Francesca, Piero Della (or Piero Dei Franceschi)

also known as Petrus Borgensis

(b. Borgo San Sepolcro [now Sansepolcro], Italy, between 1410 and 1420; d. Sansepolcro, 12 October 1492)

mathematics.

Vasari’s reason (in Lives of the Artists) for the adoption of the feminine form “Francesca” in Piero’s name has been invalidated by the authentication of his father as “dei Franceschi” and his mother as Romana di Perino da Monterchi. Of Piero’s early life–as the wide uncertainty of his birthdate reveals—nothing is known until 7 September 1439, when he was an associate of Domenico Veneziano at Florence. He is not named by Alberti in the famous dedication to his colleagues in Dellla pittura (1436), but Alberti’s influence is revealed in the clearest manner in the architectural studies from Piero’s workshop at Urbino.

Piero’s value to science lay in his pioneering efforts to explore the nature of space and to construct it by his sophisticated study of linear perspective and masterly juxtaposition of color masses. Although his major work on the mathematics of painting, De prospettiva pingendi, was written only after his career as an artist was at an end, it can hardly be doubted that the diminution in the successive members of the black and white pavement in the Flagellation at Urbino must have been achieved by such complex calculations as are subsequently displayed in the prospettiva. These represent a synthesis of the two operational diagrams that he probably learned from Alberti.

But a more strikingly original contribution of Piero’s was his measuring of the distances between successive surfaces of a human head and transferring the plane sections thus obtained into a contoured plan. Luca Pacioli, whose influence in spreading the study of mathematics in the early cinquecento is well known, testified to the assistance of his fellow townsman but later paid him the dubious compliment of including (unacknowledged) in his De divina proportione a large part of Piero’s last work, De quinque corporibus regolaribus.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. The De prospettiva pingendi was written in the vernacular; a transcript exists in the Palatina at Parma and forms the basis of the definitive text edited by G. Fasola (Florence, 1942). There is a transcript of the (contemporary) Latin trans. in the Ambrosian Library at Milan. Piero’s De quinque corporibus regolaribus exists in a transcript (with figs. by him) in the Vatican Library (Urbinas 632). Excerpts from the original works (in English) are available in E. G. Holt, ed., A Documentary History of Art, I (new York, 1957), 256–257.

II. Secondary Literature. A detailed and analytical study of piero’s life and work is Roberto Longhi, Piero della Francesca (London, 1930), Leonard Penlock, trans. The Introduction by Sir Kenneth Clark to the Phaidon review of his pictures, Piero della Francesca (London, 1951), is both readable and scholarly.

William P. D. Wightman