Carlo Ginzburg's famous monograph “The Mystery of Piero” (1981) is an intellectual bestseller and art detective story built around the historical interpretation of the frescoes of the 15th century Italian artist Piero della Francesca. The author decisively departs from the stylistic interpretation of painting and prefers to it an analysis of the socio-historical, political, everyday and other circumstances that accompanied the creation of Pierrot's masterpieces. The meaning of Pierrot's paintings turns out to be connected with the everyday life of the painter himself, his customers and their patrons. The fascinatingly written study contains several appendices, in one of which Ginzburg points out a mistake he himself made in the first edition of the work—so the text of the monograph turns into a historian’s reflection on the nature of his own craft. K. Ginzburg (b. 1939) is a famous Italian humanities scholar, one of the creators of the “microhistorical” method, the author of many books and articles devoted to the intellectual history of the Renaissance, Modern and Contemporary times.