Piero della Francesca (c 1416-1492)

Painter, b. at Borgo San-Sepolcro, about 1420; d. there, 1492. The most usual form of his name is the traditional one, PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA, which is better authenticated in contemporary documents than what in late research had been supposed to be the more correct form, PIERO DEI FRANCESCHI (Gronau, Repertorium fur Kunstwissenschaft, xxiii, 392-4). He was the son of a notary, Ser Benedetto, a member of an influential family long identified with the government of the town - the Franceschi. His earliest artistic training is unknown, but he was active at Perugia in 1438, probably as an assistant to Domenico Veneziano, and he was certainly employed in the same capacity in the Church of Sant' Egidio, Florence, in 1439-40. To Domenico and probably also to Paolo Uccello, Florentine Realists who did much for the technical side of painting, we may ascribe the formative influence in his art. Piero first appears as an independent master in 1445, when he painted a still surviving altar-piece of many panels for the Brotherhood of the Misericordia in his native town. He is said to have laboured with Domenico at Loreto, and he was certainly at Rimini in 1451, when he painted a remarkable fresco in the chapel of San Francesco, representing Sigismondo Malatesta, Lord of Rimini, venerating his patron saint, Sigismund. After this he was active at Ferrara and Bologna, and, according to Vasari, he also decorated a room of the Vatican for Pope Nicholas V. In 1454 he was again at Borgo San-Sepolcro, where in 1460 he painted a fresco of St. Louis of Toulouse, now preserved in the town hall. It was probably between this date and 1466 that he painted his masterpiece, the frescoes in the choir of San Francesco at Arezzo, which may, however, have been begun earlier. The subject is the Story of the True Cross, involving incidents beginning with Adam and including the story of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, Constantine and St. Helena, Heraclius and Chosroes. These frescoes rank with those by Masaccio in the Brancacci Chapel as epoch-making in the decorative art of the fifteenth century. - Malaspina Biography

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