Essay Review: Piero's Flagellation of Christ Elucidated?

PIERO'S FLAGELLATION OF CHRIST ELUCIDATED? Astrolabes and Angels, Epigrams and Enigmas: From Regiomontanus' Acrostic for Cardinal Bessarion to Piero della Francesca' s Flagellation of Christ. David King (Boethius: Texte und Abhandlungen zur Geschichte der Mathematik und der Naturwissenschaften, Ivi; Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart, 2007). Pp. xii + 348 + CD-ROM. euro78. ISBN 978-3-515-09061-2.Readers of this journal will recognize with respect the name of David King, who has earned an international reputation in the history of Islamic astronomy. King is arguably the leading historian of the astrolabe, for he probably has seen, catalogued, and studied more astrolabes than anyone else, and not only those of Islamic civilization. In the main part of this book King returns to an instrument about which he and Gerard Turner published a fundamental article. It is the famous astrolabe that Johannes Regiomontanus (1436-76) in 1462 gave to his patron, the Greek emigre Cardinal Bessarion (1408-72), a leading intellectual and astronomical enthusiast.1 King's primary focus now is Regiomontanus's four-line dedication to Bessarion, which he believes to be an acrostic that not only identifies the figures in the Flagellation of Christ by Piero della Francesca (d. 1492), but also explains the structure of this famous, mysterious and controversial painting.King's title aptly warns us not to expect standard fare; indeed, the book is unusual from beginning to end. Substituting for the author's name on the title page is the phrase "An essay by David A. King inspired by two remarkable discoveries by Berthold Holzschuh". Curious already. As a member of King's 2005 Frankfurt seminar, Holzschuh first proposed the key ideas that King takes up. We soon learn that he disagrees with many of King's extensions of his own hypotheses in the present book.2 In "Notes to the Reader", King acknowledges the layout problems and missing footnotes that resulted from his rushing the book into print. Next, he summarizes the book, the significance of which he links with the extravagant claim (repeated) that his is "the first hypothesis [about Piero 's "Flagellation of Christ"] to be based on a contemporaneous document" (p. viii). By this, he means the four-line dedication on Regiomontanus's astrolabe. The table of contents includes one prelude and one conclusion, two tributes to Holzschuh, and three interludes interspersed among four parts. Nine appendices (almost half the book) discuss various aspects of the history of the astrolabe, including valuable - and controversial - material on the sole surviving astrolabe with a Greek inscription (1062) and on several dozen fifteenthcentury astrolabes that King convincingly links to a Viennese workshop. After useful bibliographical and biographical material, King's acknowledgments broach candidly the scepticism with which his critics, many of them sympathetic, from the members of his 2005 seminar outward, have greeted his claims. Finally, after the index, a CD-ROM inside the back cover contains King's claims in the form of a 238-slide show (the illustrations, both here and in the book, are generally excellent).What is King arguing? This question is not always easy to answer. He took in such an impressive amount of history and art history in a short time that the book is not fully digested. On expository grounds alone, it was published prematurely. Its pages offer a profusion of details and correlations - geometrical, numerical, alphabetical, symbolic, and biographical - that lead to sometimes competing claims. The reader is left to figure out when a specific point counts as a thesis, a suggestion, a probability, a coincidence, or a passing thought, and whether a new claim replaces, or should be added to, previous ones. Since King's "Summary" (pp. vii-viii) and "Prelude" (pp. 1-12) contain some concise declarative statements of core ideas, I will treat them as canonical, even though they are sometimes inconsistent with later ones:I maintain first that the epigram on the [1462] astrolabe provided the ideas for the composition and the basic geometrical structure for the painting, and second that each of the eight images across the painting represents at least two persons whose identities are deliberately partially concealed (p. …