near Paris. Eventually he was released He
received the protection of Lorenzo de’
Medici, who settled him in an estate near
the village of Fiesole, where he wrote an-
other controversial tract,Heptaplus,ASev-
enfold Account of the Six Days of Genesis.
In 1493 he received a formal pardon from
Pope Alexander VI for his transgressions
against orthodox church doctrine. During
this period he also wrote Disputations
Against Divinatory Astrology, which at-
tacked the precepts of astrology. When Gi-
rolamo Savonarola took control of Flo-
rence and decreed the destruction of works
of art, philosophical writings, and all other
worldly vanities, Pico surrendered his
money and property and burned all of the
poetry he had written. He did not take
monastic vows, however, and died in 1494
of a sudden illness, brought on in the
opinion of some historians by poison. On
the day of his death, King Charles VIII of
France entered Florence and overthrew the
Medici dynasty.
SEEALSO: Medici, Lorenzo de’; Savonarola,
Girolamo
Piero della Francesca .......................
(1415–1492)
Italian painter and a master of the early
Renaissance. The son of a shoemaker, who
diedbeforehewasborn,hegrewupin
the small village of Borgo San Sepolcro
near the Tuscan town of Arezzo. He moved
to Florence to train as a painter and helped
older painters with the decoration of sev-
eral churches in that city. He worked for a
noble patron, Sigismondo Malatesta, for
whom he painted a famous portrait, as
well as for the pope in Rome. He spent
much of his adulthood in the town of San
Sepolcro and Arezzo, where he was hired
to paint the choir of the church of San
Francesco, where he painted a famous
fresco cycle known as theThe Legend of
the True Cross, which was inspired by tra-
ditional legends surrounding the cross on
which Christ was crucified. The orderly
arrangement of figures give these pictures
a sense of calm rationality, a new sensibil-
ity that made a break with traditions of
Gothic painting and its direct appeal to
the emotions.The Flagellation,arenowned
work of the early Renaissance, presents
three mysterious figures in the foreground
over whom art historians have been argu-
ing for five centuries.
For the Duke of Urbino, Federigo da
Montefeltro, Piero completed a double
portrait of the duke and his wife, as well
as a famous altarpiece,Madonna with
Saints and Donor. Piero’s great skill and
knowledge of mathematics and linear ge-
ometry allowed him to construct master-
ful paintings with the use of foreshorten-
ing and perspective, which gives a three-
dimensional appearance to the flat surface
of a painting. He wrote a treatise,De Pro-
spectiva Pingendi, on the art of perspec-
tive, and works on mathematics, including
Treatise on the Abacus,inwhichhecov-
ered the subjects of geometry, algebra, and
the problems of perspective.SEEALSO: Montefeltro, Federigo daPiero di Cosimo ..............................
(1462–1521)
Italian painter. Born in Florence, where he
lived his entire life, he trained in the work-
shop of Cosimo Rosselli, whose name he
took as his own (his given name was Piero
di Lorenzo). In 1482 Cosimo traveled to
Rome with Rosselli to assist in the paint-
ing of the Sistine Chapel. There Cosimo
painted a landscape background for
Rosselli’s fresco of The Sermon on the
Mount.Piero della Francesca