Piero della Francesca
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 :. | Exaltation of the Cross | The Fresco Cycle | legend of the true cross | Madonna di Senigallia | Portrait of Sigismondo Malatesta (mk05) | Related Artists: Lambdin, George CochranAmerican Painter, 1830-1896
American painter. He was a son of the portrait and landscape painter James R. Lambdin (1807-89), who had founded a museum in Pittsburgh in 1828 and directed the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia from 1845 to 1864. George Lambdin studied with his father and began exhibiting at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1848 and at the National Academy of Design, New York, in 1856. In the mid-1850s he travelled, probably to Munich, Paris and Rome. His early works were sentimental genre paintings, the best known of which are Our Sweetest Songs (1857; New York, N. Acad. Des.) and the Dead Wife (The Last Sleep) (exh. 1858; Raleigh, NC Mus. A.). The latter was shown at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867 together with one of his depictions of a Civil War subject, Consecration, 1861 (1865; Indianapolis, IN, Mus. A.). In 1868-9 he was at the Tenth Street Studio Building, New York, where he continued to exhibit anecdotal genre, especially childhood subjects, as in The Pruner (1868; Boston, MA, Mus. F.A.). He was elected an Academician by the Pennsylvania Academy in 1863 and by the National Academy of Design in 1868. In Germantown, after a short trip abroad in 1870, Lambdin turned to floral studies, especially of roses from his own garden. Some of his floral still-life subjects were conventional table-top arrangements in glass or ceramic vases, but most were paintings of blooming plants and shrubs as they grow in nature or in garden pots, their foliage and blossoms silhouetted against blue sky or a neutral wall, as in Autumn Sunshine Mrs Alexander FarmerBirthdate: 10 July 1853
Birthplace: Crawfordsville, Indiana Giorgio Schiavoneborn circa 1433-1504
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