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 :. | saint mary magdalen | Portrait of Duke Frederico da Montefello and Battista Sfozza | Details of St.Simon the apostle | The Penance of St. Jerome | the montefeltro altarpiece, details |
Related Artists:
Ralph Curtis
(1854-1922 ) - Watercolours
Giuseppe Nuvolone
Italian , b. 1619, Milano, d. 1703, Milano was an Italian painter of the Baroque period, active mainly in Milan, Brescia, and Cremona. Born in San Gimignano. He was the brother of the painter Carlo Francesco Nuvolone and son and pupil of Panfilo. He painted St Dominic resurrecting the dead for the church of San Domenico in Cremona.
Mancini, Antonio
Italian Academic Painter, 1852-1930 Italian painter. He entered the Istituto di Belle Arti, Naples, at the age of 12; while still an adolescent he produced accomplished works such as Head of a Young Girl (1867; Naples, Capodimonte). On his graduation in 1873, Mancini, together with Francesco Paolo Michetti and Vincenzo Gemito, was at the forefront of VERISMO in Neapolitan art. Sharing a studio with Gemito, he painted the street boys, musicians and dancers of Naples, creating an anti-academic, popular art. His patron, Albert, Count Cahen of Antwerp (1846-1903), encouraged him to visit Paris in 1875, where he met Manet and Degas. After a second visit in 1877