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 Baptism of Christ (mk08) | Double portrait fo Federigo da Montefeltro (mk08) | the legend of the true cross, detail | The Discovery of the Wood of the True Cross and The Meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (mk08) | Sts Sebastian and John the Baptist |
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COSTA, Lorenzo
Italian High Renaissance Painter, ca.1460-1535 was an Italian painter of the Renaissance. He was born at Ferrara, but moved to Bologna by the his early twenties, and would be more influential to the Bolognese school of painting. However, many artists worked in both nearby cities, and thus others consider him a product of the School of Ferrara. There are claims that he trained with Cosimo Tura. In 1483 he painted his famous Madonna and Child with the Bentivoglio family, and other frescoes, on the walls of the Bentivoglio chapel in San Giacomo Maggiore, and he followed this with many other works. He was a great friend of Francesco Francia, who was much influenced by him. In 1509 he went to Mantua, where his patron was the Marquis Francesco Gonzaga, and he eventually died there. His Madonna and Child enthroned is in the National Gallery, London, but his chief works are at Bologna. His sons, Ippolito and Girolamo, were also painters, and so was Girolamo's son, Lorenzo the younger (1537-1583).