Background
This master is generally named Piero della Francesca (Peter, son of Frances), the tradition being that his father, a woollen-draper named Benedetto, had died before his birth. This is not correct, for the mother's name was Romana, and the father continued living during many years of Piero's career. The painter is also named Piero Borghese, from his birthplace, Borgo San Sepolcro, in Umbria. The true family name was, as above stated, Franceschi, and the family still exists under the name of Martini-Franceschi.
Education
Piero first received a scientific education, and became an adept in mathematics and geometry.
Career
The earliest trace of Piero as a painter was in 1439, when he was an apprentice of Domenico Veneziano, and assisted him in painting the chapel of S. Egidio, in S. Maria Novella of Florence. It is possible that his Florentine sojourn began somewhat earlier or that he met and worked with Domenico Veneziano in Perugia in 1437-1438. As far as we know, Piero did not work in Florence after the late 1430s. His earliest known commissions were done for his native town of Sansepolcro: the Baptism of Christ (National Gallery, London) painted at the beginning of the 1440s, and the Misericordia polyptych (Pinacoteca, Sansepolcro), commissioned in 1445 and probably painted in large part in 1455, but finished only after 1460. To the late 1440s belong (lost) frescoes for the church of Sant'Agostino in Ferrara that were fundamental for the development of painting in that area, and in 1450 he signed and dated a panel of the penitent Saint Jerome (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin). Piero was known to have left a manuscript of his own on perspective; this remained undiscovered for a long time, but eventually was found by E. Harzen in the Ambrosian library of Milan, ascribed to some supposititious "Pietro, Pittore di Bruges". The treatise shows a knowledge of perspective as dependent on the point of distance. In the National Gallery, London, are three paintings attributed to Piero de' Franceschi* Another work, a profile of Isotta da Rimini, may safely be rejected. In 1451 he was painting in Rimini, where a fresco still remains. Prior to this he had executed some extensive frescoes in the Vatican but these were destroyed when Raphael undertook on the same walls the "Liberation of St Peter" and other paintings. Piero appears to have been much in his native town of Borgo San Sepolcro from about 1443, and more especially after 1434, when he finished the series in Arezzo. Probably between 1452 and 1458, taking over after the death of Bicci di Lorenzo, he began work on the fresco decoration of the main chapel in the church of San Francesco in Arezzo with its cycle of stories of the True Cross, recorded as completed only in 1466. Between 1458 and 1459 he was in Rome at the bidding of Pope Pius II, for whom he executed frescoes in the Vatican palace, which were destroyed in the sixteenth century. In 1454 in his native town he received the commission for a polyptych for the high altar of the church of Sant'Agostino, which was delivered only in 1470. Between the middle of the 1450s and the following decade he executed a fresco of Mary Magdalene in the Arezzo cathedral; the Madonna del Parto at Monterchi; a polyptych for the church of Sant'Agostino in Perugia (Galleria Nazionale, Perugia), completed by 1468; a fresco of the Resurrection in Sansepolcro's Palazzo Comunale (now in the local pinacoteca); and other works, now lost, in the same town and the surrounding area. His ties with the court in Urbino seem to have strengthened in the 1460s. For Duke Federico da Montefeltro and his wife, Battista Sforza, Piero painted the double portrait diptych in the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, usually dated 1472, the date of Battista's death, but probably executed in 1465, as well as the famous San Bernardino altarpiece (Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan), in 1474-1475. The last phase of his activity was marked by an increasingly capillary realism investigating the varying effects of light. To this period belong such masterpieces as the Madonna of Senigallia (Galleria Nazionale, Urbino), the Virgin and Child with Angels (Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass. ), and a Nativity (National Gallery, London), which is his last surviving work. On 5 July 1487 Piero drew up his will. By then blind, he devoted himself to compiling treatises on geometry and mathematics (Trattato d'Abaco; Libellus de quinque corporibus regularibus; De prospectiva pingendi). He was buried in the Badia of Borgo San Sepolcro on 12 October 1492.
Personality
His early bent of mind and course of study influenced to a large extent his development as a painter. He had more science than either Paolo Uccello or Mantegna, both of tliem: his contemporaries, the former older and the latter younger. Skilful in linear perspective, he fixed rectangular planes in perfect order and measured them, and thus got his figures in true proportional height. He preceded and excelled Domenico Ghirlandajo in projecting shadows, and rendered with considerable truth atmosphere, the harmony of colours, and the relief of objects. He was naturally therefore excellent in architectural painting, and, in point of technique, he advanced the practice of oil-colouring in Italy.
Quotes from others about the person
Two statements made by Vasari regarding "Piero della Francesca' are open to much controversy. He says that Piero became blind at the age of sixty, which cannot be true, as he continued painting some years later; but scepticism need perhaps hardly go to the extent of inferring that he was never blind at all. Vasari also says that Fra Luca Pacioli, a disciple of Piero in scientific matters, defrauded his memory by appropriating his researches without acknowledgment. One of Paciofi's books was published in 1509, and speaks of Piero as still living. Hence it has been propounded that Piero lived to the patriarchal age of ninety-four or upwards; but, as it is now stated that he was buried in 1492, that there was some mistake in relation to Pacioli's remark-perhaps the date of writing was several years earlier than that of publication.
