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 :. | Discovery and Proof of the True Cross | the legend of the true cross, detail | Brera madonna | Adoration of the Holy Wood and the Meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba | Polyptych of the Misericordia |
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Frederic Remington
American Painter and Sculptor, 1861-1909 American painter, sculptor, illustrator and writer. In 1878 he began his studies at the newly formed School of the Fine Arts at Yale University in New Haven, CT, remaining there until 1880. This, along with a few months at the Art Students League in New York in 1886, was his only period of formal art training. In 1881 he roamed through the Dakotas, Montana, the Arizona Territory and Texas to document an era that was fast vanishing. He returned east and in 1882 had his first drawing published (25 Feb) in Harper's Weekly. Further commissions for illustrations followed, including that for Theodore Roosevelt's Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail (New York, 1888) (see BOOK ILLUSTRATION, fig. 8).
Carlo Pittara
Italian, 1836-1890
LISSE, Dirck van der
Dutch painter (b. 1607, Den Haag, d. 1669, Den Haag)