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 :. | Portrait of Battista Sforza | st agatha from the predella of the st anthony polyptych | St.Simon the apostle | reconstruction of the annunciating angel from the detail of the madonna della misericordia, central panel of the polytych of the misericordia | The Crucifixion |
Related Artists:
Arthur Ahnert
painted Interior of Wilhelmshausen church in 1898/1899.
Mulvany, John George
Irish, 1766-1838
Thomas Baines
(27 November 1820 ?C 8 May 1875) was an English artist and explorer of British colonial southern Africa and Australia. Born in King's Lynn, Norfolk, Baines was apprenticed to a coach painter at an early age. When he was 22 he left England for South Africa aboard the "Olivia" (captained by a family friend William Roome) and worked for a while in Cape Town as a scenic and portrait artist, and as official war artist during the so-called Eighth Frontier War for the British Army. In 1855 Baines joined Augustus Gregory??s 1855?C1857 Royal Geographical Society sponsored expedition across northern Australia as official artist and storekeeper. The expedition??s purpose was to explore the Victoria River district in the north-west and to evaluate the entire northern area of Australia in terms of its suitability for colonial settlement.