PIERO della FRANCESCA. - Born around 1416 at Borgo San Sepolcro, died there in 1492, this very great artist was in contact with the Sienese painting of the early fifteenth century (above all that of Sassetta, active at San Sepolcro), with that of Masaccio, of Paolo Uccello and of Domenico Veneziano, but his highly personal nature oriented itself at once toward an architectural determinism, the ultimate result of the Florentine investigations of the early Renaissance: his natural disposition for architectural rhythms dictated to him, toward the end of his life, the celebrated treatise De prospectiva pingendi, from which Luca Pacioli derived a great part of his mathematical studies.
The instinctive geometric measure of his spirit was largely compensated by an intuitive, limpid and natural vision of the surrounding world, which allowed him to fuse harmoniously together mathematical speculation with the immediacy of optical experience, almost Flemish in character. The Baptism of the National Gallery in London marks, together with the panel of the Accademia in Venice, St. Jerome and a Donor, the starting point of a subtle and reserved painting, in which the volume of the bodies is obtained through the effect of formal simplification and of the tonal relationships among the various objects of the picture. The light, falling perpendicularly upon the composition, quickens the color, abolishing shadows and substituting for plastic chiaroscuro the efficacy of a crystalline, most pure chromatism, which requires for its full effect the immobility of the scene, as is evident in the Nativity of London, a rustic idyll entirely new to Tuscan painting. These elements become more precise in the polyptych of San Sepolcro with the Virgin of Mercy at the center, constructed in frankly architectural terms like an ancient idol. The Flagellation of the Ducal Palace of Urbino, commissioned from him by Federico da Montefeltro in commemoration of the treacherous killing of Oddantonio, sums up by itself the most typical expressive values of P. della F. The perfect and luminous architecture, such as only the designer of a great part of the same Ducal Palace of Urbino could imagine (Salmi), separates and at the same time unites two scenes linked by symbolic analogy: on the right, the young Oddantonio is between his two treacherous friends; on the left, by means of perspective, the thought meditates on the flagellation of Christ, which takes place, as in a premonitory dream, in a setting suggestive and precious for the quality of its architectural elements, almost of ivory, and the clarity of the bodies motionless in space.
For Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza the painter executed the double portrait in the Uffizi, on the reverse of which are painted the allegorical chariots with the virtues of the two illustrious personages. Projected against a limpid and cold sky, dominating the landscape seen from above, the two symmetrical profiles surpass, in height of style, the customary portraits of the early Renaissance, and take on a value of exceptional monumentality. But it is above all in wall painting that the artist achieves extraordinary efficacy, as in the Resurrection of Christ of Borgo San Sepolcro, a symbolic theme of the artist's birthplace, developed with unusual breadth of effects and grandeur of compositional modes, as in the Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta Kneeling before St. Sigismund, of the Malatesta Temple in Rimini, but above all in the cycle of frescoes of the choir of the church of St. Francis in Arezzo, where he narrated the Stories of the Cross (1453-64). Here the artist laid out his world, going beyond the narrative pretext into a solemnity of compositional modes, quickened by a palette which, while recalling the experiences of Paolo Uccello, carried pictorial abstraction to its highest development, modeled on the surrounding world, both rustic and aristocratic. Among the many scenes of the fresco cycle, mention should be made of: the Meeting of the Queen of Sheba with Solomon, in which, as in the Flagellation of Urbino, architecture marks the rhythm of the composition; the Finding of the True Cross, with the tests to recognize the truth of the relic, narrated with rhythmic solemnity, against backgrounds of Albertian architecture, which confirm the artist's architectural activity, the two Battles of Constantine and of Chosroes, in which the heraldic and decorative impulse of Paolo Uccello gives way to the motionless and grandiose projection of the combatants in a rigorous perspectival arrangement, such as to justify the definition given of his painting as: « perspectival synthesis of form-color » (Longhi). In the Dream of Constantine, moreover, from the same series of frescoes, the sudden light that comes from above provokes a plastic intensification of the whole setting, creating, in the open tent where the Emperor sleeps and around the armed guards, an atmosphere of dream such as painting had never until then attempted: from these investigations indeed proceed the luminism of Raphael in the Liberation of St. Peter of the Vatican Stanze, and, later, even the Caravaggesque investigations of constructive light.
Among the works of his mature period should be remembered: the polyptych of Perugia, with the surprising Annunciation of the cymatium, conceived in a wholly new way also in relation to the lower part of the picture, and the predella with the Stigmata of St. Francis, a passage of extraordinary atmospheric suggestion. From the same period are remembered the Madonna of Sinigallia now in the Ducal Palace of Urbino, a perfect plastic construction in a setting extremely measured in luministic effects that still recall Flemish investigations, and, in the Pinacoteca of Brera, the great altarpiece with the Madonna and Saints and Federico da Montefeltro, the latter kneeling, dressed in full armor, a painting that sums up the problems tackled by the great artist and resolved with a perfect fusion of style between the already Bramantesque architectures of the background and the figured composition. To P. della F. or to his school are attributed certain perspectival panels with architecture, of which a marvelous example is that of the Ducal Palace of Urbino. Such works, although they do not reveal the direct execution of the master, are a rare testimony of his pictorial problems and also of his architectural aspirations, in the purely humanistic conception of an « ideal city » such as, moreover, Leon Battista Alberti himself dreamed of.
The importance of P. della F. has been emphasized, above all during the last few decades, but in particular by R. Longhi, who was the first to understand its singular expressive value in a « metaphysical » tension
PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA - The Dream of Constantine. Fresco in the church of St. Francis in Arezzo.
opposed to the naturalistic researches of the Tuscan Quattrocento. His lofty personality impresses a wholly particular character on the Ferrarese school through the effect of the artist's activity in Ferrara around 1450. But the influence of his painting goes beyond the Renaissance: on the one hand, through Antonello da Messina, it reaches Venice and sharpens its coloristic and above all "tonal" tendencies; on the other, in central Italy, it stimulates to grandiose firmness the art of Lorenzo da Viterbo, Antoniazzo Romano, Luca Signorelli, forming, with the architectural and pictorial exemplars of Urbino, precious examples of harmony and contemplative serenity for Raphael himself. - See plate XCI.
Bibliography9 works
Valerio Mariani