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 :. | st romualdo, polyptych of the misericordia | Polyptych of St Anthony | madonna del parto | Brera madonna | The Resurrection of Christ |
Related Artists:
George Thomas
1816-1870 Union general in the American Civil War, b. Southampton co., Va. He served in the Seminole War and in the Mexican War. Later he taught at West Point and served in Texas. As a brigadier general of volunteers, he was sent to Kentucky, where he defeated the Confederates at Mill Springs (Jan., 1862). Thomas served under General Buell at Shiloh, Corinth, and Perryville. In the Chattanooga campaign, his stand on Sept. 20, 1863, which saved the Union army from complete rout, won for him the sobriquet Rock of Chickamauga. Appointed brigadier general in the regular army, he succeeded General Rosecrans in command of the Army of the Cumberland (Oct., 1863) and served under Ulysses S. Grant around Chattanooga and under General Sherman in the Atlanta campaign. With the fall of Atlanta (Sept., 1864), Grant ordered Thomas to pursue the army of General Hood into Tennessee. Although accused by Grant of moving too slowly, and threatened with the loss of his command, Thomas waited and finally defeated Hood at Nashville (Dec., 1864).
SAVOLDO, Giovanni Girolamo
Italian Mannerist Painter, ca.1480-1548
Nicolas Tournier
(baptised 12 July 1590 - d. before February 1639) was a French Baroque painter. Born in Montbeliard, he followed the profession of his father, Andre Tournier, "a Protestant painter from Besançon". Little is known of his life before his arrival in Rome, where he worked between 1619 and 1626, and where he was influenced by the work of Caravaggio. According to one early source, he was a pupil of Valentin de Boulogne.Tournier's Roman paintings are stylistically close to the works of Bartolomeo Manfredi. He painted both secular and religious subjects; an example of the latter is The Crucifixion with St. Vincent de Paul (Paris, The Louvre). After 1626 Tournier was active in southern France. He died in Toulouse. His work The Carrying of the Cross, painted around 1632, originally hung in the Toulouse chapel of the Company of the Black Penitents. During the French Revolution it was confiscated by the state and moved to a museum, from where it was stolen in 1818. After being lost for nearly two centuries, it reappeared in 2009 during an art collector's estate sale in Florence; when the Weiss Gallery of London purchased it in a Paris auction in 2011, the French government classified it as stolen property and banned it from leaving the country.