Piero Della Francesca
By Jannie Ngo

Piero della Francesca was an Italian Cinquecento painter who was born in Florence perhaps around the town of Sansepolcro in about 1420. He also died at Sansepolcro in 1492. The documentary sources about Piero's life is quite scanty, the most reliable contemporary source is probably Vasari's "Life of Piero" in his famous compilation of the "Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects" published about a century later after his birth in 1550 and 1568.

Piero della Francesca's early life and childhood seemed typical of many Italian families who were becoming prosperous with various trading or merchant ventures. His father, Benedetto de' Franceschi was "a tanner and shoemaker" who became successful enough to allow Piero be "well educated and literate in Latin". Though after these auspicious beginnings in academic life, little is known about Piero's early training as an aspiring painter. Most scholars would assume that he followed the conventional route and "was instructed by local masters who had been influenced by Sienese art".

Then, Piero's artistic career seem to have begun on a very high note when in 1439 he worked as an associate (or apprentice) of Domenico Veneziano, who was then painting frescoes for the hospital in Florence. Here, in Florence, Piero was exposed first hand to the flourishing of the early Renaissance style and the cultural richness of the big city. There he probably studied the statuary of Donatello and Luca Della Robbia, the buildings of Filippo Brunelleschi, and the paintings of Masaccio and Fra Angelico. He could have also read the theoretical treatise on painting by the Humanist and architect Leon Battista Alberti. Thus this was a tremendous period of learning and absorption of this fomenting Renaissance notion of humanism and more "realistic" types of paintings.

After his fruitful sojourn in Florence Piero began to establish himself as a fledging painter in his hometwon of Sansepolcro (where he was elected to the town council in 1442) with a commission from the Confraternita delta Misericordia for an altarpiece. For the rest of Piero's career it would seem that worked freely between the provincial and relatively quiet environment of Sansepolcro and the bustle of "Humanistic life of the Renaissance in artistic and intellectual centres such as Ferrara and Rimini." Piero delta Francesca's "mature" style is exemplified by the frescoes he painted in the choir of the church of S. Francesco at Arezzo. The fresco was begun by Bicci di Lorenzo who left the project uncompleted by his untimely death in 1452. Piero completed the narrative cycle, depicting "The Legend of the True Cross" in 1466. His other important commission was to a fresco in the Vatican for Pope Pius II in 1459 Piers also developed friendships with influential wealthy patrons such as Count (later Duke) Federico da Montefeltro. Piero did a notable diptych portrait of Count Federico and his consort, Battista Sforza that dates to sometime after 1474. These two pendants probably commemorates their wedding in 1465 and also to honor his mistress who died in childbirth. The particular striking feature about these portraits is the way Piero had left the Duke's unidealized features be shown with great detail and with utmost fidelity. This along with the panoramic landscape behind would suggest influence from Netherlandish painting. The trend in painting that Piero seems to have piooneered was this attention and interest in the humanistic aspect of their depictions that related to the present and not so much invested with an impersonal spiritual aura.

During the last two decades of Piero s life he seems to have abandoned painting and veered towards more "intellectual" pursuits. Between 1474 and 1482 he wrote a treatise on painting called De Prospectiva Pingendi (On Perspective in Painting) and dedicated it to the Duke of Urbino. The books many expounds on the same concepts of Alberti and the Greek geometer Euclid. He evidently personally handwrote the original copy and also provided illustrations "with diagrams on geometric, proportional, and perspectival problems''. A second treatise, the De Quinque Corporibus Regularibus (On the Five Regular Bodies) again explores the notion of "perfect bodies" begun by Plato and Pythagoras. A minor controversy seems to have crop up in Pierces biography when the noted mathematician, Lucas Pacioli, seems to have took his ideas (by the accounts of his contemporaries) for his much praised treatise called De Divina Proportione directly from Piero's De Quinque Corporibus without any sort of acknowledgement, thus suggesting a form of plagarism by Pacioli. These insightful tracts written by Piero in his later years demonstrate his career-long fascination with geometry and mathematics as a basis for the formation of his own artistic conceptions. Piero's theoretical inspiration on the concepts of perspective seem to have been derived from his mentor Alberti and incidently, his ideas on the intricacies of the art of painting, especially its perspectival elements, would be studied and emulated by the next generation of "masters", like Leonardo da Vinci and Rafael.