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reveal action at its most intense; it thus brings the process of “becoming” to an end. We see Chosroes's son falling over backwards, just a fraction of a second after his throat has been slit; and this instant will remain immobile forever. A lance sails across the sky; if we are to see it, however, we must take our aim at it with the perspective needles of other lances, following other trajectories and seemingly exploding within the white cloud at the very apex of their flight. At this same instant, yet another lance is breaking; in an example of careful forethought, its triangular, broken line coincides to the millimeter with the central axis of the entire scene.

We are, in short, at the antipodes from Antonio Pollaiuolo's famous print, the Battle of Nude Men, where everything is in frenzied motion. Piero’s scene, described by Vasari as “an almost unbelievable massacre of the wounded, the fallen, and the dead” (but actually involving, if you bother to count, no more than forty participants), has already “happened,” once and for all. To put things differently, the battle is already “over” at the moment that best represents, on Piero's stylistic terms, its dynamic culmination. It becomes a sort of colored anagram, created from the continuous intersection and conjoining of interlocking things: sky, clouds, earth; weapons, coats of arms, human figures. It is, in fact, a sort of “battle under glass,” viewed with a cruel clarity. After the clarity of simplicity manifest in the Victory of Constantine, here Piero achieves a clarity of multiplicity; but the process and its outcome remain the same. Try saying to yourself: “from top to bottom” or “from bottom to top;” “from left to right” or “from right to left.” All these expressions will turn out to have no bearing whatsoever on this polychromed structure, this brightly colored marquetry, locked in before our gaze like some freshly materialized abstraction. It takes a while to pronounce the names of the things we see: clouds; coats of arms; weapons held high against the blue backdrop of the sky; the sky itself, filling the gap in the torn banner; the complicated tangles of combat; one-on-one duels; warriors’ dark heads, standing out against the bright rumps of warhorses; white, green, or blue helmets; costumes and shields in the colors of noble houses; wounds, sporting their blood like coral trinkets .... Ah, but it's too slow a business, for no verbal repetition can duplicate the instantaneous flash of this single moment of unified multiplicity, clarified by Piero at its language-defying peak.

The above commentary applies only to the ideal, autograph version of the fresco, however; in the real one, alas, too much has been “lost in translation.” A demanding eye will be troubled by the distortions of Piero's ideas, both in this scene and in the concluding one of Heraclius Returning the Cross to Jerusalem. This same eye will, however, be better satisfied upon turning to another, supremely autograph fresco painted by Piero during the same years.

168 Roberto Longhi