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 | polyptych of saint anthony | Discovery and Proof of the True Cross | Madonna del parto | The Death of Adam, detail of Adam and his Children |
Related Artists:
Cesare Mussini
painted Atala in 1835
Michel-Ange Houasse
1680-1730 French Michel Ange Houasse Gallery Son of Rene-Antoine Houasse. He trained in his father's circle, becoming familiar with the academic teaching methods then fashionable in France and also in Italy, where he went with his father. In 1706 he joined the Acad?mie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris, obtaining the rank of Academician in 1707 with the painting Hercules and Lichas (Tours, Mus. B.-A.). In Rome he probably became acquainted with the Marquis d'Aubigny, secretary to the powerful Princess Orsini, who was close to Philip V of Spain. The Spanish King already had the painter Henri de Favanne in his service in Madrid; Michel-Ange was recommended for work at the Spanish court by Count Jean Orry (1652-1719), the King's French finance minister, and arrived there in 1715. He had contact with the French artists at court and married the daughter of the French architect Rene Carlier.
Ivar Arosenius
Swedish, 1878-1909