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 :. | Die Konigin von Saba betet das Kreuzesholz and Ausschnitt | the montefeltro altarpiece | saint jerome and a worshipper | detail of plate 90 | St.Simon the apostle |
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Walter Gay
1856-1937. He was an American painter born at Hingham, Massachusetts. He married heiress Matilda E. Travers, the daughter of prominent New York City investor and co-founder of Saratoga Race Course, William R. Travers. In 1876 the couple moved to Paris, France where Walter Gay became a pupil of Leon Bonnat. They lived in an apartment on the Left Bank and in 1907 purchased Chateau Le Breau on a three-hundred-acre walled park near the Forest of Fontainebleau. Walter Gay received an honorable mention in the Paris Salon of 1885; a gold medal in 1888, and similar awards at Vienna (1894), Antwerp (1895), Berlin (1896) and Munich (1897). He became an Officer of the Legion of Honor and a member of the Society of Secession, Munich.
Baron Pierre Narcisse Guerin
Paris 1774-Rome 1833 French painter. He won enthusiastic recognition in 1799 for his Marius Sextus (Louvre). A defender of the classicism of J. L. David, he became director of the École de Rome in 1822. He counted among his pupils Delacroix, G??ricault, and Ary Scheffer, who were to launch the romantic school.
John Ford Paterson
Australian, 1851-1912