Italian Early Renaissance Painter, ca.1422-1492 Italian painter and theorist. His work is the embodiment of rational, calm, monumental painting in the Italian Early Renaissance, an age in which art and science were indissolubly linked through the writings of Leon Battista Alberti. Born two generations before Leonardo da Vinci, Piero was similarly interested in the scientific application of the recently discovered rules of perspective to narrative or devotional painting, especially in fresco, of which he was an imaginative master; and although he was less universally creative than Leonardo and worked in an earlier idiom, he was equally keen to experiment with painting technique. Piero was as adept at resolving problems in Euclid, whose modern rediscovery is largely due to him, as he was at creating serene, memorable figures, whose gestures are as telling and spare as those in the frescoes of Giotto or Masaccio. His tactile, gravely convincing figures are also indebted to the sculpture of Donatello, an equally attentive observer of Classical antiquity. In his best works, such as the frescoes in the Bacci Chapel in S Francesco, Arezzo, there is an ideal balance between his serene, classical compositions and the figures that inhabit them, the whole depicted in a distinctive and economical language. In his autograph works Piero was a perfectionist, creating precise, logical and light-filled images (although analysis of their perspective schemes shows that these were always subordinated to narrative effect). However, he often delegated important passages of works (e.g. the Arezzo frescoes) to an ordinary, even incompetent, assistant.   Related Paintings of Piero della Francesca :. | | the legend of the true cross, detail | Double portrait fo Federigo da Montefeltro (mk08) | the legend of the true cross, detail | Die Konigin von Saba betet das Kreuzesholz an |
Related Artists:
ARCIMBOLDO, Giuseppe
Italian Mannerist Painter, ca.1530-1593 Italian painter, draughtsman and tapestry designer, active also in Austria and Bohemia. He came from a distinguished Milanese family that included a number of archbishops of the city; his father was the painter Biagio Arcimboldo. Giuseppe is first documented in 1549, working with his father for Milan Cathedral; he received payments until 1558 for supplying paintings, designs for an altar baldacchino and stained-glass windows for the cathedral: the Story of Lot and the Life of St Catherine in the south transept windows are usually attributed to him. He collaborated with Giuseppe Meda in designing the gonfalone of St Ambrose in Milan, probably sometime soon after 1558. In 1556 he received a commission to paint the south wall and vault of the south transept of Monza Cathedral, also in Lombardy, a work that must have been completed by 1562. Portions of a fresco of the Tree of Jesse on the south wall there can be attributed to him. In 1558 he was paid for designing tapestries for Como Cathedral (in situ). On the basis of stylistic comparison with the windows in Milan and the frescoes in Monza, the design of a tapestry representing St John the Baptist Preaching and Baptizing (Monza, Mus. Duomo) can be attributed to Arcimboldo. The Archbishop of Milan, Carlo Borromeo, probably paid for this tapestry.
Francesco Brina
Italian , Florence cIRCA 1540-1585/6
Conrad Wise Chapman
1842-1910 Conrad Wise Chapman Gallery