Renaissance
Piero della Francesca (1415–1492)
Italian Early Renaissance painter.
Piero della Francesca (c. 1415 – 1492) was the great geometer among Early Renaissance painters, a master in whom the Quattrocento's new science of perspective became a spiritual instrument. Born in Borgo Sansepolcro on the Tuscan-Umbrian border, he trained partly in Florence — where he is documented in 1439 assisting Domenico Veneziano — and absorbed there the perspective of Brunelleschi and Alberti and the light and volume of Masaccio. He worked for provincial communes and for the humanist court of Federico da Montefeltro at Urbino, remaining rooted in his native town, where he also served on the civic council.
His painting is unmistakable: figures of grave stillness set in luminous, measurable space, bathed in an even, silver daylight that seems to have no single source. Foreshortening, proportion, and the geometry of the picture are never displayed for their own sake but are used to still the image into a kind of eternal present — the sleeping soldiers beneath the risen Christ, the impassive witnesses of the Flagellation, the pale dawn over the Baptism. Vasari records that in old age Piero's eyesight failed, and that his mathematical achievements were partly appropriated by others.
Piero was also, uniquely, an author of mathematical and artistic treatises. His De Prospectiva Pingendi is the first surviving treatise devoted wholly to the perspective of the painter, and his Trattato d'abaco and Libellus de quinque corporibus regularibus are serious works of geometry. For Piero, painting and mathematics were a single discipline — the measured construction of the visible world.
The words the record keeps using: geometric, serene, still, measured, luminous, solemn, monumental.
At a glance
- Lived 1415–1492
- Origin Italian (Tuscan, from Borgo Sansepolcro)
- Worked in Florence
- Era Renaissance
- Movements Early Renaissance
- Mediums Fresco, Egg tempera on panel, Oil on panel
- Techniques Buon fresco, Tempera hatching, Linear perspective
Works in the archive
- The Baptism of Christ, 1450 (National Gallery, London (NG665))
An early altarpiece painted for a chapel in Piero's native Sansepolcro, showing Christ baptized by John the Baptist in the pale light of a Tuscan morning. The dove of the Holy Spirit hovers as a foreshortened white disc… - The Dream of Constantine (Legend of the True Cross), 1458 (Basilica of San Francesco, Arezzo)
One panel of Piero's great fresco cycle of the Legend of the True Cross in the choir of San Francesco at Arezzo, his masterpiece of narrative wall painting. It shows the emperor Constantine asleep in his campaign tent… - The Flagellation of Christ, 1460 (Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino)
A small, endlessly debated panel — its precise date (c. 1455–1470) and meaning are still argued — that divides its space between the scourging of Christ in a receding classical hall at the left and three enigmatic… - The Resurrection, 1463 (Museo Civico, Sansepolcro)
A civic fresco for the town hall of Sansepolcro (whose very name means 'holy sepulchre'), showing the risen Christ stepping from his tomb over four sleeping soldiers. Christ's gaze meets the viewer with grave authority;…
What was said
Piero held painting to be founded on the mathematics of perspective, dividing the art into drawing (the measured outline of bodies), proportion, and the coloring of the diminished, foreshortened forms — the painter's task being to set measured bodies convincingly in measured space.
For Piero geometry and painting were one study: alongside his pictures he composed serious mathematical works, including a treatise on the abacus and calculation and a study of the five regular (Platonic) solids, treating the construction of visible form as a branch of geometry.
Vasari praised Piero as an outstanding master of geometry and perspective, and lamented that in his final years, his sight failing, the credit for his mathematical studies was in part taken by others.
Lineage
Learned from Masaccio
What would Piero make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Piero della Francesca", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Piero · Keep a life moment the way Piero would · Pictures made after Piero