The Stone of Sansepolcro: Relic, Image, and the Resurrection of Jerusalem in Tuscany

The Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem had a lasting effect on the spirituality of the medieval West, not least through the unique meanings and associations carried by its relics. This paper focuses on a stone relic thought to have been brought from Christ’s tomb by two pilgrims returning to the Tuscan town of Sansepolcro. I examine it in the context of other stones eleventh-century pilgrims allegedly brought from the Holy Sepulcher to Europe and find that it sparked a distinctive belief. While other Italian towns, such as Pisa and Bologna, built architectural copies of the Holy Sepulcher and attempted to recreate the topography of the holy city, the inhabitants of Sansepolcro held that the stone relic miraculously made the Holy Sepulcher immanent in their town and expressed this affinity in images, including Piero della Francesca’s “The Resurrection”.