Italian Early Renaissance Painter, ca.1422-1492 Italian painter and theorist. His work is the embodiment of rational, calm, monumental painting in the Italian Early Renaissance, an age in which art and science were indissolubly linked through the writings of Leon Battista Alberti. Born two generations before Leonardo da Vinci, Piero was similarly interested in the scientific application of the recently discovered rules of perspective to narrative or devotional painting, especially in fresco, of which he was an imaginative master; and although he was less universally creative than Leonardo and worked in an earlier idiom, he was equally keen to experiment with painting technique. Piero was as adept at resolving problems in Euclid, whose modern rediscovery is largely due to him, as he was at creating serene, memorable figures, whose gestures are as telling and spare as those in the frescoes of Giotto or Masaccio. His tactile, gravely convincing figures are also indebted to the sculpture of Donatello, an equally attentive observer of Classical antiquity. In his best works, such as the frescoes in the Bacci Chapel in S Francesco, Arezzo, there is an ideal balance between his serene, classical compositions and the figures that inhabit them, the whole depicted in a distinctive and economical language. In his autograph works Piero was a perfectionist, creating precise, logical and light-filled images (although analysis of their perspective schemes shows that these were always subordinated to narrative effect). However, he often delegated important passages of works (e.g. the Arezzo frescoes) to an ordinary, even incompetent, assistant.   Related Paintings of Piero della Francesca :. | st romualdo, polyptych of the misericordia | Polyptych of the Misericordia: Archangel Gabriel | the montefeltro altarpiece, details | legend of the true cross | The Penance of St.Jerome |
Related Artists:
LIGOZZI, Jacopo
Italian painter, Florentine school (b. 1547, Verona, d. 1627, Firenze) Italian painter, draughtsman, miniaturist and printmaker. He was one of the most productive artists in 17th-century Florence, although in the context of the Florentine Baroque, with its pageantry and decorative form, Ligozzi remained as much a foreigner in terms of his precise drawing, veristic figures and expressive content, as he was by birth. He was the son of the painter Giovanni Ermanno Ligozzi ( fl 1572-88; d before 1605) and came from a Veronese family of painters and designers of armour, tapestries and embroidery on silk. Other members of the family who were painters (Fumagalli in 1986 exh. cat.) were Jacopo's brother Francesco (d before 1635), whose career seems to have been in Verona, his cousin Francesco di Mercurio, who worked for the Medici in Florence in 1590-91
POURBUS, Frans the Younger
Flemish painter (b. 1569, Antwerpen, d. 1622, Paris). was a Flemish painter, son of Frans Pourbus the Elder and grandson of Pieter Pourbus. He was born in Antwerp and died in Paris. He is also referred to as "Frans II". Pourbus worked for many of the highly influential people of his day, including the Brussels-based Spanish Regents of the Netherlands, the Duke of Mantua and Marie de' Medici, Queen of France. Works of his can be found in the Louvre, the Prado, the Rijksmuseum, the Royal College of Art,
Antoni Piotrowski
(Bulgarian: Antoni Pyotrovski; 1853-1924) was a Polish Romanticist and Realist painter. Piotrowski was born in Nietulisko Duże in 1853 near Kunew, then in the Russian Empire (today in Poland), to a sheet iron worker. From 1869 on, Piotrowski studied painting with professor Wojciech Gerson. From 1875 to 1877 he was tutored in Munich by Wilhelm Lindenschmit the Younger and from 1877 to 1879 his teacher was Jan Matejko of the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakew. In 1879, Piotrowski arrived to the newly-liberated Principality of Bulgaria as a correspondent of the British issues The Graphic and The Illustrated London News and the French Illustration and Le Monde Illustre. He moved to Paris only to return to Bulgaria in 1885 to join the Serbo-Bulgarian War as a Bulgarian volunteer. For his merits during the fighting he was honoured with an Order of Bravery. During his time in the Bulgarian Army Piotrowski painted the Battle of Slivnitsa, the storming of Tsaribrod and the Bulgarian entry in Pirot. All his nine military works were purchased by the Bulgarian state and are exhibited in the National Museum of Military History in Sofia. He also published graphics from the war in various Western European illustrated issues. Among his works were also portraits of Bulgarian princes (knyaze) Alexander of Battenberg and Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha; Piotrowski was awarded an Order of Civil Merit by the latter. Piotrowski returned to Bulgaria in 1889: he visited Batak and painted his epic canvas The Batak Massacre. This painting of his won an award at the Plovdiv Fair in 1892. In 1900 Piotrowski returned to Poland and settled in Warsaw.