Piero Della Francesca
There is very little to document the life of Piero Della Francesca, but is known that he was born in the town of Sansepolcro , a town southeast of Florence, Italy, between 1410 and 1420.His two brothers, Marco and Antonio, acted as his agents during his career, and recited payment for his work and signed receipts for him.
He was studying painting by 1436 with a provincial master named Antonio D'Anghiari , and it is documented that he worked along side of Domenico Veneziano around 1439. Around 1450, he was working on commissions in Ferrara and Rimini, and possibly in Venice as well. He worked in the nearby Arezzo for many years, and also worked in Rome from 1458 to 1459.
In1468, the plague threatened Sansepolcro, and Piero retired to Bastia in the nearby hills. In Sanespolcro, he had held public office, serving as Consigliere Popolare in 1442, 1467 and 1477 and again from 1480 to 1482 as Capo dei Priori of the Confraternity of San Bartolomeo, the most important lay religious organization in Sansepolcro.
Piero never married, and left most of his property in a will to his brothers and their heirs. He gave instructions as to his burial in the Abbey Church of Sansepolcro , and he dies on October 12, 1492, his death certificate being one of the only documents of the painter's life. In 1952, the area where he was buried was excavated, and the remains of a corpse believed to be Piero were found.
Among his better known surviving works are the Misericordia Altarpiece, a polyptych made of more than 20 separate gold -ground panels, and perhaps his earliest surviving work; his 1451 fresco of Sigismondo Maltesa before St. Sigismund, made for a private individual; "The Baptism of Christ" , originally a centerpiece of a huge multi -panel polyptych circa 1460 ; "The Legend of the True Cross" , a series of frescoes in Azzezo that depicted religious scenes beginning with the story of Adam and ending with the exaltation of the cross and The Montefeltro Altarpiece from 1472-1474. Piero Della Francesca's sense of composition and use of color have been widely studied and admired.
The best site for Piero Della Francesca's work is not surprisingly Mark Harden's artchive at http://www.artchive.com/artchive/P/piero...
There are many Italian language pages as well if you find that undaunting, the best being the Fondazione Piero Della Francesca ( the Piero Della Francesca Foundation) devoted to study and research of his works located at
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