PIERO della FRANCESCA. — Born c. 1416 in Borgo San Sepolcro, died there in 1492, this greatest of artists came into contact with Sienese painting of the early Quattrocento (especially that of Sassetta, active in San Sepolcro), as well as with the work of Masaccio, Paolo Uccello, and Domenico Veneziano. Yet his highly personal nature soon turned toward a decisive architectural approach, the ultimate result of Florentine research at the dawn of the Renaissance. His natural disposition for architectural rhythms inspired him, in his later years, to write the celebrated treatise *De prospectiva pingendi*, from which Luca Pacioli derived much of his mathematical studies.
His instinctive geometric measure was amply balanced by an intuitive, clear, and natural vision of the surrounding world, enabling him to harmoniously blend mathematical speculation with the immediacy of optical experience, almost in the Flemish manner. The *Baptism* in the National Gallery, London, together with the panel *St. Jerome and a Donor* in the Accademia, Venice, marks the starting point of a subtle and restrained painting in which the volume of bodies is achieved through formal simplification and tonal relationships among the various objects in the composition. Light, falling vertically upon the scene, enlivens the color, abolishing shadows and replacing plastic chiaroscuro with the effect of a crystalline, pure chromaticism that demands the stillness of the scene for its full impact, as is evident in the *Nativity* in London, a rustic idyll entirely new to Tuscan painting.
These elements are refined in the polyptych of San Sepolcro with the *Virgin of Mercy* at its center, constructed in frankly architectural terms like an ancient idol. The *Flagellation* in the Ducal Palace of Urbino, commissioned by Federico da Montefeltro to commemorate the treacherous murder of Oddantonio, alone encapsulates the most typical expressive values of Piero della Francesca. The perfect, luminous architecture, such as only the designer of much of the Ducal Palace of Urbino himself could have imagined (Salmi), simultaneously separates and unites two scenes linked by symbolic analogy: on the right, the young Oddantonio is among the two treacherous friends; on the left, through perspective, thought meditates on the flagellation of Christ, which occurs, as in a prophetic dream, in an evocative and precious setting for the quality of its architectural elements, almost of ivory, and the clarity of the immobile bodies in space.
For Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza, the painter executed the double portrait now in the Uffizi, whose reverse depicts the allegorical chariots with the virtues of the two illustrious figures. Projected against a clear, cold sky, dominating the landscape seen from above, the two symmetrical profiles surpass, in stylistic elevation, the usual portraits of the early Renaissance and assume a value of exceptional monumentality. Yet it is above all in mural painting that the artist achieves extraordinary efficacy: thus in the *Resurrection of Christ* in Borgo San Sepolcro, a symbolic theme tied to the artist’s birthplace, rendered with unusual breadth of effect and grandeur of compositional manner; thus in the *Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta Kneeling before St. Sigismund* in the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini; but above all in the cycle of frescoes in the choir of the church of San Francesco in Arezzo, where he depicted the *Legends of the True Cross* (1453–64). Here the artist organized his world, transcending the narrative pretext in a solemnity of compositional methods, enlivened by a palette that, while drawing on the experiences of Paolo Uccello, carried pictorial abstraction to its highest development, modeled on the surrounding world, both rustic and noble.
Among the many scenes in the fresco cycle, notable are: the *Meeting of the Queen of Sheba and Solomon*, in which, as in the *Flagellation* of Urbino, architecture marks the rhythm of the composition; the *Discovery of the True Cross*, with the tests to verify the truth of the relic, narrated with rhythmic solemnity against backgrounds of Albertian architecture, which confirm in 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 immobile and grand projection of the combatants in a rigorous perspectival arrangement, such as to justify the definition of his painting as “a perspectival synthesis of form and color” (Longhi). In the *Dream of Constantine* from the same series of frescoes, the sudden light descending from above produces a plastic intensification of the entire setting, creating, within the open tent where the Emperor sleeps and around the armed guards, an atmosphere of dream such as painting had never before attempted. From these researches indeed stem the luminism of Raphael’s *Liberation of St. Peter* in the Vatican Rooms, and, later, even the Caravaggesque investigations into constructive light.
Among the works of his mature period are the polyptych of Perugia, with the astonishing *Annunciation* of the pinnacle, conceived in a wholly novel manner even in relation to the lower part of the panel, and the predella with the *Stigmatization of St. Francis*, a passage of extraordinary environmental suggestiveness. From the same period date the *Madonna of Sinigallia*, now in the Ducal Palace of Urbino, a perfect plastic construction in an environment of extremely measured luministic effects that still recall Flemish research, and, in the Pinacoteca di Brera, the great altarpiece with the *Madonna and Saints* and Federico da Montefeltro, the latter kneeling, dressed in full armor—a painting that summarizes the problems addressed by the great artist and resolved with perfect fusion of style between the already Bramantesque architectures of the background and the figurative composition.
To Piero della Francesca or his school are attributed several perspectival panels with architectural settings, of which a superb example is the panel of the Ducal Palace of Urbino. Though these works do not reveal the master’s direct hand, they are rare testimony to his pictorial concerns and even to his architectural aspirations, in the thoroughly humanistic conception of an “ideal city” such as, moreover, Leon Battista Alberti himself dreamed of.
The importance of Piero della Francesca has been emphasized, especially in recent decades, but in particular by R. Longhi, who was the first to grasp the singular expressive value of his work in a “metaphysical” tension.