“Veritas sequitur esse rei...”. Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation. Diegesis in A Memory of Italy by Wojciech Karpiński

Abstract

This article is concerned with the text A Memory of Italy by Wojciech Karpiński, in which the author refers to the painting Flagellation by Piero della Francesca. The author of the article analyzes Karpiński’s reflections on the painting in the context of the philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas. In the painting the linear structure is important (the methodology of mathematical proceedings, among others according to Plato), the situation, the degree of distance which determines the perception of things, people and the world in the literal, spatial, and also metaphorical and psychological sense. The sensual cognition of corpus mysticum Christi is the starting point of epistemology, a key moment of the theory of the cognition of God.