Cappella Bacci - Affreschi di Piero della Francesca

In the main chapel of Arezzo's Franciscan basilica, Piero della Francesca spent fourteen years painting the story of the wood of the Cross. The Bacci Chapel preserves a cycle its custodians rank among the most famous of the Renaissance.

Why it matters

Between 1452 and 1466 the Bacci family's burial chapel took on its wall paintings, as Piero della Francesca transferred the Legend of the True Cross — narrated in Jacopo da Varagine's thirteenth-century Golden Legend — onto its walls. The story runs from the death of Adam and the seed of the fatal tree to the recovery of the Cross at Jerusalem, arranged in three registers along the side and back walls.

What made the cycle canonical was not the subject, which other painters had treated, but the way Piero staged it. His scenes are composed in measured perspective blocks, lit by controlled and unexplained light, and populated by figures who stand in still, sculptural groups. The Dream of Constantine, with its dark tent and single source of illumination, is recognised as one of the earliest night scenes in Italian painting. The official circuit describes the cycle as one of the most famous Renaissance fresco sequences in the world, and the room holds up to the claim.

What to notice

• The non-linear order. The episodes do not follow the story chronologically; the official page notes that they are linked by formal and symbolic correspondences rather than sequence. Look for rhymes of colour and gesture across opposite walls.
• The architecture Piero invented around his figures: classical buildings and vaults rendered in strict perspective that convert a small Gothic chapel into a series of measured open-air spaces.
• The Dream of Constantine: the night scene already mentioned, with its angel, its sleeping emperor and the pre-dawn light that changed what European painting could do.
• The burial-chapel function: this was the tomb chapel of the Bacci, a wealthy merchant family, and the scale of the commission was a statement of civic standing.
• The 13th-century painted Crucifix that hangs in front of the chapel above the main altar, attributed to the Maestro di San Francesco and dated to the late 1200s, with Saint Francis shown kneeling in adoration — the object that framed the space decades before Piero arrived.
• The condition and calm: later additions and losses exist, but the overall reading is Piero's geometry intact, unpainted by the drama that affects other cycles.

Context and history

The commission had a false start. Bicci di Lorenzo, a respected late-Gothic painter, began work in 1447 and died leaving the job barely under way. Piero della Francesca — born in nearby Sansepolcro, already a mature master of perspective and of painting on wet plaster — took over in 1452 and worked on and off until 1466. The gap between Bicci's inherited scenes and Piero's own registers remains visible to attentive eyes, and forms part of the cycle's documentary interest: you can watch a Gothic workshop give way to the Renaissance inside one room.

The subject was chosen for the Franciscans. The True Cross legend centres on the wood of the Cross and the relic's devotion, themes close to the order that built the basilica; the Bacci paid, and the chapel served the family's memorial mass. After centuries of relative neglect, the cycle became a foundation of art-historical teaching on perspective.