In one of his famous letters, the Roman official Pliny the Younger—who surely knew his way around the empire—wrote to a friend describing the upper Tiber valley: “You will experience great pleasure when observing this region from the heights of its surrounding hills: rather than a territory, you will think, in fact, that you are gazing at a painting executed with incredible skill—such is its rich variety and felicitous arrangement [of features]—that your eyes will be satisfied wherever they dwell.” It would be another thirteen centuries before Piero della Francesca, a native of that valley, painted the picture that Pliny imagined. He was born about 1412 in Sansepolcro, a small, reasonably prosperous provincial town, often a pawn in the shifting alliances of Central Italy’s larger seigniorial city-states. Although Piero visited Florence, Ferrara, and possibly Venice—he also received a number of important commissions from the churches and courts of Arezzo, Urbino, Rimini, and even Rome—the topography of Sansepolcro and its surroundings always remained the informing locus of his art. It appears, somewhat timidly, in what may be the artist’s very first surviving work (the Madonna and Child, Alana Collection) and positively dominates his last (The Nativity, National Gallery, London).

Piero’s affection for his hometown is not surprising; his large, well-to-do family was firmly rooted there, and Sansepolcro awarded him early, important commissions (The Resurrection and the Misericordia polyptych). But despite having been occasionally described as a “provincial,” he was anything but. Like Lorenzo Lotto