Francesca, Piero della

(c. 1406-1492)

   Italian painter born in Borgo San Sepolcro in the Tuscan region to a family of leather merchants. Piero della Francesca was not only an artist but also a mathematician, geometrician, and theorist. He authored two treatises, one on perspective and painting and the other on geometry. The details of his training as painter are not completely clear, though it is possible that he studied with Domenico Veneziano whom he assisted on the nowlost frescoes in the Church of Sant' Egidio, Florence.

   Piero's earliest work is the Misericordia Altarpiece (beg. 1445; San Sepolcro, Museo Civico), commissioned by the Confraternity of the Misericordia of San Sepolcro. The contract for the work stipulated that it had to be executed by Piero himself within three years. Piero ignored the stipulations and the work was completed by his assistants a decade later. He painted the Baptism of Christ in the London National Gallery (c. 1450) for the Chapel of San Giovanni in the Pieve of San Sepolcro, and the Resurrection (c. 1458), now in the San Sepolcro Museo Civico, was originally intended for the San Sepolcro Town Hall. Piero's most extensive commission is the Legend of the True Cross in the Cappella Maggiore at the Church of San Francesco in Arezzo (c. 1454-1458), a complex cycle he painted for the Bacci family based on Jacobus da Voragine's Golden Legend. Piero also worked in Rimini for Sigismondo Malatesta, painting his patron's portrait (Paris, Louvre) and frescoes in the Tempio Malatestiano in 1451. In the earlier years of the 1470s, he was in Urbino working for Duke Federico da Montefeltro. There he rendered the portraits of the duke and his wife, Battista Sforza (1472), inspired by ancient Roman coinage.

   Piero conceived his figures and objects in geometric terms. He used cylinders for limbs, spheres for faces and eyes, and circles, triangles, squares, and rectangles for architecture. His simplified approach was greatly admired by the Cubists of the 20th century who employed a similar approach to the construction of their compositional elements. Like Domenico Veneziano, Piero used light instead of line to describe his forms. The vivid palette he employed, composed mostly of pastel colors, is also borrowed from his master.