"The Resurrection"

The use of space in this painting is particularly captivating. Piero creates a realistic space with a landscape of a Tuscan village that extends behind Christ, but the figures before the tomb are pressed right up to the surface of the picture plane, giving the illusion that Christ, whose foot rests upon the top of the tomb, is about to step out of the picture itself. This illusion makes the viewer feel she is present at this frozen moment in time, and it is heightened by Christ's direct gaze. To further place the scene in the original viewers' present space and time, Piero dresses the Roman soldiers in contemporary, 15th-century dress.

For many years this painting was largely unknown to those who had not visited Borgo San Sepolcro, but it began to receive attention in the late 19th century. The pyramidal compositions of the soldiers and the stillness of the scene inspired Georges Seurat's Bathers at Asnières (1884), and in particular Seurat posed one of the bathers to echo Piero's leftmost figure. A few decades later, writer Aldous Huxley called it "the greatest picture in the world."