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 :. | Madonna and Child Attended by Angels | Nativity | the discovery of the true | Head of an Angel | the legend of the true cross, detail |
Related Artists:
Francesco Botticini
Florence 1446-1497
ANGELUCCIO
Italian painter, Roman school (active 1640-1650 in Rome) Italian painter. He is the only known pupil of Claude Lorrain other than Claude's long-standing assistant Giandomenico Desiderii (b 1620-24; d after 1657). Pascoli, the only biographer to record him, claimed in his life of Claude that Angeluccio was Claude's most able student but had died young and was able to work little. Angeluccio appears to have lived in Rome and, like Claude, was exclusively a landscape painter. About 25 paintings and 35 drawings, all dated 1640-45, comprise his entire oeuvre. Claude's influence can be seen in such paintings as Landscape with Figures and Bridge (priv. col., see 1983 exh. cat., no. 88). This is a composition with centrally placed foreground figures framed by trees in the middle ground, which in turn stand before a bridge and a distant vista, and was borrowed directly from such paintings by Claude as Pastoral Landscape (1644-5; Merion Station, PA, Barnes Found.). Although Angeluccio shared Claude's approach to landscape, he was not merely an imitator. His paintings form a coherent stylistic group of wooded landscapes, rich in foliage and undergrowth and characterized by a blue-green tonality, which indicates that he also embraced the tradition of landscape painting brought to Rome in the 17th century by Dutch and Flemish artists. The Landscape with Hunters (Rome, Pal. Barberini), painted on an intimate scale and aligned vertically, like most of Angeluccio's paintings, betrays the artist's debt to this tradition. In the painting the pockets of sunlight and the highlighted foliage, indicated with the abbreviated white brushstrokes typical of Angeluccio's manner, provide sharp contrast to a dark, tunnel-like wood. The resulting sense of the landscape closing in on the figures is an effect often found in the landscapes of the Flemish artist Paul Bril. The distant vista, however, is similar to those that appear in works by Claude. The romanticism evoked by this blending of borrowed elements gives Angeluccio's works their distinguishing quality. His paintings frequently also contain rustic genre figures.
ORRENTE, Pedro
Spanish Baroque Era Painter, 1580-1645 Spanish painter. He is one of the most interesting artists of his day. His father, Jaime Orrente, was a merchant from Marseille, his mother, Isabel Jumilla, from Murcia. By 1600 Orrente was active in Toledo, where he was commissioned to paint a retable (untraced). In 1607 and again in 1611 he was in Murcia, and a journey to Italy recorded by Jusepe Mart?nez and Palomino must have taken place between those years. It seems certain that he visited Venice and met Leandro Bassano