User:Comme-un-non-su/longhi111

Longhi believed that Piero and his assistants worked on 2|both walls from a single scaffolding, proceeding downwards, register by register, from the level of the lunettes, with Piero leaving a larger share of autograph work on the right wall while supervising his helpers across the scaffolding. As will be readily apparent, Longhi’s chronology recognizes a stylistic shift over the course of the cycle: from a certain residue of typically Florentine linear elements in the lunettes to a more perfect fusion of three-dimensional form and broad areas of surface color in the lower registers. Longhi’s dating—although not his reconstruction of the manner in which the work was performed, which seems absolutely coherent with the visual evidence—encounters a certain potential difficulty over Piero’s fresco of Saint Luke in Rome, where Piero is not reliably documented before 1459; for Longhi himself regarded the Roman work as stylistically coherent with the middle years (around 1455) of Piero’s task at Arezzo.

Kenneth Clark (in Piero della Francesca, London, 1951) offered an alternative, “separate scaffolds” chronology, according to which Piero would have worked his way first down one wall and then down the other, with the Rome trip marking the hiatus between the 2|two phases. Work would thus have continued well after 1459.

A solution combining features of the 2|two mentioned above was proposed by Creighton Gilbert in 1968 in his Change in Piero della Francesca. Gilbert believes that Piero began work on 2|both walls simultaneously, but that the stylistic differences between the top and middle registers—including a shift in the direction of a greater architectonic monumentality—reflect the impact of the artist’s Roman sojourn and of his contacts with Humanist circles there. According to Gilbert, even if work had begun in the early 1450s, a good part of it must thus have been executed in the first half of the 1460s, but still prior to 1466, when a document refers to the frescoes as already complete.