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Piero Della Francesca in Oxford Art Online Oxford Art Online Grove Art Online Results list Next result » Piero della Francesca article url: http://www.oxfordartonline.com:80/subscriber/article/grove/art/T067465 Piero [Pietro di Benedetto di Pietro] della Francesca [de’ Franceschi] (b Borgo San Sepolcro [now Sansepolcro], c. 1415; bur Borgo San Sepolcro, 12 Oct 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. I. Life and painted work. 1. Early works. (i) Background and collaborative works. Piero’s birthplace, Borgo San Sepolcro, was at one of the crossroads between Tuscany, the Marches and Umbria. A flourishing town in the upper Tiber Valley, it passed from Malatesta rule to the Papacy in 1431 and was ceded to Florence in 1441. Piero was the son of a tanner and wool merchant, and his early study of mathematics doubtless had a mercantile purpose (see §III below). Documents (Dabell, 1984; Banker, 1990, 1991, 1993) provide clues about Piero’s earliest artistic activity. He was paid in Borgo San Sepolcro in June 1431 for painting processional candle poles, and he is recorded there on 29 December 1432 as having assisted Antonio da Anghiari, a local Late Gothic painter, with initial work on the high altarpiece of S Francesco since June 1432. The commission was later abandoned and passed on to Sassetta, whose celebrated altarpiece, completed in 1444, was an important influence on Piero. This early payment (a substantial 56 florins) and others for painting pennants with the insignia of Pope Eugenius IV (reg 1431–47) in 1436 were made through his father (recorded elsewhere in dealings with Antonio), indicating Piero’s youth but also his precocious involvement in local artistic commissions. He is recorded several times in Borgo San Sepolcro until 1438. Florence must have provided a fundamental stimulus for Piero’s development, although there is only one record of his presence there. On 12 September 1439 he is documented with Domenico Veneziano in a payment relating to the decoration (destr.) of S Egidio (now S Maria Nuova), then the most important Florentine fresco cycle since the Brancacci Chapel (Florence, S Maria del Carmine). Piero was inspired by Domenico’s ordered, rationally lit compositions (especially his St Lucy altarpiece of the 1440s), as well as by his calm, pale Madonnas, whose ovoid heads and almond eyes reappear in Piero’s figures. It is intriguing to imagine the appearance of the work (untraced) that Domenico is documented as having produced in 1450 in Arezzo, where the two painters may have met again. (ii) The ‘Misericordia’ altarpiece. In 1442 Piero’s name was drawn from a list of citizens eligible for membership of the town council of Borgo San Sepolcro (not necessarily indicating his actual presence there), the first of many references to his participation in civic affairs. He received a significant commission in the town a year after Sassetta’s altarpiece was set up there. On 11 June 1445 a leading charitable confraternity contracted him to paint a large altarpiece for its church/oratory. The Misericordia altarpiece (Sansepolcro, Pin.) was probably the first major work in the town by a non-Sienese artist. The commission had been in preparation since 1430 (Dabell, 1984), and Piero’s contract specified that the work was to be completed within three years. As with many of Piero’s works, however, there were years of delay, and he interrupted the execution of this polyptych more than once; in early 1455 he was admonished by the patrons. The work was not finished until about 1460. Although the panels of the Misericordia altarpiece are poorly preserved, they reveal the early development of Piero’s style from the loose modelling reminiscent of Masaccio, seen in SS Sebastian and John the Baptist on the left, to the monumental, subtly defined SS John the Evangelist and Bernardino on the right, all of them standing solidly in space, despite the gold background required for this conservative commission. The central figure of the Virgin epitomizes Piero’s concern for statuesque, scrupulously modelled form and is a perfect conjunction of iconography and volumetric description. The supplicants gathered around her typify Piero’s non- individualizing approach to figures, here depicted with a restrained but telling use of gesture. (iii) The ‘Baptism’. The Baptism (London, N.G.) is also an early work, probably begun in the late 1440s; it was the centre of an altarpiece (Sansepolcro Cathedral) that appears archaic when viewed according to Piero’s luminous idiom. The morning light, open sky and distinctive clouds in the Baptism are all characteristic of Piero, while the trees in the landscape background punctuate space like bars of music and provide the same compositional scansion as they do in many of his later works. His interest in light is prominently displayed in the reflective surface of the river. The arrangement of the foreground figures and their deliberate juxtaposition with inanimate, regular Piero della Francesca: Baptism, egg tempera on panel, bodies (e.g. the cylinder of the tree) are early indications of Piero’s 1.67×1.16 m,… enduring interest in rigorously constructed compositions. Here and elsewhere, however, narrative expression always takes precedence over perspectival construction. The remaining part of the altarpiece was entrusted in the mid-1450s to the Sienese workshop of Matteo di Giovanni (also a native of Borgo San Sepolcro) and Giovanni di Pietro, who painted the lateral panels with figures of SS Peter and Paul, pilaster saints and a narrative predella relating to the Baptist, one end of which bears the arms of the Graziani family (all Sansepolcro, Mus. Civ.). A roundel with God the Father (untraced) above the central scene may have been painted by Piero. The altarpiece appears to have been constructed by Antonio d’Anghiari (Dabell, 1984) and commissioned for a church dedicated to S Giovanni Battista, either in Val d’Afra or the Pieve (Lightbown). (iv) Work for courtly patrons. The signed and dated Penitent St Jerome (1450; Berlin, Gemäldegal.), a small painting in its original frame, is a refined work of the kind Piero provided for his first courtly patrons. These were perhaps the Este in Ferrara, where he painted frescoes (destr.) in S Agostino c. 1449 and where he doubtless saw examples of work by Rogier van der Weyden or other early Netherlandish painters. Despite the loss of its surface glazes, this work demonstrates Piero’s clarity of composition and depiction of cool, morning light. Its poetic, river-crossed landscape, similar to that of the Baptism, precedes that painted by Bono da Ferrara in the Ovetari Chapel (Padua, Eremitani). A slightly later version of the same subject (Venice, Accad.) depicts a donor and a view of a town like Borgo San Sepolcro. Both works have an intensity of feeling entirely befitting the spiritual subject. Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta was one of Piero’s most important courtly patrons. His transformation of S Francesco in Rimini into the dynastic Tempio Malatestiano involved Alberti (see fig.), who may have proposed Piero’s services for the votive fresco of Sigismondo Malatesta Venerating St Sigismund (1451; detached, in situ). The careful profile of Sigismondo, repeated in a portrait by Piero (Paris, Louvre), contrasts with the relaxed pose of the saint and with the contrapuntal figures of the two greyhounds, in which courtly and symbolic iconography and natural description are merged. The saint’s hand and orb reveal the painter’s skill in depicting both regular and irregular solids. As in the Baptism and all of Piero’s most successful compositions, there is a visually satisfying sense of interval between the figures here, a remarkable and idiosyncratic feeling for the rhythmical arrangement of solids and voids. (v) The Perugia altarpiece. The altarpiece painted for the Franciscan nuns of S Antonio delle Monache, Perugia (Perugia, G.N. Umbria), has been associated with documents of 1469 (Lightbown) but appears to be an earlier work, datable to before the Arezzo frescoes and showing the strong influence of Domenico Veneziano (e.g. his Virgin and Child; Bucharest, N. Mus. A.). The setting and frame of the main register, the Virgin and Child between SS Anthony of Padua, John the Baptist, Francis and Elizabeth of Hungary, are redolent of the courtly Late Gothic world of Central Italy, while its more modern double predella and unusual gable with the Annunciation, certainly planned from the start, display Piero’s freedom when faced by less restricted sections of a painting.
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