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 :. | Dke Battista Sforza | The Duchess of Urbino | senigallia madonna | Polyptych of the Misericordia: Sts Sebastian and John the Baptist | madonna del parto |
Related Artists:
JOHNSON, Cornelius
Flemish-born English Baroque Era Painter, 1593-1661
Ciro Ferri
Italian Baroque Era Painter and Sculptor , ca.1634-1689 was an Italian Baroque sculptor and painter, the chief pupil and successor of Pietro da Cortona. He was born in Rome, where he began working under Cortona and with a team of artists in the extensive fresco decorations of the Quirinal Palace (1656-1659). He collaborated with Cortona and completed for him the extensive frescoed ceilings and other internal decorations begun in the Pitti Palace, Florence (1659-1665). His independent masterpiece is considered an extensive series of scriptural frescoes in the church of Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore (Bergamo). In addition, also well known is his an altarpiece of St Ambrose Healing the Sick in the church of Sant'Ambrogio della Massima in Rome. In 1670, he began the painting of the cupola of Sant'Agnese in Agone in central Rome, in a style recalling of Lanfranco's work in the dome of Sant'Andrea della Valle; but died before it was completed in 1693 by his successor Sebastiano Corbellini. He executed also a large amount of miscellaneous designs, such as etchings and frontispieces for books; and served as an architect as well. Ferri was appointed to direct the Florentine students in Rome, and Gabbiani was one of his leading pupils. As regards style, Ferri ranks as chief of the grand manner of Cortona, as opposed to the more sober and spare style promulgated by Andrea Sacchi, and continued by Carlo Maratta and others.
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
J. A. D. Ingres (1780-1867) was born in Montauban on August 29, 1780, the son of an unsuccessful sculptor and painter. French painter. He was the last grand champion of the French classical tradition of history painting. He was traditionally presented as the opposing force to Delacroix in the early 19th-century confrontation of Neo-classicism and Romanticism, but subsequent assessment has shown the degree to which Ingres, like Neo-classicism, is a manifestation of the Romantic spirit permeating the age. The chronology of Ingres's work is complicated by his obsessive perfectionism, which resulted in multiple versions of a subject and revisions of the original. For this reason, all works cited in this article are identified by catalogue.