Piero Della Francesca: Painter of the Silence (1998)

About

The Great Masters—Piero Della Francesca: Painter of the Silence

(Kultur, 1998)

Running Time: 36 Minutes

Piero Della Francesca (c.1420-92), was an Italian painter of the first rank, whose style was one of the most individual of the early Renaissance.

Piero was born in Borgo San Sepolcro, a small city in southern Tuscany, around 1420. He appears to have studied art in Florence, but his career was spent in other cities, among them Rome, Urbino, Ferrara, Rimini, and Arezzo.

Almost all of Pier’s works are religious in nature—primarily altarpieces and church frescoes. The undisputed high point of his career was the series of large frescoes, Legend of the True Cross, done for the Church of San Francesco in Arezzo, in which he presents scenes of astonishing beauty, with silent, stately figures fixed in clear, crystalline space. These frescoes are characterized by broad contrasts—both in subject matter and in treatment—that create a powerful effect of grandeur.

Piero’s later works show the probable influence of Flemish art, which he assimilated without betraying his own monumental style. Certain aspects of Piero’s work were significant for the northern Italian painters Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini, as well as for the later Raphael, but his art was in general too individual and self-contained to influence strongly the mainstream of Florentine art. He died in Borgo San Sepolcro, July 5, 1492.

It is very symbolic perhaps that Piero died in 1492, in the very year that Christopher Columbus discovered the New World. Thus concluding a golden age of Europe before the Renaissance period was about to burst into full bloom.

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Raphael #2121

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Fra Angelico #2123

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Videodarte Totalfoto

Language

English

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English

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