MILAN – Piero di Benedetto de ‘Franceschi, commonly known as Piero della Francesca, was an Italian painter and mathematician. Among the most emblematic personalities of the Italian Renaissance, he gave life to a spacious, monumental and impassively rational painting in which the absolute mathematical rigor of the creations helps to enhance the abstract and iconic quality of the work, giving his masterpieces a powerful sacred value. . THE BEGINNINGS– There is no news about his life and therefore it is not known what kind of studies he followed, but given the historical period it is assumed that Piero della Francesca was well acquainted with the painting techniques used by the painters of his time and the Masters of the fourteenth century. Piero was born in Sansepolcro (which was then called “Borgo San Sepolcro”) in an unspecified year between 1406 and 1416 into a family of merchants and dyers. He trained in Florence together with Domenico Veneziano with whom I collaborate for the lost frescoes of the choir of S. Egidio in Florence. His first works, which can be placed before 1450, show us the artist’s character: very rigorous perspective structure, perfection of geometric volumes, representation of grandiose figures immersed in an atmosphere of diffused luminosity,THE ASSIGNMENTS IN THE VARIOUS ITALIAN COURTS– In the forties Piero stayed in various Italian courts: Urbino, Ferrara and probably Bologna, creating frescoes that have been completely lost. In 1442 Piero was once again a resident in Borgo Sansepolcro where he was one of the “popular councilors” in the municipal council. On 11 January 1445 he received from the local Confraternita della Misericordia the commission of a polyptych for the altar of their church: the contract provided for the completion of the work in three years, in reality the painter, disputed by the richest, most cultured and refined courts of Italy, employs fifteen. Starting from the fifth decade of the fifteenth century, Piero’s career took place alternating stays in the main courts of central-northern Italy and in his hometown. In 1451 Piero della Francesca and at the court of Rimini, where,STORIES OF THE TRUE CROSS – In 1452 he was called to replace Bicci di Lorenzo, deceased, in the mural decoration of the Main Chapel of San Francesco in Arezzo, where I fresco the famous Stories of the True Cross. The Stories of the True Cross, frescoed in three superimposed registers on the high walls, occupied it in a first phase until the end of the fifties, when Piero temporarily moved to Rome (1459), invited by the humanist Pope Pius II Piccolomini to paint in fresco some scenes in the Vatican palaces, destroyed fifty years later to make way for Raphael’s frescoes in the famous rooms. Among the most important works of the painter there is the tablet representing the Flagellation performed in the years between 1455 and 1460 in Urbino. IN URBINO, THE MOST FAMOUS WORKS– During the sixties and seventies Piero della Francesca often worked at the court of Urbino for Duke Federigo di Montefeltro, for whom other painters such as Francesco Laurana, Donato Bramante, Luca Pacioli, Paolo Uccello, Melozzo da Forli and the Flemish Pedro worked Berruguete and Giusto di Ghent. In this particular atmosphere he realizes some of his most famous works: the diptych with the portraits of the dukes, Federigo and his wife Battista Sforza, the famous Flagellation, as well as the Sacred Conversation for the church of San Bernardino, with the famous portrait in armor of Duke Federigo. LAST YEARS– From 1475 onwards the activity of Piero della Francesca seems to stop. Among his latest works we remember the Madonna di Senigallia from 1470 and the Sacra Conversazionedi Brera from 1472-74. Having become blind in the extreme years, Piero della Francesca died in Borgo San Sepolcro on 12 October 1492. Shortly after his death, his work was forgotten. Only towards the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the new current of historical “Pre-Raphaelite” painters and art admirers, did they rediscover Piero della Francesca.
