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 :. | Saint Mary Magdalen | the flagellation, detail | Portrait of Federigo da Montefeltro | the legend of the true cross, detail | the legend of the true cross, detail |
Related Artists:
William Ford
c.1820-1884
Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze
German-born American Romantic Painter, 1816-1868,American painter of German birth. When he was nine, Leutze's family emigrated to America and settled in Philadelphia. In 1834 he began to study art with the draughtsman John Rubens Smith (1775-1849). Leutze developed his skills as a portrait painter by taking likenesses to be engraved for publication in the National Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans and then working as an itinerant painter. He also experimented with imaginative compositions, such as the Poet's Dream (Philadelphia, PA Acad. F.A.). Philadelphia patrons sponsored his study in Europe, and in 1841 he enrolled at the K?nigliche Kunstakademie in Desseldorf. Although attempts at history painting won approval in Germany and in the USA, Leutze left the academy in 1843. He travelled for two years in Germany and Italy, during which time he became convinced of the importance of freedom and democracy, which he believed to be fundamental institutions of the American political system.
Frank Duveneck
1848-1919 Frank Duveneck Gallery Frank Duveneck (October 9, 1848 ?C January 3, 1919) was an American figure and portrait painter. Duveneck was born in Covington, Kentucky, the son of a German immigrant Bernard Decker. Decker died when Frank was only a year old and his widow remarried Joseph Duveneck. By the age of fifteen Frank had begun the study of art under the tutelage of a local painter, Johann Schmitt and had been apprenticed to a German firm of church decorators. While having grown up in Covington, Duveneck was a part of the German community in Cincinnati, Ohio. However, due to his Catholic beliefs and German heritage, he was an outsider as far as the artistic community of Cincinnati was concerned. In 1869 he went abroad to study with Wilhelm von Diez and Wilhelm Leibl at the Royal Academy of M??nich, where he learned a dark, realistic and direct style of painting. He subsequently became one of the young American painters ?? others were William Merritt Chase, John Henry Twachtman, and Walter Shirlaw ?? who in the 1870s overturned the traditions of the Hudson River School and started a new art movement characterized by a greater freedom of paint application.