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As a great master of the early Renaissance, Piero della Francesca created paintings for ecclesiastics, confaternities, and illustrious nobles throughout the Italian peninsula. Since the early twentieth century, the rational space, abstract designs, lucid illumination and naturalistic details of his pictures have attracted wide audiences. Piero's treatises on mathematics and perspective fascinate scholars in a wide range of disciplines. This Companion brings together new essays that offer a synthesis and overview of Piero's life and accomplishments as a painter and theoretician. ... Read more

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Piero della Francesca book
Terrific book I'd been looking for - came quickly, in excellent condition, and just as advertised.

Great Paiinting with Scholarhsip; in details
Confined to a small part of Italy Piero della Fransescalk is oone of the great artists of of the ages. Ginzbubg, a great historian, deals with all thje accounts of who and who is ij the paitinga to extract a plausible list of personalities. Acadmiec for experts, but an interestimg browse, with many illustrations to encourage the reader to see more of the paiktings. ... Read more

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This art guide examines the life and work of Pierro Della Francesca and analyses his masterpieces in detail, placing them in their social and historical context. ... Read more

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Hardcover portfolio with 14 page booklet and 28 plates. ... Read more

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Beautiful and vast in scale, Piero della Francesca's fresco cycle in the church of San Francesco in Arezzo is a masterpiece of colour, light and perspective - a panorama of battle scene and landscape filled with hundreds of intricately painted figures and lavish ornamentation. This work provides a close-up view of the frescoes, with colour photographs of the chapel's interior, including magnified details. It also provides a brief background history and a descriptive interpretation of the fresco cycle. ... Read more

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PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA

One of the major artists of the Quattrocento, Piero della Francesca, who died in 1492, turned mathematics and perspective into a mysticism of space and light. Piero's graceful planar geometry was a precursor of Cubism and 20th century abstraction.

Naomi Haskell concentrates on Piero's series of monumental Madonnas, the magnificent Madonna della Misericordia and the mysterious pregnant Goddess, the Madonna del Parto, also his Arezzo fresco cycle, the Resurrection, and the enigmatic Flagellation.

Piero della Francesca has one of the most special and distinctive forms of space in painting. The bright, timeless spaces of Piero della Francesca are instantly recognizable, and critics sometimes evoke Greek sculpture in connection with Piero’s paintings. One might also see in his hermetic, ritualized and timeless paintings the art of Chinese landscape painting, with its evocations of emptiness, which hints at the radical void of Eastern mysticism (in Zen Buddhism and Taoism). Piero’s hypnotic art coolly melds science with art, space with spirit, the personal with the cosmic, and history, myth and religion with time.

Like the art of ancient Greece, Piero’s paintings rejoice in eternal brilliance, an architectonic precision, a ‘Classical’ feeling for proportion and harmony. In Piero della Francesca’s epoch, perspective, proportion and geometry attained a fetishistic quality. ‘Seeing was theory-laden’ as Michael Baxandall put it. Piero’s sense of mathematics and perspective took in commercial arithemetic on the one hand, and the transcendent purity of the Pythagorean solids on the other.

For Piero dela Francesca, geometry, proportion, perspective and mathematics had a magical quality. His art exalts, on one level, a jouissance of mathematics and measurement, in which the ‘science’ of Renaissance perspective is joyously explored. Piero seemed to learn towards the cool, impersonal, impassive scientific inquiry of Aristotlean philosophy, rather than the more sensuous, more obviously mystical aspects of Platonic philosophy.

Bibliography, notes, illustrations. ... Read more

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Originally published in 1901.This volume from the Cornell University Library's print collections was scanned on an APT BookScan and converted to JPG 2000 format by Kirtas Technologies.All titles scanned cover to cover and pages may include marks notations and other marginalia present in the original volume. ... Read more

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The paintings of Piero della Francesca have remained intriguing because of their distinctive three-dimensional space and unemotional figures, but the artist himself remains a mystery. Curiously, his activities were not confined to painting. He wrote treatises on perspective, commercial arithmetic, and geometry, all without ever settling in any of the centers of great intellectual achievement. James R.Banker has unearthed previously undiscovered documents that make it possible for him to write a social biography of the artist that accounts for his early formation. The Culture of San Sepolcro during the Youth of Piero della Francesca examines the culture of the southeastern Tuscan town of Piero's youth. Analyses of San Sepolcro's political and social organization and its specific religious culture serve to enhance our understanding of Piero's early career prior to his experiences in Florence.
Piero della Francesca has remained an enigma because of the contradictions observed in his life and art. Banker's archival research has enabled him to clear away some of the obscurities. This book situates Piero in the earliest social and intellectual worlds within which he moved. Heretofore, writers on Piero have begun his putative formation in Florence in 1439. Banker demonstrates that the young painter's formation began prior to 1439, when he was surrounded by his family and the local artisans' community.
The Culture of San Sepolcro during the Youth of Piero della Francesca integrates social and art history in order to better understand the formation of a Renaissance artist. It will be vital to scholars and historians of the Italian Renaissance city states, as well as to art historians and those interested in the relationship of art and society.
James R. Banker is Professor of History, North Carolina State University.
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