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 :. | sigismondo malatesta, detail from st sigismund and | senigallia madonna | legend of the true cross | Detail of Baptism of Christ | Mary Magdalene |
Related Artists:
Raffaellino del garbo
Italian Early Renaissance Painter , ca.1466-1524 Italian painter and draughtsman. According to Vasari, he began as the most gifted assistant of Filippino Lippi and the most promising painter of the new generation but never fulfilled expectations, deteriorating into mediocrity and worse. Raffaellino's first known work is the frescoed vault of a small antechamber off Filippino Lippi's Carafa Chapel in S Maria sopra Minerva, Rome, uncovered during restoration in the 1960s. It was decorated with pagan themes, to Filippino's designs, apparently after the main chapel was completed in 1493. Filippino's influence is evident in the all'antica detail and animated figure style, to which Raffaellino brought a youthful freshness and charm. Vasari, in his account of the vault, likened it to an illuminator's work. It has been suggested that Raffaellino remained in Rome and worked with Bernardino Pinturicchio in the Borgia apartments in the Vatican, where some frescoes of 1495 show stylistic affinities with Raffaellino's work in S Maria sopra Minerva.
Neeffs, Peter the Elder
Flemish, Approx. 1578-1661
Moran, Edward
English-born American, 1829-1901 American painter of marine and historical subjects, b. England. He came to the United States with his family in 1844. In 1899 he completed a series of 13 paintings illustrating epochs in the maritime history of America from the landing of Leif Ericsson to the return of Admiral Dewey's fleet from the Philippines in 1899 (Pennsylvania Mus. of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia). His brother Thomas Moran, 1837?C1926, was an American landscape painter, illustrator, and etcher. He accompanied the exploring expeditions of Professor F. V. Hayden to the Yellowstone River (1871) and of Major J. W. Powell down the Colorado River (1873). Subsequently, he made the illustrations on wood for both expeditions' reports and the sketches from which he painted the two large canvases now in the Capitol at Washington, D.C., The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone and Chasm of the Colorado. In 1884 he became a member of the National Academy of Design. As a painter Moran was strongly influenced by the art of Turner. Other examples of his painting are Bringing Home the Cattle (Buffalo, N.Y., Mus.); The Grand Canal, Venice; The Dream of the Orient; and Tower of Cortez, in Mexico, a watercolor. He also produced many etchings and magazine illustrations on wood.