Piero della Francesca painted this baptism for the altar of a church in his native Borgo San Sepolcro. The town’s name – holy sepulchre – came from a legend that two pilgrims to Jerusalem had returned there in the 9th century with a stone from the tomb of Jesus. It is located on the eastern side of the broad valley of the upper Tiber. The Tiber passes quite near the town flowing south east towards the Holy City of Rome. But directly to the east of the city walls the waters of the river Afra flow down from the nearby mountains and join the river Tiber just south of the town. If the founding legend of the town casts the Borgo with its relic as Jerusalem then the Afra would be like the river Jordan which flows to the east of the Jerusalem. Jesus was baptised in the river Jordan but in his painting Piero relocates the baptism to the area around San Sepolcro,. I am convinced that the shallow river in the painting is intended to be recognisable as the river Afra. The church whose parishioners commissioned this painting bore the dedication “San Giovanni Battista in Val d’Afra”. The name of the river was included in the dedication of the church because it was located near a cistern which was fed by the water from the Afra. This diversion of water explains the shallow water. In the days of Piero only certain churches were allowed to have a baptism font. In San Sepolcro the font of baptism was located in the church which is now the Duomo and it is very likely that its supply of water came from the cistern fed by the Afra. This means that what Piero actually did was to paint Christ being baptised in the same waters in which he himself and indeed all the people in the Borgo were baptised. The walls of San Sepolcro are visible in the painting as is the straight road leading to it from across the broad valley of the Upper Tiber. This detail locates the baptism somewhere near where the Afra still flows. It is true that the mountains which rise behind Borgo San Sepolcro are much higher than the hills shown in the painting, but I have walked along the present day course of the Afra and as you get closer to the Borgo, they look smaller and eventually disappear behind the nearest hills. It is hard to verify this last claim, because today the land on either side of the river is farmed and high embankments have been made on either side of the Afra on which trees are growing, so it is difficult to see. However, the tree shown in the painting is a walnut tree which was grown commercially in the area and walnut trees still grow in the hedgerows near the river. The pale stones on the riverbed in the painting are still there today too. By relocating the baptism of Christ to the outskirts of his native city, Piero confirms the belief that the relic of the holy tomb was held within the walls of the Borgo. However, the quality of the painting is such that it speaks not only of the baptism of Christ and of the unique holiness of the Borgo, but of the sacrament of baptism itself. We splash water on the head of a baby in the name of the father, Son and Holy Spirit but in this God acts in silence, as it were, as Father Son and Holy Spirit make their home in the newly baptised, giving the child new life and conforming the child’s whole life to the death and resurrection of christ. It is this elusive silence which Piero captures wonderfully in this painting. It is there in the stillness. The only movement in the picture is the water being poured unto Christ’s head by John the Baptist. You can almost hear it in the stillness of the summer’s day. The Holy Spirit descends like a dove, foreshortened, but is totally still. A young man is either stripping off his clothes or putting them on. He might be undressing for baptism, but his skin is as luminous as the body of Christ and the bark of the tree, so perhaps he has been baptised already. His pale skin, so similar to that of Christ, shines with the Trinity’s new life which we have come to share in our baptism. In this marvellous work, Piero would have us revisit the oh so still waters of our own baptism, which though silent and still flow and live in us all the days of our life.
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