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 :. | The Baptism of Christ | senigallia madonna | The Flagellation | details from the baptism of chist | the legend of the true cross, detail |
Related Artists:
Francis Bacon
English , 1561-1626 British statesman and philosopher, father of modern scientific method. He studied at Cambridge and at Gray's Inn. A supporter of the Earl of Essex, Bacon turned against him when Essex was tried for treason. Under James I he rose steadily, becoming successively solicitor general (1607), attorney general (1613), and lord chancellor (1618). Convicted of accepting bribes from those being tried in his court, he was briefly imprisoned and permanently lost his public offices; he died deeply in debt. He attempted to put natural science on a firm empirical foundation in the Novum Organum (1620), which sets forth his scientific method. His elaborate classification of the sciences inspired the 18th-century French Encyclopedists, and his empiricism inspired 19th-century British philosophers of science. His other works include The Advancement of Learning (1605),
Nicholaes Berchem
1620-1683 Dutch Nicholaes Berchem Gallery
Claude Deruet
(1588-1660) was a famous French Baroque painter of the 17th century, from the city of Nancy. Deruet was an apprentice to Jacques Bellange, the official court painter to Charles III, Duke of Lorraine. He was in Rome between ca. 1612 and 1619, where - according to Andre Felibien - he studied with the painter and etcher Antonio Tempesta. During his stay in Rome, he painted the Japanese samurai Hasekura Tsunenaga on a visit to Europe in 1615. Deruet was made a noble by the Duke of Lorraine in 1621, and was then made a Knight of the Order of St Michel in 1645 by Louis XIII, who had in 1641 absorbed most of Lorraine into France. He had a luxurious residence in Nancy, named La Romaine, where Louis XIII and his Queen stayed in 1633. Claude Lorrain was an apprentice to Claude Deruet in 1623 for one year. He also married and had two sons, one of whom became a painter.