Piero della Francesca (1415–1492)

Italian painter and a master of the early Renaissance. The son of a shoemaker, who died before he was born, he grew up in the small village of Borgo San Sepolcro near the Tuscan town of Arezzo. He moved to Florence to train as a painter and helped older painters with the decoration of several churches in that city. He worked for a noble patron, Sigismondo Malatesta, for whom he painted a famous portrait, as well as for the pope in Rome. He spent much of his adulthood in the town of San Sepolcro and Arezzo, where he was hired to paint the choir of the church of San Francesco, where he painted a famous fresco cycle known as the The Legend of the True Cross, which was inspired by traditional legends surrounding the cross on which Christ was crucified. The orderly arrangement of figures give these pictures a sense of calm rationality, a new sensibility that made a break with traditions of Gothic painting and its direct appeal to the emotions. The Flagellation, a renowned work of the early Renaissance, presents three mysterious figures in the foreground over whom art historians have been arguing for five centuries.

For the Duke of Urbino, Federigo da Montefeltro, Piero completed a double portrait of the duke and his wife, as well as a famous altarpiece, Madonna with Saints and Donor. Piero's great skill and knowledge of mathematics and linear geometry allowed him to construct masterful paintings with the use of foreshortening and perspective, which gives a three-dimensional appearance to the flat surface of a painting. He wrote a treatise, De Prospectiva Pingendi, on the art of perspective, and works on mathematics, including Treatise on the Abacus, in which he covered the subjects of geometry, algebra, and the problems of perspective.

See Also: Montefeltro, Federigo da