The panel is much admired for its use of linear perspective and the air of stillness that pervades the work, and it has been given the epithet "the Greatest Small Painting in the World" by the art historian Kenneth Clark.

[2] The painting is signed under the seated emperor OPVS PETRI DE BVRGO S[AN]C[T]I SEPVLCRI – "the work of Piero of Borgo Santo Sepolcro" (his town).

This interpretation is backed by an 18th-century inventory in the Urbino Cathedral, where the painting once was housed, and in which the work is described as "The Flagellation of Our Lord Jesus Christ, with the Figures and the Portraits of Duke Guidubaldo and Oddo Antonio".

According to this other old-fashioned view, the figure in the middle would represent an angel, flanked by the Latin (Catholic) and the Greek (Orthodox) Churches, whose division created strife in the whole of Christendom.

The seated man on the far left watching the flagellation would be the Byzantine emperor John VIII Palaiologos, as identified by his clothing, particularly the unusual red hat with upturned brims which is present in a medal by Pisanello.

In the variant of this interpretation, proposed by Carlo Ginzburg, the painting would be in fact an invitation by Cardinal Bessarion to Federico da Montefeltro to take part in the crusade.

Silvia Ronchey and other art historians[6][full citation needed] agree on the panel being a political message by Cardinal Bessarion, in which the flagellated Christ would represent the suffering of Constantinople, then besieged by the Ottomans, as well as the whole of Christianity.

But, at the time, allegories of that event and of the presence of Byzantine figures in Italian politics were not uncommon, as shown by Benozzo Gozzoli's contemporary Magi Chapel in the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi in Florence.

In 1951, the art historian Kenneth Clark identified the bearded figure as a Greek scholar, and the painting as an allegory of the suffering of the Church after the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, and of the proposed crusade supported by Pope Pius II and discussed at the Council of Mantua.

[page needed] An interpretation developed by David King, director (1985–2007) of the Institute for the History of Science in Frankfurt, Germany, establishes a connection between the painting and the Latin inscription on an astrolabe presented in Rome in 1462 by Regiomontanus to his patron Cardinal Bessarion.

However, his image embodies, amongst others, three brilliant young men close to Bessarion who had recently died: Buonconte da Montefeltro, Bernardino Ubaldini dalla Carda and Vangelista Gonzaga.

Sir John Pope-Hennessy, the art historian, argued in his book The Piero della Francesca Trail that the actual subject of the painting is "The Dream of St.

According to Pope-Hennessy, As a young man St Jerome dreamt that he was flayed on divine order for reading pagan texts, and he himself later recounted this dream, in a celebrated letter to Eustochium, in terms that exactly correspond with the left-hand side of the Urbino panel.Pope-Hennessy also cites and reproduces an earlier picture by Sienese painter Matteo di Giovanni that deals with the subject recorded in Jerome's letter, supporting his identification of Piero's theme.

[citation needed] It has been held in especially high regard by art historians, with Frederick Hartt describing it as Piero's "most nearly perfect achievement and the ultimate realisation of the ideals of the second Renaissance period".