Piero della Francesca
The painter of geometry and stillness.
Piero della Francesca was also a mathematician and wrote about perspective. His pictures are clear, light and almost motionless.
Piero della Francesca was born around 1415 in Borgo San Sepolcro, today Sansepolcro, a small town in Tuscany. His father was a merchant. In 1439 Piero worked in Florence as an assistant to the painter Domenico Veneziano, and there he learned the new perspective and the light palette. He nevertheless remained tied to his home town all his life.
His most extensive work is the fresco cycle The Legend of the True Cross in the church of San Francesco in Arezzo, painted in the 1450s and 1460s. It tells the story of the Cross from the death of Adam to the Emperor Heraclius. Other well-known works are The Baptism of Christ in the National Gallery in London, The Flagellation in Urbino and The Resurrection in the civic museum in Sansepolcro. He also worked for Duke Federico da Montefeltro in Urbino. His double portrait of the duke and his wife in profile is in the Uffizi, and his large altarpiece with the duke kneeling is in the Brera in Milan.
Piero was also a mathematician. He wrote a treatise on perspective, one on arithmetic and one on the regular geometric solids. This shows in his pictures. The figures resemble cylinders and spheres, the compositions are built on geometry and everything rests in a still balance. The colours are pale and cool and the light as clear as morning. The faces are calm and enigmatic. The Flagellation, in which Christ’s torment takes place in the background while three men converse in the foreground, has given rise to countless interpretations.
He died in Sansepolcro in 1492. According to one story, a British officer in the Second World War refrained from shelling the town because he remembered that The Resurrection was there. The British writer Aldous Huxley had called it the best picture in the world.
After his death Piero was partly forgotten. He was rediscovered in the 19th and 20th centuries, when his clear forms and geometric order appealed to modern artists. Today he is regarded as one of the foremost painters of the Renaissance.