The Resurrection is a fresco painting by the Italian Renaissance master Piero della Francesca. The image was painted in the 1460s in the Palazzo della Residenza in the town of Sansepolcro, Tuscany, Italy.
The peculiarity of this painting is that Christ has been depicted as both man and God. Jesus has been painted with an unidealized face yet his body has been painted as if it was a sculpture, without blemishes.
Unlike other paintings by Piero (The Flagellation for example), The Resurrection is less interesting iconological than it is formally; that is, art historians are less concerned about what it might mean than what it looks like.
The Resurrection is often depicted by having Christ emerge from a cave from which a boulder has been “rolled away,” Piero instead chose to show Jesus stepping out of a Roman sarcophagus. In the foreground of the painting, the Roman soldiers ordered to guard the tomb have all fallen asleep. The position of their bodies is quite interesting. The reclining soldier certainly could never actually maintain that pose while sleeping in real life, and his comrade next to him, holding the lance, doesn’t even have legs. These two details show that Piero was more concerned about achieving a pleasing composition than being true to life.