council of Ferrara and Florence in 1438-1439 for the union of the Churches and the salvation of Byzantium; the man on the right would be the Arezzo humanist Giovanni Bacci, who according to Ginzburg commissioned the painting in 1459 on behalf of Bessarion, addressing it to Federico da Montefeltro to ask for political and military intervention against the Turks.
To support this reading Ginzburg moved Longhi’s proposed dating forward by about fifteen years, from the 1440s to the late 1450s: that is how you arrive at the 1459-1460 bracket the gallery uses today. A philological hypothesis, built on a document of commission, ended up fixing the date under which the painting is catalogued.
Ginzburg’s book does not stop at the identification: it reconstructs an entire diplomatic scenario, with Bessarion sending the painting to Federico da Montefeltro through Bacci to press for his military and political intervention against the Ottoman advance, at a moment when the Urbino condottiere was in fact weighing whose side to offer his sword to. It is a reading that ties the Flagellation not to a family bereavement but to the grand international politics of its time, and precisely because of that ambition it remains the most debated of all.
Marilyn Aronberg Lavin sees two fathers, not two ambassadors
The American art historian Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, in a 1972 monograph devoted solely to this painting, proposes a more intimate reading. For her the man on the right is Ludovico III Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, and the one on the left is Ottaviano Ubaldini della Carda, court astrologer in Urbino, recognisable by the forked beard typical of his profession. Both, around the time the painting was made, had recently lost a son: the fair-haired young man standing between them, according to Lavin, is not discussing politics but embodies that shared grief, set against the suffering of Christ at the column.
Three readings, three different pairs of names, none of which has convinced every other scholar. Facing this painting, after a century of answers, the question left standing is no longer «who are they», but why a painting this small keeps generating new ones.
At least ten hypotheses, and the count is not closed
Clark, Ginzburg and Lavin are the three most-cited readings, but not the only ones. The art historian Eugenio Battisti, in 1971, read the three men as Byzantine and Western princes set against each other, not ruling out Francesco Sforza or Filippo Maria Visconti among them. Mario Salmi, in 1979, proposed an entirely theological route: the young man at the centre would be no historical figure at all, but an allegory, the «universal just man» or even the Paraclete. In 2006 the Byzantinist Silvia Ronchey extended Ginzburg’s Bessarion-based identification to all eight figures in the painting, background included, reading the whole scene as an organic political message tied to the Council of Ferrara and Florence. The British historians Charles Hope and Paul Taylor proposed instead a precise Gospel episode, not a contemporary reference: the three would be discussing the release of Barabbas.
Lined up, the hypotheses come to more than a dozen, and almost all share the same mechanism: the flagellation scene, relegated to the background, becomes the pictorial pretext on which the real conversation of the three foreground men is grafted, whatever it may be. It is the clearest sign of how open Piero’s construction remains to different readings, and at the same time the reason a single paragraph, in an article devoted to the palace that houses it, would not have done it justice.
The empty square is a theorem of perspective, not a place
What does this empty square actually show? Leaving the Sala delle Udienze, the Ideal City does not resemble any other work in the gallery. It is a wide, low panel, sixty-seven centimetres by almost two metres forty, tempera on panel, datable between 1470 and 1490: a square paved in white and green marble, flanked by identical palaces and by two octagonal wells, dominated at the centre by a circular building with Corinthian columns and a conical dome. No human figure inhabits it. It is the image of a perfect city and, therefore, of a city that does not exist, built with the same perspective rules that, in Urbino, in those years, were being taught and applied on the building sites of the Ducal Palace.
The theme did not come from nowhere: in the same decades Leon Battista Alberti was writing De re aedificatoria and Antonio Averlino, known as Filarete, imagined in his treatise a city of entirely new design, Sforzinda. The Urbino panel sits halfway between these two worlds, that of written theory and that of built design: it does not describe a real city, nor does it propose an executable urban plan, but it puts into images the idea that a city, to be perfect, must first be conceived in perspective.
The paving itself tells something: the serpentine bands of white and green marble, laid out in a chequerboard, echo a Florentine Romanesque motif more than a Marche one, a detail scholars have used to debate where the designer really came from. The vanishing point falls exactly inside the central door of the circular building, and every line of the floor and of the cornices converges there with a precision that makes the square look more like an illustrated geometric theorem than a place meant to be inhabited.
The panel comes from the convent of Santa Chiara in Urbino: it may have been brought there by Elisabetta da Montefeltro, the duke’s daughter, when she entered as a widow in 1482. On what purpose it was painted for, criticism has no definitive answer yet: a backdrop for a courtly performance, a model for a wood inlay, a theoretical exercise in perspective meant to hang in a room. The three hypotheses coexist, and none has ruled out the other two.
Five centuries of attributions, and still none has won
Who really painted the Ideal City? The first documented mention comes more than a century after it was made: a 1599 ducal inventory describes «a long painting of an ancient but beautiful perspective by the hand of Fra Carnevale». It is a posthumous attribution, written more than a hundred years after the death of the Urbino friar-painter in 1484, and modern criticism has never treated it as definitive: the National Gallery of the Marche today displays the work with the caption «Luciano Laurana (attr.)», the Dalmatian architect who designed the courtyard of honour and the staircase of the Ducal Palace.
Fra Carnevale is not a name invented for the occasion: he is a documented Urbino painter, author of two other panels with highly developed perspective architecture, today divided between the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and known as the «Barberini panels», after the Roman collection that kept them for centuries. That is why the 1599 inventory is not without sense, even though it remains a late and isolated document: whoever wrote it had before them a local painter already associated, in court memory, with this kind of composition.
Over the last century Laurana’s name has shared the space with almost every protagonist of Federico da Montefeltro’s court: Piero della Francesca, who in Urbino applied the same perspective rules; Francesco di Giorgio Martini, a military architect and theorist as well as a painter; Donato Bramante, active in those same decades between the Marche and Lombardy; and more recently Leon Battista Alberti, who, if the attribution held, would remain the only surviving pictorial evidence of a theorist who never signed a painting. None of these proposals has gathered lasting consensus, and in the gallery the label still carries the «attr.» in brackets next to the name.
Two twin panels, in Baltimore and Berlin
The Urbino panel is not alone. Two other views of an ideal city, of similar size and with the same rigorous perspective construction, are held at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin. The three works share a method more than an author: they follow the principle of copia et varietas theorised by Leon Battista Alberti, the same theme treated with different variations. The Baltimore panel restores an ideally reconstructed Roman forum, with recognisable ancient buildings; the Berlin one in turn evokes places of ancient and modern Rome; the Urbino one, alone, cites no real building and is the most abstract of the three.
No document links them explicitly, but criticism has read them for decades as a group: three different answers to the same theoretical problem, born from the same cultural climate, perhaps from the same workshop, without anyone ever managing to establish with certainty which of the three came first.
Seeing them side by side, even just in photographs, helps explain why the attribution of the Urbino panel remains a group problem and not only an individual one. If the three ideal cities are the work of different hands but of a single cultural programme, looking for a single author for the Urbino one may mean asking the wrong question: the patron, more than the painter, could be the real protagonist of this story, and on the patron’s name criticism has written even less than on the painter’s.
Practical information
For hours, tickets and how to reach the Sala delle Udienze, the full guide is in Ducal Palace of Urbino and the National Gallery of the Marche: we do not repeat them here.
Two things do need saying, though, and they concern precisely these two works, checked in September 2026. The first: both the Flagellation and the Ideal City are in the permanent collection in the Sala delle Udienze, together with the Madonna of Senigallia; no loan and no restoration under way keeps them away from the public.
The second concerns a recent episode. Between 20 and 24 July 2026 the Flagellation was the subject of a campaign of non-invasive diagnostic investigations, the kind of examination (reflectography, multispectral analysis) that on 15th-century paintings serves to read the underdrawing beneath the painted surface, without touching a single layer of colour. The campaign took place in preparation for an exhibition at the National Gallery in London planned between October 2027 and January 2028. The work was not removed from the room during the investigation: anyone looking for it in Urbino today will find it still where it has always been seen, and the results of the diagnostic campaign will most likely arrive together with the London exhibition.
Anyone organising the whole day in Urbino, between the Ducal Palace, the Studiolo and Raphael’s house, finds the full itinerary in What to See in Urbino in One Day.
Photo credits: photographic reproductions of public-domain paintings (the Flagellation and its details by Piero della Francesca, the Ideal City of disputed attribution), from Wikimedia Commons.
