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 Michael | madonna del parto | saint mary magdalen | pala mantefeltro | the legend of the true cross, detail |
Related Artists:
Richard Earlom
English Printmaker, 1743-1822,English printmaker. Taught by Giovanni Battista Cipriani, he worked in mezzotint, etching and occasionally stipple. His mezzotints of flowers and still-lifes, such as Roses for the Temple of Flora (1805) by Robert John Thornton (?1768-1837) or the Fruit Piece (see Wessely, no. 145) after Jan van Huysum, are also found printed in colours or coloured by hand. Earlom's most influential prints were a set of outline etchings combined with mezzotint of the volume, then belonging to the Dukes of Devonshire, of Claude's drawings of his own landscape paintings
Frederick William Woodhouse
Frederick William Woodhouse 1820-1909 Woodhouse was born in Britain, but is better known as an Australian artist after his move to Australia. He painted images of Bush Life, and made many images from direct observation in sketchbooks and watercolors. He was also Australiaes most important horse racing painter, having painted every Melbourne Cup winner from 1861 until the introduction of the trackside camera. Although horses were his mainstay, Woodhouse also painted dogs, sheep, cattle, landscapes and portraits of persons. Between 1893 and 1894 he made a number of landscapes during a trip to Tasmania.
Alexander Ivanov
1806-1858 Russian Alexander Ivanov Galleries was a Russian painter who adhered to the waning tradition of Neoclassicism but found little sympathy with his contemporaries. Ivanov studied together with Karl Briullov at the Imperial Academy of Arts under his father, Andrey A. Ivanov. He spent most of his life in Rome where he befriended Gogol and succumbed to the influence of the Nazarenes. He has been called the master of one work, for it took 20 years to complete his magnum opus, The Appearance of Christ before the People (1837-57). It was for the next generation of art critics to do him justice. Some of the numerous sketches he had prepared for The Appearance have been recognized as masterpieces in their own right. Although Ivanov's major painting is a gem of the Tretyakov Gallery, the most comprehensive collection of his works can be viewed at the Russian Museum in St Petersburg.