Lecture 16: Piero della Francesca in Arezzo

Piero della Francesca in Arezzo .....................................................

Lecture 16

Unlike most of the Italian artists we have studied so far, Piero della

Francesca, who was born about 1420 and lived until 1492, was not from

Florence or Siena, or any of the major Tuscan centers of art, nor did he

spend much time in them. He did, of course, visit these cities and work

brieÀ y in Florence.

L

ooking at three of his paintings, we will continue in the same vein as

previous lectures by exploring his artistic renditions of sacred subjects,

his use of symbolism, and his handling of speci¿ c Renaissance

techniques. We will take a closer look at the rigorously designed paintings

for which Piero is famous and discuss some of the artistic inÀ uences apparent

in his works.

Piero was born and died in the village of Borgo San Sepolcro, belonging to

the Papal States. He spent his career painting in small cities, such as Urbino

and Arezzo. His fame did not spread much beyond those places until the

20 th century, when a perceived quality of geometric abstraction in his ¿ gure

compositions attracted the attention of modernist painters and critics.

Our example shows Piero’s Baptism of Christ (c. 1450). This was painted for

a church in San Sepolcro as the center panel of a triptych, although the wings

are by another artist. It was sold to a private collector in London in 1859 and

was acquired by London’s National Gallery in 1861, a remarkably early time

for a museum to have shown interest in Piero’s art. The composition has an

arched top that includes extensive landscape and ¿ gures. If we follow the

arched top, inscribing an imaginary circle below, it includes the head and

shoulders of St. John the Baptist and Christ. The painting is divided vertically

by the ¿ gure of Christ and divided horizontally in many other places with

geometrical clarity. Compare the ¿ gures to Baptism of the Neophytes in

Masaccio’s Brancacci Chapel; the nude ¿ gures are surely the inspiration for

Piero’s ¿ gures.