A celebration of Piero della Francesca
A celebration of Piero: in this absorbing exhibition the complicating primary questions revisit the notion of 'influence' and the accompanying issues of tradition and continuity. The Angelic Space 'concentrates on the residual aspects of Piero 's influence on contemporary art practice'.1
Our own century's response to the reticent art of the painter and theorist Piero della Francesca has authenticated it as a source of "influence", a term naked enough now in its secular ascriptions of power, but thought of long after Piero's lifetime as the affective emanation of ethereal fluid, insensibly yet ascendantly active in its spiritual, esoteric and mundane etymologies. Influence, then, flowed from the heavens to affect human destiny. Although remote in time and place, this celebration of Piero half a millenium after his death inevitably involves problematic questions about influence.
The exhibition catalogue presents Harriet Edquist's reflections, grounded in the sacred geometry of architecture and perspective, on three Piero paintings (the Annunciation panel from the Polyptych of St Anthony, the Flagellation and
the Brera Altarpiece). in which she points to Piero 's creation of an "angelic space, a space which is pure and possible but a space that also contains mysteries; a space of representation which denies the possibility of true representation; the space of mediation, the mystical space of the via negativa and negative theology."2
Edquist's eo-curator, Juliana Engberg, follows this essay with a discussion of the works in the exhibition-twenty-one works by twenty contemporary and established artists working in Australia. The generally well-produced catalogue includes nineteen colour plates and five black and white illustrations.
The works assembled, writes Engberg, "resonate together and separately within the parameters" established in Piero 's work. The chosen