Piero della Francesca, Resurrection

Piero della Francesca, Resurrection by julianna.lees
Thought it would be fun to juxtapose a portion of John Berger's essay "The Calculations of Piero" (1959) with Piero's painting Resurrection (a focal point of the essay).
Excerpt from Berger's "Calculations":
     Look, for instance, at the overall composition of this work. Its centre, though not of course its true centre, is Christ's hand, holding his robe as he rises up. The hand furrows the material with emphatic force. This is no casual gesture. It appears to be central to Christ's whole upward movement out of the tomb. The hand, resting on the knee, also rests on the brow of the first line of hills behind, and the folds of the robe flow down like streams. Downwards. Look now at the soldiers so mundanely, so convincingly asleep. Only the one on the extreme right appears somewhat awkward. His legs, his arm between them, his curved back are understandable. Yet how can he rest like that just on one arm? This apparent awkwardness gives a clue. He looks as though he were lying in an invisible hammock. Strung from where? Suddenly go back to the hand, and now see that all four soldiers lie in an invisible net, trawled by that hand. The emphatic grip makes perfect sense. The four heavy sleeping soldiers are the catch the resurrecting Christ has brought with him from the underworld, from Death. As I said, Piero went far beyond the pure harmonies of design.
     There is in all his work an aim behind his calculations. This aim could be summed up in the same way as Henri Poincare once described the aim of mathematics:
Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things. . . . When language has been well chosen one is astonished to find that all demonstrations  made for a known object apply immediately to many new objects. 

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