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Piero
Della Francesca
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Piero
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Piero
Della Francesca (c. 1420-1492),
Italian painter whose style was
one of the most individual of the
early Renaissance.
Piero
was born in Borgo
San
Sepolcro,
a small city in southern Tuscany,
around 1420. He appears to have
studied art in Florence, but his
career was spent in other cities,
among them Rome, Urbino, Ferrara,
Rimini, and Arezzo.
He was strongly influenced by
Masaccio and Domenico Veneziano.
His solid, rounded figures are
derived from Masaccio, while from
Domenico he absorbed a
predilection for delicate colours
and scenes bathed in cool, clear
daylight. To these influences he
added an innate sense of order
and clarity. He wrote treatises
on solid geometry and on
perspective, and his works
reflect these interests. He
conceived of the human figure as
a volume in space, and the
outlines of his subjects have the
grace, abstraction,
and
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precision of geometric
drawings.
Almost
all of Piero's works are religious in
nature-primarily altarpieces and church
frescoes-although his serene and noble
double portrait Federigo da Montefeltro
and Battista Sforza (1465, Uffizi,
Florence) is one of his most famous works.
The undisputed high point of his career
was the series of large frescoes Legend of
the True Cross, (c. 1452-c. 1465), for the
church of San Francesco in
Arezzo,
in which he presents scenes of astonishing
beauty, with silent, stately figures fixed
in clear, crystalline space. These
frescoes are characterized by broad
contrasts-both in subject matter and in
treatment-that create a powerful effect of
grandeur. Thus, for example, the nudes in
Death of Adam are contrasted to the
sumptuously attired figures in Solomon and
Sheba, the bright daylight of Victory of
Constantine with the gloom of Dream of
Constantine (one of the first night scenes
in Western art). In addition, each fresco
is organized in two sections-a square
paired with a longer rectangle-which he
exploited to create a marked sense of
rhythm.
Piero's
later works show the probable influence of
Flemish art, which he assimilated without
betraying his own monumental style. In
works such as the Sinigallia Madonna (c.
1470, Galleria Nazionale delle Marche,
Urbino), he adapted to his own purposes an
attention to detail and a meticulous
treatment of still life that were
characteristic of Flemish art.
Certain
aspects of Piero's work were significant
for the northern Italian painters Mantegna
and Giovanni Bellini, as well as for the
later Raphael, but his art was in general
too individual and self-contained to
influence strongly the mainstream of
Florentine art. He died in
Borgo
San
Sepolcro
on July 5, 1492.
The
Legend of the True Cross
In 1447 the Bacci family of
Arezzo
commissioned
the Florentine painter Bicci di Lorenzo to
decorate the choir of the Basilica of San
Francesco By 1452, when Bicci died, he had
finished painting only the four
"Evangelists" in the great cross-vaulted
ceiling of the choir, the "Last Judgment"
on the front wall of the arch, and two
"Doctors of the Church" on the intrados or
inside curve of the arch. It is presumed
that Piero della Francesca immediately
took up with the work where Bicci had left
off. The theme of the cycle is taken from
the "Golden Legend" by Jacopo da Varagine,
the iconographic source relied on by many
Tuscan and Italian painters starting in
the 1300s. It has been determined from a
notary's document that the work was
interrupted in 1458/59 and brought to
completion by 1466. The story narrated
pictorially in the 12 main episodes
represented in the various scenes
composing the cycle, begins with the
"Death of Adam" in the lunette of the
right wall and concludes with "The
Exultation of the True Cross" in the
lunette on the left wall and "The
Annunciation" at the bottom left of the
center wall. The chronological execution
of the frescoes follows a different order,
however, from top to bottom and from left
to right, painted from seven different
scaffolds over a period of 250 "working
days".
Madonna
del Parto
In just seven "working days"
(presumably before 1465) Piero della
Francesca painted the extraordinary and
touching image of the Madonna del Parto,
distant as a heavenly vision and yet alive
and real in her post-adolescent freshness.
The fresco was planned to complete the
back wall of the main altar in the 13th
century church of Santa Maria di Momentana
(formerly Santa Maria in Silvis) in an
isolated country village on the slopes of
Monterchi. The church was completely
destroyed in 1785 after a disastrous
earthquake which miraculously left
standing only the wall with the fresco.
The panting was later detached from the
wall and moved to a niche in the main
altar of a new church. This chapel was
constructed to serve a cemetery that had
been established as part of the reforms
instituted by Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo.
In 1889, after more than a century of
neglect, the fresco was "rediscovered" as
one of Piero's masterpieces. In order to
conserve the fresco it was again detached
from the wall in 1910 by the restorer
Domenico Fiscali and then was again saved
from destruction in the earthquake of 1917
that seriously damaged the 18th century
cemetery chapel. From 1956 until its
restoration in 1992/93 the Madonna del
Parto was conserved inside a new chapel
built from the remains of the earlier
structure.
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