Piero della Francesca

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Presumed self-portrait of Piero della Francescas (bottom center left) in a fresco depicting the resurrection of Jesus Christ (Museo Civico, Sansepolcro )
Madonna del Parto (Madonna of the Nativity)

Piero della Francesca (actually Pietro di Benedetto dei Franceschi , also Pietro Borghese ; * around 1410–1420 in Borgo San Sepolcro / AR ; buried October 12, 1492 ibid) was an Italian painter of the early Renaissance , art theorist and mathematician.

Live and act

Piero probably spent his education and youth in Florence, where a light, pastel-like color was cultivated in the 1430s, which was also propagated by Leon Battista Alberti in his painting tractat ( trattato della pittura ) in 1435 . Above all Domenico Veneziano , for whom Piero worked in Florence in 1439, but also Fra Angelico will have influenced him in this sense, while he was impressed by Masaccio with his thoughtful arrangement of the figures in the room. Piero probably never returned to Florence after 1440, but in 1459 he worked briefly for the Pope in Rome , otherwise from 1442 he worked in the Tuscan provinces ( Arezzo , Sansepolcro) and for provincial princes in Urbino , Ferrara or Rimini . Since there are only a few reliable data on the life and individual works of Piero, the chronology of his works is controversial and the information in the following catalog raisonné gives correspondingly spreading periods of origin. In the past, attempts were made to derive a sequence of works from the development of style, but more recent research is based more on historical (Ginzburg) and associated iconographic evidence (Roeck) in order to make the origins of individual works probable. In addition to the bourgeois donors of church frescos, there are above all courtly circles around the rulers in Rimini and Sansepolcro ( Malatesta ) or Urbino ( Montefeltro ), whose arguments between them are reflected in coded image details. Piero's visual language is shaped by ancient reminiscences, to which he had access between 1452 and 1466 in the circle of artists and humanists at the court of Federico da Montefeltro in Urbino and which also shaped his later theoretical work. Melozzo da Forli was one of the artists he met at the Herzogshof .

His students presumably included Luca Signorelli and Pietro Perugino, as well as the mathematician Luca Pacioli (around 1445–1514), who was later suspected of plagiarism by Giorgio Vasari .

Piero developed unmistakably peculiar style features. The scenarios of his paintings are distinguished by serious solemnity. The light that floods through everything, however, softens the severity of these figure compositions. It is based on basic geometric structures, a grid of verticals and horizontal lines, which determined his style for life right up to his theoretical late work. This explains why his work, which had been neglected for a long time, was only rediscovered and admired in the 1920s, the time of the New Objectivity and the Pittura metafisica .

Around 1478 he stopped painting in order to devote himself entirely to theory. He wrote important books on art theory that deal primarily with perspective , geometry and trigonometry : De prospectiva pendingi and Libellus de quinque corporibus regularibus . Piero della Francesca was the first painter who tried to solve perspective problems with the help of mathematics or to perfect the handling of perspective through geometric and mathematical aids. There is also a treatise by him called Del Abaco in the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence . He was responsible for the rediscovery of six Archimedean bodies .

He made his will on July 5, 1487. Five years later he died blind and lonely in his place of birth. He exerted a great influence on the following generation of painters such as Andrea Mantegna and Luca Signorelli , and Leonardo and Raffael must also have known his works.

Works (selection)

  • Baptism of Christ , around 1450, sure before 1465, London, National Gallery.
  • Nativity , around 1460. National Gallery , London
  • Polyptych of the Madonna's Protective Cloak , around 1445–1462. Museo Civico, Sansepolcro
  • Madonna del Parto (Madonna of the Nativity), fresco, around 1450 to 1475. Monterchi (south of Sansepolcro in Tuscany). Exhibited in a dedicated Museo della Madonna del Parto since the extensive restoration in 1992/93 . → Main article: Madonna del Parto
  • St. Hieronymus , around 1440, Gemäldegalerie , Berlin
  • St. Jerome with a donor , around 1448–1451, Gallerie dell'Accademia , Venice
  • Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta , around 1450. Musée du Louvre , Paris
  • Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta praying before St. Sigismund , fresco, 1451. Tempio Malatestiano , Rimini
  • Legend of the True Cross , cycle of frescoes in the Church of San Francesco, Arezzo. Piero's main work from the 1450s was restored from 1991 to 1996. The individual murals are covered in more detail in the article on the church: ( The legend of the true cross ).
  • St. Julianus , fresco around 1455, Museo Civico, Sansepolcro
  • The Flagellation of Christ , around 1452 or 1460. Galleria Nazionale delle Marche , Urbino. Scholarship and criminal acumen try again and again to decipher the secrets of the enigmatic double image. → Main article: The Flagellation of Christ (Piero della Francesca)
  • Polyptichon of St. Anthony , between 1460 and 1470. Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria, Perugia
  • Polyptichon of St. Augustine , 1460–1469. The altarpiece has been dismantled, the parts are in the following museums: National Gallery, London and Frick Collection , New York, Museo Poldi Pezzoli , Milan, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon and National Gallery of Art , Washington
  • Resurrection of Christ , fresco, around 1460. Museo Civico, Sansepolcro
  • Maria Magdalena , fresco, around 1466. Cathedral, Arezzo
  • Hercules , fresco, around 1470. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum , Boston
  • Double portrait of Battista Sforza with her husband Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino . Around 1465 to 1473. Galleria degli Uffizi , Florence. → Main article: Diptych of Federico da Montefeltro with his wife Battista Sforza
  • The Pala Montefeltro (Mary and Child, surrounded by saints), around 1459 to 1465. Pinacoteca di Brera , Milan. → Main article: Pala Montefeltro
  • Madonna and Child and Four Saints , between 1450 and 1470. Clark Art Institute , Williamstown, Massachusetts
  • The Madonna of Senigallia , 1472. Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino

Fonts

  • De prospectiva pendingi . 3 vol. Ed. By G. Nicco-Fasola. Florence 1984. (Ms. Regg. A 41/2. Biblioteca Panizzi, Reggio Emilia )
  • Trattato d'abaco . Dal Codice Ashburnhamiano 280 (359-291) della Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana di Firenze. A cura di Gino Arrighi. Pisa, Domus Galileana 1970. (Testimonianze di storia della scienza. 6.)
  • Libellus de quinque corporibus regolaribus. (Late work) Edited by C. Grayson, CM Dalai Emiliani, CGMaccagni Mancini. Florence, Giunti 1995. (MS Urb.lat.632. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana Rome)
  • Piero's Archimedes , [fac-sim of Codice Riccardiano 106 by Piero della Francesca]; from. Roberto Manescalchi, Sansepolcro 2007.
  • Piero's Archimedes , [fac-sim of Codice Riccardiano 106 by Piero della Francesca]; eds. Roberto Manescalchi, Matteo Martelli, James Banker, Giovanna Lazzi, Pierdaniele Napolitani, Riccardo Bellè. Sansepolcro, Grafica European Center of Fine Arts e Vimer Industrie Grafiche Italiane, 2007. 2 vol. (82 ff., XIV-332 pp. English, Français, Espanol, Deutsch, Italiano and Arabic) ISBN 978-88-95450-25-4 .

literature

Web links

Commons : Piero della Francesca  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. M. Jordan: The missing treatise of Piero della Francesca on the five regular bodies . JSTOR : 4301707 (It could also be the mere intent of translating Pico's treatise into Italian.)
  2. On reception see the foreword by Martin Warnke zu Ginzburg, Erkundungen, pp. 7-13.
  3. Pages 241, 253 and 274 in: JV Field: Rediscovering the Archimedean polyhedra . Piero della Francesca, Luca Pacioli , Leonardo da Vinci , Albrecht Dürer , Daniele Barbaro , and Johannes Kepler . In: Archive for History of Exact Sciences . tape 50 , no. 3-4 , September 1997, pp. 241–289 , doi : 10.1007 / BF00374595 ( direct link [accessed on April 7, 2016] doi defective).
  4. ^ Ingeborg Walter: Piero della Francesca - Madonna del parto. A work of art between politics and devotion . Frankfurt: Fischer, 1992
  5. Bernd Roeck : Murderer, painter and patron. Piero della Francesca's "Flagellation". An art-historical crime story . Munich: Beck, 2006, ISBN 978-3406614231
  6. On the Sphere and the Cylinder; On the Measurement of the Circle; On Conoids and Spheroids; On spirals; On the Equilibrium of Planes; On the Quadrature of the Parabola; The Sand Reckoner . 1450-1460. Retrieved July 13, 2013.