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 | Constantine s Dream | the legend of the true cross, detail | Portraits of Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza | Portrait of Sigismondo Malatesta (mk05) |
Related Artists:
Ignacio Pinazo
1849-1916 He came from a poor family and in his youth worked as a silversmith, gilder, tile painter and hatter. This experience encouraged an independent spirit unencumbered by academic doctrine. He did, however, attend the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Valencia while working as a hatter, studying colour and composition, life drawing and drawing from the Antique (1868-9). In 1870 he started to devote himself wholly to painting. His early works include several portraits. A series of stays in Italy were important for Pinazo's development. The first of these took place in 1873, when he spent seven months visiting Rome, Naples and Venice and became familiar with the work of Mariano Jos? Bernardo Fortuny y Marsal, whose influence can be seen in Pinazo's small-scale landscapes on panel . Soon, however, his work came to resemble that of the impressionistic Italian painters, the Macchiaioli, as in Pinazo's brightly coloured Wheat-field. His second stay in Italy began in 1877 with an award for his large history painting, Landing of Francis I of France in Valencia
Jan Bogumil Plersch
painted Tadeusz Kosciuszko falling wounded in the battle of Maciejowice in 1794
William Mctaggart
Scottish Painter, 1835-1910 was a Scottish landscape painter who was influenced by Impressionism. The son of a crofter, William McTaggart was born in the small village of Aros in Kintyre. He moved to Edinburgh at the age of 16 and studied at the Trustees' Academy under Robert Scott Lauder. He won several prizes as a student and exhibited his work in the Royal Scottish Academy, becoming a full member of the Academy in 1870. His early works were mainly figure paintings, often of children, but he later turned to land and seascape painting, inspired by his childhood love of the sea and the rugged, Atlantic-lashed west coast of his birth. The Storm, 1890, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.McTaggart was fascinated with nature and man??s relationship with it, and he strove to capture aspects such as the transient effects of light on water. He adopted the Impressionist practice of painting out of doors, and his use of colour and bold brushwork resemble qualities found in paintings by Constable and Turner, both artists whom he admired. McTaggart was skilled in the use of both oil and watercolour and, in addition to Kintyre seascapes, he also painted landscapes and seascapes in Midlothian and East Lothian. Many of his later works depict the Moorfoot Hills which could be seen from his house near Lasswade, which he moved to in 1889.