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 :. | Polyptych of the Misericordia | Polyptych of the Misericordia: Sts Sebastian and John the Baptist | the legend of the true cross, detail | Saint Michael | detail of plate 90 |
Related Artists:
valdemar sejr

DOBSON, William
English Baroque Era Painter, ca.1611-1646 English painter. His father, William Dobson, was a gentleman of St Albans employed by Francis Bacon, Viscount Verulam, on the building and decoration at Verulam House and Gorhambury; he was also probably Master of the Alienation Office and a member of the Painter-Stainers' Company, but according to John Aubrey, 'he spending his estate luxuriously upon women, necessity forced his son William Dobson to be the most excellent painter
George Bernard O Neill
(1828-1917). Irish genre painter